David, no-one is asking you to have an abortion. Kindly mind you own damned business and get your nose out of other peoples.
As mentioned in a previous post "The Issue of Dying", David seems determined to mind everyone's business as well as his own, and further, to enforce his morals on everyone else. You may well deny it, David, but you are an unfeeling, bigoted, bully who has decided what is right for the world, and everyone else can go to buggery.

80% of the Australian population believe that women should have access to abortion, only 10% of the population oppose abortion. As there is one abortion for every 3 live births in Victoria abortion, access to RU486 would reduce women's reliance on surgical abortion. Abortion will clearly continue irrespective of its legal status and if we criminalise abortion then, extrapolating from pre 1970 figures, there would be 2 women dying every day of sceptic abortions.

David does appear to be a busybody.
How much of each woman's stress is due, if she decides an abortion is the best choice for her, to the ridiculous indoctrination during her childhood that we are all sinners and that what she has chosen is a sin. Each woman in the reproductive part of her life undergoes about 350 periods. It should be her choice which of those should produce a child, if any, particularly on a overcrowded planet.
As defined in John Ralston Saul's book, The Dobter's Companion, "Moral crusades are public activities undertaken by middle aged men who are cheating on their wives or didling little boys. Moral crusades are particularly popular among those seeking power for their own pleasue, politicians who can't think of anything useful to do with their mandates and religious professional suffering from a personal inability to communicate with their god."

Although it is obviously his style, Mr Palmer has not quite developed the requisite skill of appearing to make objective and rational statements while supporting minority, conservative views of morality and subjective dogma.

Women have fought hard over many decades to have the rule of law support their human right to control their own bodies and to exclude the intrusive, institutional claptrap of right-wing religious Inquisitionists - and the law does just that.

Although there is ongoing debate about the moral status of the foetus, in Australian law a foetus is not a person [“Foetal Welfare and the Law”, Australian Medical Association Report, Commission of Inquiry, 1995]. It follows that it does not have the rights possessed by a human being. It is also clear in UK law that the foetus does not have any separate legal interests capable of being taken into account by a court [Re MB (medical treatment) [1997] 2FLR 426]. Although it had been suggested that the right of everyone to have their life protected by law, under Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights, could extend to the unborn, this was rejected in 2004 in the case of Vo v France [Vo v France (2005) 40 EHRR 12]. In that case the European Court of Human Rights held that Article 2 did not confer a right to life that extended to a foetus.

I can do nothing more than suggest that Mr Palmer follows the advice of ianbrum, supra.

David has presented a quite well argued response to the VLRC's Report. As a social worker who has had to deal with the emotional pain and suffering that many women, young and old, experience following an abortion, I can understand where David is coming from, my opinion being from a humanistic perspective and not a religious one. In many cases those women are coming to terms with a decision they subsequently come to feel was made with insufficient guidance and a lack of information about alternative options. The women I have counselled haven't been suffering out of 'indoctrinated guilt', but out of what they come to see as a desperately sad experience of having separated themselves from a life that had been growing within them.

Those experiences brought me to a realisation that abortion is a much more complicated procedure than simply exercising a 'right to choose' or removing a foetus from a woman's uterus. People who present that simplified view do women no good at all, as David argues, as it tends to lead to a culture of thought where the emotional component of abortion is ignored or minimalised.

I had a personal example about four years ago when my daughter experienced a complication during pregnancy. When she was told she would need to go to Melbourne for tests, the somewhat throw away line from the medical practitioner was 'you need to consider there might be a need to terminate'. This blew us all away, as it was at a very early stage in the intervention, before anything clear was known other than there was a problem with the foetus' foot, and subsequently caused my daughter unnecessary mental anguish as her husband was serving overseas at the time and could not be contacted. Fortunately, our story had a good outcome.

It is unfortunate that as soon as people like David raise questions around issues like abortion they are villified and accused of being meddlers, unfeeling, bigoted, or bullies. I'm inclined to think those shoes might in fact be on the other feet!

The bitter vile responses to David confirms that you are on to the truth here David. Only the most callous can kill their own and not be affected by it. Many of these women do suffer guilt later in life. You would think that a few more would have the honesty to want to prevent others from going through this trauma. Then again abortion is mostly done for selfish reasons so why should we expect otherwise.