Thanks for that article - it is so important that people are aware what Costello is trying to do to women.

Someone wise (whos name escapes me just now) once said that restricting abortion only meant that "the rich get abortions,the poor get butchered"... I completely agree - and taking abortion off the list for medicare certainly means those back-yard coat hanger weilding quacks can start rubbing their grubby hands together once more.

I shall be writing immediately to register my concern.

A pox on Costello and anyone else who thinks the decision to end a pregnancy has anything to do with them, unless they are the woman whos' body it concerns

I've had a look at the proposed legislation and there's no mention of the item numbers Kate seems concerned about.

In any case, the idea that a pregnant woman owns her body and the child within is simply ridiculous. After all, it took a man to create half the genes of the child.

This is no attack on women by men, as nasty feminists like to frame the debate. They seem to forget that men are part of the birth equation and that men play a very important role as fathers, sons, uncles, grandpas etc, roles that women could never imitate.

It is about time feminists realise that Australia's population is dying and that we are losing a classroom of children every day to abortion. Surely we ought to act, in the interests of the innocent children and our nation.

Having an abortion is definitely elective surgery, on a par with a hip replacement or cosmetic surgery. I cannot see why a woman who wants an abortion has any greater claim on medicare than someone needing a hip replacement who currently has to endure a painful waiting period of 6-12 months. It must be elective as the woman is not ill. Perhaps the best compromise would be to retain medicare access as elective surgery, with a minimum waiting period of twelve months.

Neat trick, Plerdus, 12 months is a little too long to wait if you need or want an abortion, indeed, unless we want more late -term abortions, the waiting list idea is a spectacularly bad one.
It has already been pointed out that most late term abortions happen either because a woman found it hard to access an abortion earlier, or because the foetus is discovered to be unviable late, or it is discovered later in the pregnancy that the woman's life is endangered. Very, very, very few late-term abortions are merely elective.
No, the previous poster is correct. Removing the medicare benefit will not affect wealthier women and will force poorer women to take great risks. Some propose a further negative consequence.
Did anyone read Caroline Overington's column in the Weekend Australian called "Crime Rates seen as a matter of life and death"? She cites a US study which "after sober analysis of the data" concludes that the fall in the crime rate in the US can be traced back to liberalised abortion laws.
"..the US crime rate has been dropping like a stone since 1991. As it happens that's roughly 18 years after the US Supreme Court upheld a woman's right to abortion." In other words, unwanted kids have such a lousy start, particularly the unwanted kids of the already poor and dysfunctional, that they often turn to crime.
I have no idea whether this shocking idea is true or not, but surely it ought to be further investigated? What if it turns out that it is sometimes better not to be born?

Thanks for your article Kate on how the Health Legislation Amendment Bill can be used to stop abortion against the wishes of the majority of Australians.

QUESTION: Why does an Irishman use a condom?
a. to stop unwanted pregnancy
b. to stop the spread of disease
c. as a political act, saying “up you ** palace of cardinals”
d. to bolster a brewers droop erection

ANSWER: c, the others are side effects

Women of childbearing age need to stand up and be counted otherwise we will head back to the 1950’s. Do we really want to have to proceed with unplanned pregnancies and give up unwanted babies for adoption? How does pregnancy effect your career or standing in the community? How does society look after those babies that no body wants?

2004 figures tabled in parliament indicated Australia has 200,000 live births and estimated 80,000 abortions per year (40% of 200,000). Its estimated about 10% of couples are infertile so lets assume the infertile couples all want to adopt. ie there is a demand to adopt 30,000 babies.

What do we do with the remaining 50,000 babies? Perhaps the grateful tax payer can be prevailed upon to fund orphanages at an appropriate level to allow children to grow up to be useful members of society. Anything less and we are breeding a welfare dependent underclass.

The reasons for abortion appear to be overlooked. Women who have access to birth control, have been educated on contraception and have a self-esteem level to insist on using preventative measures are less likely to become pregnant, but become pregnant we do! I know of no woman who is using abortion as an unemotional birth control method. It takes alot of courage to decide to terminate a pregnancy. A woman may be financially, mentally or socially unable to raise a child or she may not be healthy, old enough or too old to safely carry the child. The conception may be the result of a rape. The woman may not have the family, social network or partner support to care for the child.
An abortion is not an easy decision, and just because someone had rights over my body for 15 minutes does not mean they can make decisions that affect it for years to come. My body is my body and it is my decision on what to do if I fall pregnant.
If I have the money to go private if I need an abortion then the covering of expenses by Medicare is a moot point. If I don't have the money to pay then please don't look at my body as a breeding machine to repopulate Australia, support me in such a tough decision and assist me in making it safely and legally.

To me, one of the frightening things about this is not only the issue of abortion (my views about this already known to regular posters) but the idea that the Health Minister can decide at his own discretion without any debate which procedures qualify and which do not is of major concern. Kate Mannix is right. It is undemocratic.

This also potentially means that everything is up for grabs: hip replacements (last time I checked, hip replacements weren't "elective" either, no one just decides they "would like a new hip"), cataract surgery, heart bypass...we should be rightly concerned that abortion procedures are at threat by this type of legislation, but we should also be looking for Medicare numbers that cover any medical procedure any of us or our family might reasonably need at some point.

Just as this is an issue about the rich having access to terminations and the poor not having access (which it might be argued is already the case in New South Wales), imagine if this idea was applied across the board to a much wider range of surgeries.

To my mind, the logic behind the private health insurance system is to take the pressure off the public system, although what it seems to do is ensure that some people get treatment quickly while others do not. This legislation only exacerbates this issue by potentially making health provision even less equitable.

This is a HUGE issue that must be debated.

Kate Mannix appears to know very little, or is completely lying about, Catholic thoughts on abortion. Her little online group of malcontents dissemenate apostasy and pass it off as 'refomer open mindedness'. The Catholic church has always opposed abortion, and I would recommend 'Evangelium Vitae' for those who think otherwise.

I'm not happy with the Health Legislation Bill either. We need a Health Bill that fully bans the public funding of abortion. We need the states to make abortion a criminal procedure. Quite frankly it doesn't matter what kind of tyranny the 'majority' wants to impose on the vulnerable. If 51% of Australians thought it was a good idea to put detainees into slave labor for the state, then would we do that under the guise of democratic governance? Human rights are above the whims of masses of people, whose opinions on abortion have been manipulated by ouright liars like Mannix (an ironic name for someone shouting heresies in Australia). Everyone has the right to life, and abortion kills babies.

Dangerous waters ahead; here be dragons methinks.

I am not a big fan of the concept of abortion. The arguements revolve around the rights of the women and her body - throw in the belief in some circles that the aborted fetus is a life and emotions run ragged.

A lot of energy was once invested in determining when life began. In spite of the best science it satill remians pretty much an act of faith what one believes.

If there is still debate about when life begins we'd be better off declaring that we dont care if it is a life or not - the tumor in my uterus represents an over bearing inconvenience and needs to be gotten rid of - there is some honesty in such an approach.

What is also over looked is the bind women find themselves in after the abortion - procured or natural there is often a sense of unresolved grief are not warned about;- externally imposed guilt is partly to blame but so to is what seems to be a tragic ambivalence in many - not all women when it comes to aborting a fetus.

I do not for a moment think that the democratic nature or otherwise of this Bill amounts to a hill of beans.

What the 'right to lifers' seem to always miss is that the problem doesn't end with birth, unlike abortion where it is all over and there is no 'product' to be cared for by either an unwilling mother or an unwilling state.
VERY rarely is the willing FATHER in the picture.

Hooray - you saved a life so it can suffer for the next 80 years, more than likely making those around it suffer also. Well done.

While I think it is unfortunate that men can't have more of a say, until they step up and have more of a responsibility then it simply must be that the person who stands to lose physical health and earning potential must have the final say.

To the crazy person suggesting that abortion be criminalised - what would you suggest people do - stop having sex?
Accidents *will* always happen because contraception is not fool proof and surely you are not advocating orphanages and adoption to deal with these unwanted children. Now THAT would truely be tragic.
Bring on that underclass of parent-less slaves mentioned by a previous poster! I'll keep one in the space under the stairs....

I do agree that whether the 'product of conception' is 'alive' or not matters little to someone considering an abortion. Honestly, it comes down to a stitch in time saves nine....one hour of procedure to save a lifetime being ruined by the responsibility for an unwanted child which once here, can't be gotten rid of so easily.

Also - I have had close experience with both modes of dealing with unwanted pregnancy and I can tell you - abortion weighs on my mind a LOT less than the child ditched on someone elses charity.

It is absolute clap trap that women have all this 'unresolved guilt' over abortion - it's just not true - the number one feeling of women post abortion is overwhelming releif.
I think men who can't understand why a woman doesn't want to hand over her body to ravishing changes and a lifetime of servitude made that one up.

Three recent articles on OLO about abortion. This one, another by Snator Natasha Stott Despoja, and the third by Leslie Cannold

In not one article has the author mentioned if the abortion rate is too high, not one has mentioned ways of reducing the abortion rate or the rate of unwanted pregnancy, not one has mentioned adoption or contraception, and of course not one has ever mentioned the father.

Overall, one has to suspect that these authors consider the rate of unwanted pregnancy and the rate of abortion to be acceptable, (or they can’t think of ways to reduce it).

Abortion is often related to family (via such terms as ”family planning”), but what is mysteriously missing is the term “best interests of the child”. It appears that “the best interests of the mother” is the main factor, with about 90% of abortions being deemed “convenience” abortions, where the pregnancy is not deemed to be seriously affecting the health of the mother, but only an inconvenience to her.

Perhaps “the best interests of the child” is only used if the mother decides to keep the child, (and does not want to adopt the child out), and then the mother wants the father to pay her money. The term “the best interests of the child” is rarely used if the mother decides to “terminate” the pregnancy. How ethical and moral.

But certainly more statistics should be kept on abortion. The Medicare numbering system for abortion means that even the number of publicly funded abortions being carried out is not accurately known. But the taxpayer has a right to know how their money is being spent, and the public also has a right to better knowledge about the nature of abortion in Australia, and that can only come from collecting better statistics.

Perhaps with better statistics, there would be better solutions put forward to reduce the amount of unwanted pregnancy and abortion, if that is what abortion advocates really want (but somehow I keep thinking that they don’t)

A good start would be allowing people surgical sterilisation when they asked for it, not only after X number of children or a drawn out fight - but that's asking doctors to let some of that power slip and admit people might just know their own minds.

The thing with a lot of these arguments here is that, Timkins, you want the father involved but your language squarely lays the 'blame' for being pregnant at the feet of the victim of the pregnancy - the female. How come?
They've had a male contraceptive pill 'in the wings' for some time but I've yet to meet a man who would take it - the almighty penis is too precious to be mucked about with taking hormones! ...yet Viagra made it through approvals in something like two months...

S0 - it DOES take two to tango - but it seems like only one suffers for it.

I would like to hear YOUR solution to reducing unwanted pregnancy, Timkins (although that's probably all you were waiting for - an open invitation to crap on.....)I think it's actually what we should be doing, it's just that when this topic comes up people seem to lose their grip on reality and start talking about abstinence - which we all know is the shortcut to perversion and madness.

P.S - Your solution better not include going to church either....

Newsroo,
Your language squarely lays the 'blame' for being pregnant at the feet of the victim.
You think the almighty penis is too precious.
You suffer for it.
You await an open invitation.
You crap on.
You think it what we should be doing,
You lose your grip on reality and start talking about abstinence
You take a shortcut to perversion and madness.

In a number of forums on abortion, I have put forward a number of suggestions to reduce the rate of unwanted pregnancy and abortions. Everything from having a national goal of reducing the abortion rate, to better contraception use, to better research into abortion, to more adoption, to better counselling etc.

In return, people have called me various things, and then launched into the mantra of “choice, Choice, CHOICE”, (without mentioning the foetus’s choice), and I’m about 99% convinced, that they actually like abortion, and want more, More, MORE.

Statistics on abortion in Australia are not being adequately kept, but an article in MJA gives some estimates compared to other countries.

Eg
Abortion rate per 1000 women aged 15–44 years
Germany 7.7
The Netherlands 8.7
Finland 10.9
Norway 14.8
Canada 15.4 (2000)
England and Wales 16.1
Sweden 19.6
Australia 19.7 (2003, estimated)
New Zealand 21.0 (2003)
United States 21.3 (2000)
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/182_09_020505/cha10829_fm.html

So maybe another option is to study what certain countries do that have an abortion rate at least half that of Australia.

What would you suggest Newsroo?

Newsroo,

Both 'right-to-lifers' and 'pro-choicers' have their own dogma. Both sides seem terminally unable to acknowledge that the opposing side could have any reasonable argument. The current 'debate' creates a deadlock.

Ultimately, the way the debate is set up can never create effective solutions.

Unexpected pregnancies cause misery for some women, and unexpected joy for others – myself included in the latter. Fortunately, I had the support to make a decision consistent with my belief system. But I was also confronted with negativity from many 'pro-choice' women who told me that continuing my pregnancy would ruin my life. If I had been scared into having an abortion, I would certainly have suffered as a result.

It is certainly not true that all women suffer some sort of interminable guilt over their abortion. But conversely, it is not good enough to deny that serious depression, anxiety and grief exist in some women as a result of abortion. The key here, however, seems based upon many factors: how supported the woman is in her decision, how well it fits her personal belief system, the type and amount of counselling (pre and post) she receives, how she experiences the abortion procedure, previous psychological distress… In short, her own personal circumstances.

To deny that some women are deeply affected by abortion de-legitimises their experience, which stigmatises their grief, just as some women are stigmatised by choosing abortion. Disenfranchised grief can have devastating consequences.

While post-abortion grief is sometimes used out of context and applied to more women than necessary for political advantage, it’s certainly not something that ‘pro-servitude’ men “just made up”.

While the ethical and moral debate continues, we need to focus on the immediate, practical issue: How do we better support women who have made the decision to terminate their pregnancy? And how we better support women, who will not benefit from terminating their pregnancy, to continue it?

This requires an implicit understanding of the women who are likely to suffer from abortion, based on their own personal circumstances, as described above.

Abortion does not benefit all women, all of the time.

"Abortion is often related to family (via such terms as ”family planning”), but what is mysteriously missing is the term “best interests of the child”."

Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but when a foetus is aborted, there is no child. For a foetus to become a child, it has to be born.

Is that a twittering parrot I can hear, or is it just the old textual loop?

Mahatma Duck,
You do not point out the obvious.
You want to abort a foetus so there is no child.
You are twittering.
You are a parrot.
You can hear.
You are an old textual loop.

You are an example of what I wrote about earlier. If someone suggests ways to reduce the rate of abortion or the rate of unwanted pregnancy, then they just get called names and a whole range of maligning things are said about them (which appears to be your greatest talent).

Noticeable also, (but not atypical of abortion advocates by any means), that you have not suggested ways to decrease the rate of abortion, or decrease the rate of unwanted pregnancy.

I'm more than convinced that abortion advocates do not want to see a reduction in the rate of abortion or unwanted pregnancy.

All these words about contraception and family planning, maybe it would be better to take the gamble out of it completely and make sure that the only pregnancies that could ever happen are planned and wanted.

The best way to do this, of course, is to sterilise the whole male side of the species, and make sure that pregnancies can only occur through IVF or Artificial Inseminimation by Donor.

This initial stage could be followed by one where all male children are not only sterilised prior to an age where fertilisation of a female was possible, but that all these male children, by careful surgery, could be rendered impotent, whilst remaining externally intact.

Perhaps given time we could abolish the male side of the species completely, as they seem so disposable at the moment anyway. As well as this, it would stop males from interfering in the reproductive lives of women.

The possible shortcoming of all this is that somehow 'the state' - now all female - would have to pay for the raising of the children, and it would stop some women from getting pregnant for the sake of it, or out of strange feelings of 'love'.

At least there would be no more abortions, except for foetuses that show signs of disability, or of being male, of course.

(What's that I hear about not being able to pick a possible father with the most money or best genes...........?)

The main reason for abortion is lack of support from significant others,concern for themselves as much as the woman concerned.In many ways abortion benefits men more than women.It is some men who insist upon it and is a cop out for them.Some mothers of young women are terrified they will be left with the baby.Fear of rejection,loss of love lack of support and negativity ,panic sets in and hasty decisions are made much to the regret of some.Post abortion syndrome is a fact not a myth and not easily overcome for some women,especialy when not allowed to talk about it,most abortion clinics do not offer this kind of counselling.The debate is getting bogged down and the real after effects are getting buried here.

Hello all the sisters here, please help me !
Im tracy - 19 year old, live in Liverpool - Sydney NSW; maybe i get pregnent for 1 months, and i just came to AUSTRALIA for 2 year, not very knowledge in Australia.
Can you give me answer for these questions:
1) What can i do to check 100% im pregnent or not ( is there some good device? where can i get it)
2) If i dun want to keep the pregnent (my age so young ). i will go to hospital for abortion; how much money for abortion (im not AUSTRALIA yet ! so i must pay -_-'' )
3) You know some hospital or doctor is cheap and safely in Sydney?
Thank ! waiting for all your sweat heart !