Submission to Community Consultation: Abortion Legislation in Western Australia

The National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW) is dedicated to promoting and protecting the interests of Australian women, including intellectual, cultural, political, social, economic, legal, industrial and domestic spheres, and ensuring that the aims and ideals of the women’s movement and its collective wisdom are handed on to new generations of women. NFAW is a feminist organisation, independent of party politics and working in partnership with other women’s organisations.

NFAW believes that no matter where people are born and live, everyone seeking an abortion should have access to legal, safe, timely and compassionate abortion care.

The attached NFAW position paper is drafted from a National perspective, given that the Federal Government has a role to play in the funding of services through Medicare. However health services are provided by the states and I will address the specific issues in the WA context.

Firstly I would like to preface the discussion with a comment from a personal perspective.

In 1998 I was a Member of the Legislative Council in Western Australia, and I had the honour, and responsibility, of being able to vote to decriminalise abortion in the Acts Amendment (Abortion) Act 1998. I acknowledge the efforts of Hon Cheryl Davenport MLC and Diana Warnock MLA and the other members of parliament who worked to ensure that the Bill was passed.

The political debate surrounding the passage of the legislation was very divisive. We were the first state to legislate what had become the norm in most states though the operation of the Common Law (R v Davidson [1969] VR 667; R v Wald (1972) 3 DCR 25). However, the final version of the legislation was constrained by what was considered to be politically achievable in an environment where Members were being lobbied extensively by people who wanted to constrain the right to abortion. The hurdles currently in place were inserted to ensure the passage of the legislation by countering the “floodgates” argument, that women would access abortion as a form of contraception, or would access late term abortion as they changed their mind about a pregnancy. These arguments were specious at the time, and did not acknowledge the range of circumstances in which women make the very difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy.

WA is now out of step with the rest of the country, and the hurdles now incentivise women to travel interstate where access to services is less restrictive

 

 

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