Women outside NSW Parliament in 2019 dragging suitcases to protest women having to travel long distances to access abortion. Six years later, this remains the case in Wagga. Photo: Pro-Choice Alliance Facebook.
CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses abortion.
Regardless of how you feel about the ethics of abortion, it’s undeniably a legal right and form of healthcare. Therefore, there’s no justification to block women’s access to it.
Abortion was decriminalised in NSW six years ago, but access still remains a postcode lottery for people in regional Australia.
A woman in Wagga seeking these services needs to travel to Albury or be referred to Orange Hospital (which is almost four hours away).
However, a woman in Sydney is likely to have multiple options a short distance from her house. In many cases, there’s no need for a referral in a big city.
Albury-based Greens MP Dr Amanda Cohn wants to level this playing field. But her bill to expand abortion services for people who lost the lottery was met with a lot of opposition – including from our local member, Wagga MP Dr Joe McGirr.
Nevertheless, her legislation passed, allowing nurses and midwives to prescribe abortion-inducing pills up until nine weeks gestation.
This is good news for everyone, because if you try and block access to abortion, you’re really just preventing people from accessing it in a safe manner.
Personally, I think regulation is far more important. To regulate something, you need to be able to have open and constructive discussions, but some of the Facebook comments for the story I did on abortion access in the Riverina were anything but helpful.
One person commented: “A person may have legal right to murder but the person you carry doesn’t have the right to be the victim.”
“Typical of a Greenie … values an ant more than a human,” said another.
One user said we needed adoption centres rather than abortion, but that issue is far to complex to conflate with this one.
Besides, this is about a medical procedure and someone’s ability to make the best decisions for themselves.
Dr Cohn summed this up perfectly when we spoke last week: “There’s not much point having a legal right to something if you can’t actually access it in a regional area.”
You may not know, but abortion is heavily restricted and generally prohibited in my birth country of Malaysia. But it doesn’t stop it from happening.
Unregulated procedures always spell trouble, putting the lives of mothers at risk.
On top of that, baby dumping (or baby abandonment) is one of the many side effects of blocking and stigmatising abortion.
Baby dumping is a crime that happens when parents abandon their child in a public or private place.
Perpetrators often say the feel pressured to do so because of socioeconomic factors and lack of support, but stigma over pregnancies out of wedlock and abortion probably remains an issue, despite our progress.
The Australian Charter of Healthcare Rights clearly states that everyone in Australia has the right to receive healthcare services and treatment that meet their needs, with their information kept secure and confidential.
It’s about time all healthcare professionals practised what they preach – after all, didn’t they take the Hippocratic oath to care for patients and do no harm?
