Abortion reform progresses in Victoria

Victoria's Legislative Council has begun debating the Abortion Law Reform Bill. The bill (quick overview here) would decriminalise abortion, allowing abortion on demand up to 24 weeks, and where two doctors believe it is appropriate afterwards. This doesn't go as far as it should, but its an improvement, and a model that could be adopted to lever open access in new Zealand.

One of the most contentious aspects of the bill is a clause requiring medical practitioners with a conscientious objection to abortion to provide an effective referral to someone without such barriers to assisting their patients. The Catholic Church regards this as a violation of freedom of conscience, and are threatening to close their hospitals in Victoria if the bill passes. But based on the stories emerging about how these people use their freedom of conscience to victimise women and outright endanger their patients, that looks like a highly desirable option. For example, there's this horror story recounted by MLC Candy Broad during the debate yesterday [PDF, p. 32]:

A senior clinician in a public hospital in Victoria recounted to me his experience of providing advice to a woman in a very advanced stage of pregnancy, which showed very clearly on the information he had available that the pregnancy was incompatible with life and that the pregnancy had no earthly hope of proceeding to term. He had to commence the process of working through those issues with the woman and her partner and of arranging the necessary counselling for that couple to make a very difficult decision.

When that very senior clinician went back and reviewed all the information available about that case he realised the information he had available to him at that point had been available to another clinician much earlier in the woman’s pregnancy. That clinician, because of his moral position, had not informed the woman of the situation at that earlier stage.

Or there's this one, reported in The Age on Monday, from a senior doctor who has worked in a Catholic hospital:

He said one doctor withheld ultrasounds showing a foetal abnormality until it was too late for an abortion. The child was born and died a slow, unpleasant death, the doctor said.

Then there's the inspiring news that Victoria's Catholic hospitals are refusing to refer rape victims to rape crisis centres because they'll be able to get emergency contraception. These people are simply monsters, using their religion as an excuse to sadistically abuse women, endanger lives, sentence children to short "lives" of pain and suffering, and generally act like arseholes. And if this law drives them out of (this part of) the medical profession, then I think we're better off for it.