SMH:
Vic MP to introduce abortion bill
Former Victorian frontbencher Candy Broad will introduce a private members bill into state parliament this week to decriminalise abortion.
The Upper House Labor MP announced her intentions to remove abortion from the Crimes Act.
Ms Broad said the legislation would safeguard women and doctors against the threat of prosecution.
“Most Victorians believe that abortion services are lawful in this state,” she said.
“The fact is, however, that these outdated provisions remain in the Crimes Act and because of these provisions the threat of prosecution and the stigma … is an ongoing source of concern for health professionals, for women (and) for their partners,” she said.
Ms Broad is expected to introduce the bill into parliament on Wednesday.
About time.
Edited to Add: There’s such a huge difference between a retrogressive govt deciding just to start prosecuting again and that same govt actually getting a new law passed. That’s why the laws need to be off the books, otherwise our current expectations of controlling our own fertility can be taken away without even the stroke of a pen.
So who amongst the Parliamentarians in other states are going to sort out decriminalisation for their women voters as well?
Categories: Miscellaneous
Are we all still here? 
Otterday and Open Thread 
So my plans for writing today didn’t quite work out 
Otterday! And Open Thread 
Hoyden About Town 
Though luckily, when the godbags forced the issue back onto the agenda in WA by exploiting unenforced laws that were still on the books, it didn’t exactly work out the way they expected.
A right to abortion actually enjoys very strong electoral support in Australia, which is why the godbags tactics failed to badly here. Lots of pathetic politicians devoid of moral conviction sat on the fence – right up until the opinion polls came in, at which point they all decided to side with 80% of the community.
So have the laws been struck from the Crimes Act yet in WA?
tigtog: Short answer: No.
Long answer: the 1998 changes were a big improvement for adult women seeking first trimester or early second trimester termination of pregnancy in Perth, as it amended the requirements from a “health” exception to an “informed consent” exception. The previous health exception was not a large barrier in practice, as it included “mental health”, but it was still an issue. Access remains problematic for children, rural women, and women more than 20 weeks pregnant.
Access can be complicated for women in Perth, also, if they have no money – they need to find a bulk-billing general practitioner who is willing to counsel and refer them (we seem to have an enormous number of doctors who refuse, and some of those have no compunction on breaking their ethical guidelines further by not saying so up front and referring to a doctor who will). Then they need to ensure that the referral is to a clinic who will accept them despite inability to pay (there is at least one that I know of, and all kudos to them for their stance).
Children By Choice has a summary of the law in the different states here: Australian abortion law and practice. WA:
What I do not understand what all the discussion is about abortion because medicare covers the costs of such procedure and if abortion is still listed in the Crimes Act in Victoria how come there has been no prosecutions? What is being said then is the Crimes Act means nothing anyway? The law is written nobody acts upon the Crimes Act so isn’t abortion in real world already decriminalised with the bonus of medicare paying costs?
Eliza, in most countries there are still obsolete crimes listed in the statutes which nobody prosecutes anymore. The Crimes Act means what bureaucrats are instructed by their political masters to make it mean.
Sodomy was only actually decriminalised in most States in Australia in response to a Tasmanian police force and prosecutor suddenly going against the habit of just looking the other way regarding homosexuality and actually charging two men for having sex in the privacy of their own bedroom, a case which went all the way to the Supreme Court, if memory serves (this was 25 years ago), before the prosecution was struck down.
So yes, abortion is de facto decriminalised, and Medicare covers the costs because of the “mental health” loophole in the current legislation. But all it would take is for a few zealous pollies and bureaucrats to say “oh, we’re enforcing that now” and doctors would be charged and women would be denied the abortion they seek while the charges against the doctors proceed.
Just as a thought experiment, Eliza: if abortion IS murder, then women who hire abortion doctors are essentially hiring a hitman, a contract killer. If a woman hired a hitman to kill her husband, both the hitman and the woman would be charged with murder asa conspiracy. When it’s abortion, only the doctor gets charged. Why is that? How come anti-abortionists don’t want women to serve time when they contract to murder their fetuses?
Which is exactly what happened in Perth in 1998. “Crackdowns” on abortion aren’t all in the distant past.