The Nile bill
[We asked Dr Jean Edwards, a member of the Doctors Reform Society, to prepare a short article on Fred Nile's bill to restrict abortion rights in NSW, and where, if successful, it will lead. It summed up the issue so well that we decided to run it as the week's editorial.]
Fred Nile's attempt to force termination of pregnancy back into hospitals, under extremely restrictive guidelines, would set women's health back by 30 years.
Doctors will again be faced with the agonising dilemmas of women too poor, too old, too young, too distressed, to be able to cope with an unplanned pregnancy. Every hospital used to have a ward full of these women, many of whom died and all of whom suffered as the result of illegal abortions procured in despair.
Hospitals do not have the facilities to deal with termination of pregnancy appropriately. They do not have the counsellors who will take their time and allow the woman to explore all her options before she makes her own decision.
Women will be seen, as they used to be seen, in the gynaecological outpatient departments of the hospitals. They will lie on their backs with their knickers off, trying to explain why they are desperate enough to need an abortion.
It will be a lucky dip. Some women will be allowed to have a legal abortion, but if they come on the wrong day, and the doctor they see is uncomfortable and untrained in this area and if another woman has just been "permitted" to have an abortion, they may be denied this.
What will happen to them? Those with financial resources will obtain illegal abortions by reasonably efficient but threatened doctors who, since they are breaking the law, will hustle the woman in and out, for a cash transaction, with no counselling and no after-care.
Those without financial resources may be forced to continue the pregnancy, to the everlasting detriment of their physical and emotional health and the physical and emotional health of their child.
A large number, however, will do what women have always done. They will attempt to procure illegal abortions by unqualified practitioners. They will use knitting needles, coat hangers, unsterile instruments and toxic drugs, and some of them will die.
They will die of haemorrhage, of septicaemia, of suicide.
They will become infertile due to massive pelvic infection for which they will be afraid to seek treatment, for fear of being jailed for breaking the law.
These are the women whose suffering we must prevent. Out-of-hospital specialised clinics with excellent non-traumatic techniques, superb counselling and, above all, dignity for all involved, allow a woman to come away from the process with a minimum of trauma, with her fertility intact, and with the chance, later on, to have a child if she wishes to.
The rights we have already fought for, and for which women have died, must not be taken away.