It has amazed and irritated me for the last week or so hearing stupid politicians trundle out their “harrowing tales” of wives, partners and girlfriends who have had abortions and how it has affected the politicians lives, without realising that the thing they are debating has absolutely zero to do with the morality of abortion.
Abortion within Australia is legal within tightly defined pre-existing parameters.
This debate had nothing whatsoever to do with the legality or morality of abortion.
It was entirely to do with whether the health minister alone and with no oversight should be allowed to decide whether a safe method of carrying out a legal proceedure should be available, or whether this decision should be entrusted to the organisation that makes these same decisions on all other medications that are available in Australia, and who posess significantly more expertise in the fields of medicine, public health, pharmacology, and medical ethics than the health minister personally does.
If the politicians want to try and change legislation to outlaw abortion then they are perfectly welcome to try to do just that, and they can have their emotional stories, and they can have their fiery debates (and they can also loose the next election because they alienate the majority of the female vote, and they can live with the fact that women will go back to having so called “back yard” abortions, and they can have the many deaths which will result from this on their conscience).