The big news in life issues this past week was the pre-election policy announcement from the Australian Greens that it would require all public hospitals in Australia to offer abortions up until birth and would allocate an extra $100 million of taxpayer funds to ensure this happens.
On the one hand, we know that there is a redundancy to the Greens to making pre-election budgetary commitments. There is no chance that the Greens will have a majority in the Lower House that would enable them to form government and therefore have control of budget items.
On the other hand, we cannot dismiss the Greens’ promises as completely irrelevant to future government policy for two key reasons.
Firstly, it is possible that they will hold the balance of power in the Lower House following the next federal election, and that one of the major parties will need to rely on them to form government. If this eventuates, the Greens will be in a position to make certain demands of the party it helps to take control.
Labor took a similar policy to that announced last week by the Greens to the 2019 federal election but abandoned the policy after a post-election review of its defeat noted, among other things, that the party, “did not project an image that was appealing to devout Christians” and the pro-abortion policy, “enabled conservative groups to target Christian voters in marginal electorates around the country, and in traditionally safe Labor seats in western Sydney.” As recently as last week, federal health minister Mark Butler confirmed that Labor would not reinstate this commitment. Whether this resolve will remain in circumstances where the Labor party needs the Greens to keep governing remains to be seen.
Secondly, the pledge of funding by the Greens also indicates another deeper (and more sinister) policy agenda.
The justification for the Greens’ budgetary commitment is that women, particularly those who live in regional and rural parts of the country, are not able to access abortion because private providers are scarce and a number of public hospitals do not provide termination services, particularly for later-term abortions.
One way to fix this scarcity, or “postcode lottery” as they describe it, is to make abortion-till-birth-and-for-any-reason available for free at any public hospital.
The other way to fix this scarcity is to remove conscience protections for individual doctors and private health institutions and require all doctors and all facilities—public and private— to participate in taking the lives of the next generation of Australian children.
The removal of conscience protections is a matter for state laws, though, and not federal and so the federal Greens are playing their part in the “abortion access” pantomime in part to pave the way for the argument about conscience to happen in each of the states.
It is no coincidence that around the same time of the federal Greens’ announcement about abortion access in public hospitals, we saw news items drip fed to sympathetic, pro-abortion media about medical professionals in regional and rural areas placing barriers in the way of abortion access, because they are unwilling to facilitate the provision of abortion or provide it themselves.
As sure as night follows day, these stories appearing in outlets like the ABC and the Guardian will be followed by a push for state-based inquiries into “abortion access” in the regions and these are really just code for “let’s try and force doctors to provide abortions, even if they don’t want to, by removing the conscience protections they currently enjoy.”
This is the utterly predictable one-two step dance of pro-aborts like the Greens, and good governments or potential governments should not fall for it.
If politicians were really concerned about health care being provided in rural and regional Australia, then they would not try to force doctors to act against their conscience because, rather than result in greater abortion provision, it will likely just result in doctors leaving the profession altogether.
Hard as it is for those who give no regard to human life to believe, doctors with conscientious objection to abortion would rather quit than kill. The inevitable push to remove conscience protections is not only counterproductive, it would also reduce the medical choice available to women.