Women who want to terminate their pregnancy after 28 weeks could be required to deliver the baby alive under a proposed change to the law in South Australia (SA), a law which decriminalised abortion in 2021. MP Ben Hood introduced the bill in the SA upper house on 25 September 2024. It would require women pregnant for more than 27 weeks + 6 days to be induced and deliver the baby live instead of having the abortion they sought.
In the 2021 SA legislation, abortion is legal after 22 weeks and 6 days if it is “medically appropriate” and with the approval of two doctors. Hood is quoted as saying: “What my amendments hope to do is balance the choice of the mother with the rights of the child.” He believes this does not impinge upon the rights of the woman to choose a termination. He also said: “When that child is born alive it will receive neonatal care, and then, if it is the choice of the mother, the baby would be put up for adoption.” He also argued that “the bill would not remove a woman’s right to end a pregnancy, because the pregnancy would end when the baby was born”. He also said: “In fact, the innovation of this bill is that it allows a mother to end her pregnancy throughout all nine months and indeed, right up to birth.”
He does not clarify who would actually be responsible for the child in the interim, nor what would happen if adoption turned out not to be a possibility, nor even mention how the pregnant woman might feel about any of this. Nor does he seem to realise that globally, 4.9 million children aged up to five years old die annually, primarily of infectious diseases, including pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria, along with pre-term birth and intrapartum-related complications. (See UNICEF, WHO, on Google)
The Greens denounced the bill as tantamount to “forced birth”, while the lead standards body in women’s health called it an attempt to limit healthcare access.
According to the abc news report, the South Australian Abortion Reporting Committee reported only eight terminations after 28 weeks in 2022 and 37 in 2023, all due to a risk to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman. In a statement, SA Health said that in the first 18 months after the 2021 legislation was passed, there were fewer than five terminations after 27 weeks and no terminations after 29 weeks.
According to the Guardian, there were 47 terminations in 2023, of which 37 were on grounds of the physical or mental health of the woman, and 10 were for fetal anomalies,” SA Health said in a statement. The Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said only 1% of abortions are performed after 20 weeks’ gestation.
The SA Abortion Action Coalition’s Brigid Coombe said the proposed amendments “would remove the basis of informed consent and do not recognise at all the complexity of the circumstances that people are in when they need an abortion at those gestations… ” She also said the Coalition has always placed importance on the person who is pregnant. “You can’t say that you’re going to force somebody to do something against their will [and] at the same time say that you’re going to find that balance between choice. It disregards all the very serious decision-making that goes into these circumstances….”
Greens MLC Tammy Franks said later abortions were “very complex, often heartbreaking cases” and that “playing politics with healthcare is a dangerous folly…. [Hood’s] proposal would force birth upon children; victims of rape, incest and sexual slavery; or on much wanted pregnancies where the mother or the fetus will not survive his forced-birth plans for them. The SA Greens stand firmly against attempts to roll back hard-won reproductive rights. We will continue to fight for policies that ensure access to comprehensive healthcare, including reproductive services, without fear or stigma.”
In 2021, the historic bill that moved abortion out of the Criminal Law Consolidation Act into healthcare legislation passed parliament after members of parliament were granted a conscience vote. Those changes brought South Australia into line with most of the other jurisdictions in the country, with then Attorney-General Vickie Chapman stating the move was about “giving women choice”.
Currently, abortions after 28 weeks are only approved if there is a threat to the life of the pregnant woman or to another fetus, or if there is a significant risk of serious fetal anomalies associated with the pregnancy. Terminations would also be approved if the continuation of the pregnancy would involve a significant risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the woman.
SOURCES: abc.net.au: by Josephine Lim, Evelyn Leckie, 23 September 2024; The Guardian, by Tony Shepherd, 25 September 2024 + PHOTO by Joel Carrett/AAP.