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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 9 Hansard (21 August) . . Page.. 2508 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

In looking at this deeply, one of the things that struck me was that the fundamental arguments surrounding the German approach, and the Western approach Mr Stefaniak talked about, are exactly where the divide is today in society. The German approach actually talks about somebody's right to life and it actually assumes that an abortion is the taking of a life, and that that is the prime issue. The Western approach actually talks about the inviolability of a woman's body and primacy of her right to privacy. It recognises also that it is the taking of a life but privacy has primacy.

Those arguments rage overseas in many jurisdictions. I don't know whether we will ever find a solution to that. But one of the points that came home to me-and it is a point that I just cannot reconcile within my own heart-is that I do not consider that an abortion is merely a medical procedure.

I understand a medical procedure to be, for example, the removal of a diseased or unwanted organ. It can in fact be the transplantation of any organ. But, to me, "medical procedure" talks about surgical intervention on parts of the body, a pathology issue. It doesn't talk about there being two lives. And I cannot get away from this. We are talking about two lives, and I can't apply the thought of terminating a life as just a medical procedure. I'm sorry about that for those people who have differing views, but there it is. And all of my thoughts kept coming back to that.

I do not believe-emphatically-that we should as a society consider negatively women who have been forced, through their circumstances, to take this decision. Indeed, not only should we not be ostracising people who have made that decision, or even thinking negatively about them; we should actually be putting in as much support as we can possibly bear for them-because what a hell of a decision to have to take!

I thank God quite frequently that I am not going to be faced with having that final decision. I am quite happy to participate in the decision from a long way, but it's a really comforting position to be in to know that I am not the person who has to turn the lights off. A woman has to do that, and only a woman will ever know what that means. I do not think that society ought to be doing anything but supporting these people. So I am not averse to removing the justifiable termination from the crimes law books at all, but I make this point: you cannot just take it out and not replace it with something else.

For example, I think that if a woman has the dreadful decision that she wants to have an abortion and so she goes to the clinic and has it done, then that should be something about which we all say, "Well, we would prefer it didn't happen but okay." But if somebody, for reasons known only to herself, goes along to somewhere other than an approved facility, she is putting herself in danger, it is an illegal act, and in my view we should be making a societal statement about that-and it ought to be a strong one.

I went through various pieces of legislation around the countryside about it, as Mr Stefaniak obviously has. I looked at the Northern Territory legislation, the South Australian legislation and the Western Australian legislation. I own up to not checking out the Tasmanian legislation. The one that actually attracted me most was the South Australian legislation. I won't read the whole lot of the South Australian legislation, but it makes interesting reading on its own. Section 81 of the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 says:

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