Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 9 Hansard (21 August) . . Page.. 2513 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

begins-are personal. Meanwhile, the choices we make as legislators have profound consequences for people-especially for women who find themselves pregnant.

I have found some very personal stories from women with differing views and spiritualities, and I will read some of these. I am contributing them to the debate today because I think it is important for us to understand that there is a range of genuine beliefs, and that abortion is no place for the criminal law.

In the mid 1960s, in the United States of America, a group of church people-from Catholics, Jesuits, Episcopalians to Methodists-were so horrified by the consequences of illegal abortions they saw that they organised to get women to safe clinics. The following story comes from a woman who had an illegal abortion and who then, for different reasons, had a legal abortion. She is also the mother of two now full-grown children. Her name is Linda Ellerbee, and she is a journalist. She says:

I've said over and over that I am not for abortion, that no-one is for abortion. I am for a woman's right and a man's right-I'm for your right to make your own hard choices in this world.

I think one of the things that makes me angriest, as angry as the shame and the pain I had to go through for the illegal abortion, is the lack of education, of sex education in the home, in the church, in the school, all of those places that didn't give me any information that got me into that place. The same people who don't want you to have an abortion don't want you to have sex education, and there is no question where this ignorance leads. And anyone who thinks that outlawing abortion makes abortion go away is a fool. It makes it uneconomical, it makes it dangerous, and it makes it shameful ...

Of legal abortion, she says:

Having the legal abortion was so totally different from having the illegal one. It was inexpensive. It was done in a clinic, a Planned Parenthood clinic, under sterile circumstances, with counselling, and I was not made to feel worse than I already felt. I was helped in grieving my loss, and it was a loss.

About the question 'Does life begin at conception?' I do not know. Life in a certain sense probably does begin at conception, even perhaps right before conception-the properties of life are in the sperm and they're in the womb. But one must make tough choices in this world, harder choices than abortion. I don't see that choice as any different from the choice that families and doctors always have to make in difficult childbirth when they can only save the mother or save the fetus: You go for the life that is.

That is the view of one woman.

The Reverend Christine Grimbol, a woman who had an abortion and then trained as a minister in the Presbyterian Church, says:

The Presbyterian church's official stand on abortion is pro-choice ... Part of the stand is based on stewardship, on the belief that our job as human beings is to take care of the world and if we have babies we can't take care of, that is not particularly moral.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .