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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 9 Hansard (21 August) . . Page.. 2515 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

of this kind of attitude. A report from the Australian Women's Research Centre in 1996 cites cases where health insurance companies threatened to deny women health insurance unless they aborted foetuses with genetic anomalies.

I have also been sent a copy of what appears to be an ACT department of health briefing from 1998, in which costs of not being able to access abortion were detailed in answers to questions from the then minister for health.

Shockingly, the brief's version of costs included estimates of the costs of caring for people born with disabilities as a result of their mothers not being able to access abortions in the ACT. Before I go on, I restate that reducing the legality of abortions does not prevent them from happening, so there is a faulty premise in this brief. Nonetheless, the point I want to explore is that consideration was being given to this question in respect of the costs involved in caring for someone. My correspondent points out that this is cold-blooded economic rationalism.

This view of people with disability-this failure to see people as contributors to society, is not created by access to abortion. I also believe that decriminalisation will do nothing to change this attitude, one way or the other. I believe that the work to shift this attitude is a different thing altogether. That work is already under way. I am committed to that, and have a proven record on it.

As to insurance being refused, we must watch this and prevent it here. It is a dilemma we are going to face in many situations, as genetic testing becomes more prevalent. Getting back to the decisions about abortion versus parenting, the moral choice has to work both ways, if it is a real choice.

Why change? Some people have claimed that there is no need to change this law, or that it is preposterous to be concerned about a 10-year jail term for seeking or providing an abortion, because no-one has been charged. If no-one has been charged, then let's get rid of it! This is still a superficial argument.

We know that, as long as abortion remains part of the Crimes Act, eventually someone may try to use it to punish a woman for not sharing his or her own beliefs, or for drawing different conclusions to her circumstances from what they may have done. It happened in Western Australia in 1998 and in Tasmania last year.

Abortions in Tasmania are provided at public hospitals. Legally, it had been assumed that abortions were lawful, subject to the 1969 ruling of Mennenheit J in Victoria. That ruling established that the lawfulness of abortion relies on establishing that, if a pregnancy were to continue, it would seriously adversely affect the physical or mental health of the woman.

The Levine ruling in 1971 in New South Wales established that social and economic factors could contribute to an abortion being lawful. This opened the way for the establishment of counselling services for women. The law in Tasmania had not been tested. Legal advice was that the Mennenheit/Levine interpretations would apply in Tasmania. That is the same murky legal situation as we currently have here in the ACT.

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