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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 9 Hansard (21 August) . . Page.. 2523 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

Ms Gallagher's amendments grant doctors the right to refuse to perform abortions. But there is no protection afforded, in Ms Gallagher's amendments, to the matter of referral. If Ms Tucker has her way, doctors will, in fact, be conscripted. What this means for doctors of my philosophical belief is that they do not have to be murderers, but they have to at least be accessaries. That would make it impossible for a sincere, Catholic doctor or a Muslim doctor to be an obstetrician, gynaecologist or general practitioner in the territory, because he would be unable to refuse to deal with abortion. In addition to the doctors, there are the nurses.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I thought I could use standing order 84, but I understand that I cannot. I seek leave to table a petition from 79 midwives and nurses opposing the passage of this bill. They oppose the bill for a variety of reasons but, principally, as health professionals, they will no longer have the protection of law that they need to hold a conscientious objection to abortion.

Leave granted.

MRS DUNNE: I present a petition from 79 midwives and nurses requesting the Assembly to reject the Health Regulation (Maternal Health Information) Repeal Bill 2001 and the Crimes (Abolition of Offence of Abortion) Bill 2001.

I foreshadow that, if we get to debate Ms Gallagher's bill, I will be moving an amendment, which I have already circulated, to ensure that doctors, nurses and institutions can conscientiously decline to be involved in either the practice of abortion or referring people elsewhere.

Whilst this is a debate about philosophy and conflicting claims about human rights rather than population effects, we need to look at the data and get a picture of what is really happening. (Further extension of time granted.) There are 1,500 abortions per year in the ACT. That is 40 per cent of the number of live births and slightly more than the number of deaths from all other causes. Mr Wood was correct this morning, when he said that there are too many abortions in the ACT. The first thing that is incumbent upon us is to find a way of making that number decline.

The abortion rate in the ACT is higher than just about anywhere else on the planet. Nowhere else do we find an abortion rate as high as that for women in the ACT-especially young women who, I submit, do not have enough knowledge, put the whole of their lives in peril. There are no prosecutions. According to legal advice I have received, there is no legal basis for prosecuting any of the 1,500 women who have abortions in the ACT each year.

As I foreshadowed publicly earlier today, I will not be supporting part of my own bill-on the basis of advice I have received since submitting that bill. When I introduced that bill, I did so because I believe, as every person in this place believes, that a woman should not be sent to jail because she does something in a stressful situation. However, I do believe there are circumstances in which medical practitioners should be sent to jail.

I will now oppose my own proposal to deal with section 44 of the Crimes Act, on the basis of advice that I have received from an eminent international lawyer who works in this area. I seek leave to table the advice and will read the salient points. It says that the

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