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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 9 Hansard (21 August) . . Page.. 2524 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

plain meaning of the words of section 44 is that this section penalises a pregnant woman who intends to procure her own abortion. It continues:

That section does not penalise her for attending before another person who then procures her miscarriage.

It says that section 45 penalises a person who has the intent to procure a miscarriage and administers a drug to do so. It goes on:

Plainly, this is intended to penalise a third party procurer, not just the woman who procures her own miscarriage.

In my opinion, however, this section does not directly penalise a woman who attends upon a third party for the purpose of having her miscarriage procured ...

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Excuse me, Mrs Dunne. Are you debating a later bill? We do not have a cognate debate.

MRS DUNNE: I thought we were able to speak on all-

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, we are not.

MRS DUNNE: Okay. I will leave that and come back to it.

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes. You will have to leave it until the bill is discussed, I am afraid.

MRS DUNNE: I apologise to members. I thought we were debating all of them. I thought we were able to speak on all of them at once, even if we were not debating them.

It is clear that abortion rates are changing significantly over time. It is interesting that, in the two jurisdictions where we have reliable data, the trends are in opposite directions. This is where I have to part company with Mr Hargreaves. I do not think the legislation in South Australia does the job that Mr Hargreaves hoped it would, because, in the 30 years that data has been collected in South Australia, the rate of abortion has trebled. That belies the claim that better sex education and contraceptive availability will reduce the need for abortion.

The ACT stands as a pinnacle at the moment because, by contrast, over the two years of information we have available to us, abortions have fallen-from 1,710 in 1999-2000 to 1,447 in 2000-01. On present trends, they will be around 1,270 at the end of this financial year. That is a reduction of more than a quarter of the number of abortions over two years.

If Mr Berry's moves to remove all restrictions on abortions succeed, this trend is likely to be reversed. ACT statistics will be expected to follow the gradual upward trend shown in South Australia and elsewhere in the western world-or, at least, ACT abortion numbers may grow, the statistics will no longer be collected, and we will not know for sure. The effect of returning to 1999-2000 abortion rates would be the equivalent of quadrupling the death rate. The cumulative effect of a few years is not hard to imagine.

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