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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 9 Hansard (21 August) . . Page.. 2554 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

Table 1 shows that the age-adjusted odds ratio of women dying in the year they give birth as being half that of women who are not pregnant-

if you gave birth, you were half as likely to die-

whereas women who have abortions are 76 per cent more likely to die in the year following abortion compared to non-pregnant women. Compared to women who carry to term, women who abort are 3.5 times more likely to die within a year.

Safe! That is reasonably safe! If we change the Crimes Act, if we send the message that abortion is okay, do we actually open to legal action this Assembly and those that enforce the laws here and the activity that goes on to the clinic? We have all seen the opinion piece in the paper this morning about a woman who is suing the ACT government or the clinic because she was not informed, she was not made aware, that abortion was not safe.

The next figure goes on to suicide. It says:

Using a subset of the same data, STAKES researchers had previously reported that the risk of death from suicide within the year of an abortion was more than seven times higher than the risk of suicide within a year of childbirth.

So much for being safe! The figures go on. I will keep a large amount of this data for the debate on the next bill about the need for informed consent. The document does not rely just on the data for Finland. It goes on to say that the data aroused some concern in South Glamorgan in Great Britain, which has a population of 408,000, not dissimilar to the ACT. The document says:

After their pregnancies, there were 8.1 suicide attempts per 1,000 women among those who had abortions, compared to only 1 suicide attempt among those who gave birth. The higher rate of suicide attempts subsequent to abortion was particularly evident among women under 30 years of age.

The document goes on to quote a study by the University of Minnesota about younger women, saying:

Teens are generally at higher risk for both suicide and abortion. In a survey of teenaged girls, researchers at the University of Montana found that the rate of attempted suicide in the six months prior to the study increased tenfold-from 0.4 per cent for girls who had not aborted during that time period to 4 per cent for teens who had aborted in the previous six months.

The document goes on about self-harm, before saying:

In a study of government-funded medical programs in Canada, researchers found that women who had undergone an abortion in the previous year were treated for mental disorders 41 per cent more than postpartum women, and 25 per cent more often for injuries or conditions resulting from violence.

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