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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 9 Hansard (21 August) . . Page.. 2584 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

I seek leave to table two papers. Most members of this place would not have seen these. The first is the consolidated statistics, collected over the three years of the operation of the maternal health information act. I do not think that most members have seen them together.

Leave granted.

MRS DUNNE: I present the following papers:

"Private TCH, RHC, Total" for 1999-2000 - 2001-02-Statistics and a chart.

Along with that, there is a table. It is a small table but it shows a dramatic picture. It shows a dramatic picture of what a simple piece of legislation which was so actively opposed by some members in this place could do. But it was actively opposed only by some members. There were other members who, despite the fact that they were pro-choice, were prepared to say that this was a good thing.

On the night this legislation was passed in 1998, Kate Carnell said that real choice is about having a full suite of information. She said that she was pro-choice, but that she believed choice should be available for women or, for that matter, for anybody else in this community, only when they know what that choice entails-that it is a total breadth of choice.

Tonight in this place, courtesy of Mr Berry and his legislation, we will go back to the dark ages when women were kept in the dark. We have to look at these figures and ask the question why Mr Berry and his cohort want to suppress these statistics. Ms Tucker also needs to answer this question. She claims to be pro-choice, but she does not want to let the information out-that, in the ACT, and across the Western world, against the tide, we are seeing a marked reduction in abortions. This is something we should be proud of. But today is a black day, because we are turning the figures around, we are turning off the information so that in future we will never know what happens. We will never know how many people go down to that clinic and put themselves at risk. Not today!

It is nice and clean and clinical, and they use nice, sterilised implements. Yes, it is clean, but we do not know what is going to happen to them when they are 45 and they suddenly discover they have breast cancer-because Mr Berry, Ms Tucker, Ms Gallagher and the people who support them will not permit them to know that they might get breast cancer in a few years time.

In addition to that, it is not just breast cancer, it is the whole panoply of things that can go wrong. Your total mortality in the year after an abortion, compared to someone delivering at full term, goes up by 252 per cent. Do the young girls and women of Canberra know that? They are 324 per cent more likely to die in accidents. Often it is that, because they feel so bad about what has happened, they take bad risks. They are also 546 per cent more likely to commit suicide.

Do you want this to happen to the women of this town? I suspect you do. I suspect you do not care! Every time a woman submits herself to a termination, she submits herself to those risks. And get this one! If she has an abortion rather than carrying to term, in the year after that event, she is 1,299 per cent more likely to be murdered.

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