Page 3851 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 September 2018
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ensure that those who undertake a medical abortion are not inadvertently criminalised. And it provides for gender-neutral language, recognising that persons who do not identify as women may be capable of being pregnant and thus could be seeking an abortion.
Historically the ACT has been ahead of other jurisdictions on issues such as abortion. In 2001 we were among the first Australian states to remove abortion from our Crimes Act. But we should not be complacent. Being a small jurisdiction, both in terms of relative population and in terms of being spatially contained, should make it easier for us to tackle society’s wicked problems such as climate change, human rights and entrenched cycles of disadvantage. Ours is a majority well-educated, well-off, progressive community. As such, the laws of the ACT need to meet the expectations and values of the community that we in the Legislative Assembly are elected to represent in order to serve the whole community.
Unfortunately, it has become apparent that we are no longer the leader in many key social areas: for example, rental tenancies; consent law reform; and, as this bill before us illustrates, abortion, specifically, medical terminations of pregnancy through the administration of abortifacients, drugs more commonly known as MS-2 Step, with step 1 being the much publicised RU486.
Minister Berry briefly went through the time line of this; I will go through with a bit more detail. In 2001, as she said, Wayne Berry introduced a private member’s bill to remove and repeal outdated laws that prescribed a jail sentence for abortions and laws that required women to view pictures of foetuses.
In 2002, the Assembly voted to decriminalise abortion. In 2006, RU486 became available in Australia through the Therapeutic Goods Administration, but it was not for abortions at that point. In 2012, MS-2 Step, sponsored by Marie Stopes International, was registered by the TGA with 187 providers nationwide. In 2013, a year later, MS-2 Step was listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme for use in pregnancy of up to 49 days gestation. In 2015, MS-2 Step approval for use under the PDS was extended to 63 days gestation. So the clinical landscape changed significantly from 2012 to 2013 to 2015. Despite all of this, we have had no action to improve access to drugs for abortion in the ACT.
In 2015, my colleague Shane Rattenbury introduced legislation for protest exclusion zones in the ACT. As Shane said at the time, women should have the right to a safe, legal medical service without being harassed in any way. That was my Greens colleague. There have been other key advancements in the ACT that Greens have initiated, such as the 100 per cent renewables target, drug law reform, pill testing et cetera. But I will not keep on with that, because it is something of a digression.
Interestingly, in the period between 2012 to now, even in Queensland and New South Wales, where abortion is still technically illegal, access to abortifacients has not been restricted in the same way as in the ACT. We are simply behind the rest of Australia.
In 2016 a statement by the Women’s Health Committee of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists recommended access to abortion, saying:
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