In yet another attempt to Catholicise the Australian options on health, Minister Tony Abbott, a Catholic, continues his reckless quest by assigning to the Catholic Church in Australia a contract to provide pregnancy counselling services. This is in part because he wants to reduce the number of abortions.
Under the fold is the text of the Canberra Times editorial, which gets it exactly right. Having failed to control access to abortifacients, stem cell research, and the like, Abbott really ought to be removed from his office for this blatant grab for control of Australian polity. There's a reason we have abortion in Australia - it reduces deaths by backyard abortions, it improves the lives of those young women who do not want or cannot raise children, and hell, it's the right of a woman to remove a small number of cells from their body if they like. Early fetuses have no civil rights, no matter what the Catholic Church might think is right or wrong. If you're Catholic, by all means take the Church's views into account. The rest of us will exercise our secular rights.
The only reason to reduce abortions is religious. It is not a matter of public good arguments, or public health - to the contrary, all evidence is that abortions improve health and social wellbeing. So in the face of such secular (and let's face it, despite what Cardinal Pell might want, Australia is a secular society) reasons in favour of it, the only motive for a minister of health to reign it back has to be a moral argument. Which most of us do not share. And this is plain wrong. The prime minister must remove Abbott from this position, as his continued behaviour is improper.
Later note: Abbott denies involvement in the decision. Right. Sure. If he didn't directly make the decision, those chosen by him will have. It used to be that the public service in Australia was neutral, politically. However, since the Hawke/Keating era, politicians have stacked the upper echelons of the public service with party hacks.
Wednesday, 3 January 2007
Again, Abbott crosses the line
The Canberra TimesIT IS hard to say whether it is the Minister for Health, Tony Abbott, or the Catholic Church, who is in the more untenable position over Mr Abbott's decision to give a substantial government contract to provide pregnant women with a telephone helpline and counselling service.
Two agencies directly affiliated with the Catholic Church are involved in the consortium, and will be involved both in providing training and giving actual advice to callers. Those in charge of the agencies are, by getting involved, in an invidious position, one bound to mean that they are violating either their duty to the church or to the state.
Mr Abbott, himself a sincere Catholic, should not have allowed them to be put in this position, and is himself in an impossible conflict between his public and his private duties.
The official position of the Catholic Church, along with many other religious groups, is of adamant opposition to abortion. The teaching of the church is that Catholics must not have abortions; moreover they must do nothing which permits or assists anyone to have one. In the past this position has meant that the church has had difficulty even in involving itself in schemes which would have the effect of reducing (but not forbidding altogether) access to abortion, say to all but rape or incest victims, or cases where there is a physical risk to the mother.
If Catholic teachings are to be upheld and Australian Catholic bishops have never shrunk from action in this field those responsible for providing services under the contract will be forbidden to do anything which assists or promotes choices by women to have an abortion. The focus will, necessarily, be on steering women towards other options, presumably having and keeping their babies, or to surrendering them for adoption. This means that the full range of options available will not be provided.
Mr Abbott insists that the service will be a professional counselling service, not an advocacy centre. Centacare, one of the providers, is a professionalised organisation involved in many areas of social service, with trained workers, many of whom will not even be Catholic. The Caroline Chisholm Society is also professional. But Mr Abbott is being all too cute in insisting that what will pass between counsellor and counselled will be detached advice; put simply, the guiding philosophy and the overall management of the organisations will not allow that.
There is, of course, nothing whatever wrong with the church, or any other organisation, providing restricted services from their own resources, as indeed some do. There might, indeed, be nothing wrong with the funding of an organisation to provide support and assistance to women opting to keep babies. But Mr Abbott is having us on in pretending that this service can, or will, give women full advice on the full range of options available to them. Women are entitled by law and by (overwhelming) public opinion to have abortions; indeed on every occasion in which anti-abortion groups have sought to restrict this right, the end-up effect has been to make access to the right easier. This is not the first Abbott intervention in attempting to restrict access to abortion, nor the first occasion in which he has been cute about why his actions have been justified. On other occasions, the Prime Minister, or the Parliament, have overruled him and told him to butt out, and the same should happen this time.
Abbott is on safer ground in saying that he believes that there are far too many abortions in Australia, and that the rate may be as high as it is because many women do not feel that they have the help, the support, and, perhaps the advice, to decide to have the child. But it is by no means clear that a mere want of knowledge about options is the primary problem, or that many women, contemplating abortion after an unwanted pregnancy, would immediately opt to have a child once they became aware of the magnificent support offered by the Federal Government (or, for that matter, the Catholic Church).
If Mr Abbott wants outcomes fewer abortions he would be far better focused on improving the quality of support for women having children, particularly without partners. Or in promoting something else he might think objectionable, if considerably less so, than abortion: sex education and the better provision of advice about contraception.
Last year, some Catholic agencies, and some other Christian ones, decided that they should not involve themselves in seeking government contracts to provide services associated with the welfare-to-work program. There the problem was the feeling that it was not the role of church bodies to make, or enforce, judgments by the state about the entitlements of citizens, not least in situations where those abandoned, perhaps rightly, by the state might become supplicants for church assistance or advocacy.
The pregnancy hotline is another example of where cool heads would think that church and state simply cannot be in bed together.
Source: The Canberra Times editorial
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They opened a Mother of Life center right across from an abortion provider near me. The provider went out of business.
I've had some dialog with the folks who run the MoL and they are a little on the extreme side, but they do offer free pregnancy testing, as well as placement for unwanted children, etc. So they do put their money where their mouth is.
However MoL is part of the Catholic Diocese of Providence which makes my skin crawl.
The only reason to reduce abortions is religious. It is not a matter of public good arguments, or public health - to the contrary, all evidence is that abortions improve health and social wellbeing.
Well actually, abortion, like virtually any medical procedure, can cause complications. Abortions can lead to, on occasion, sterilisation or even death. An *increase* in abortions does not come with a health benefit.
What *does* clearly have a health benefit is freely available abortions, since they are a heap safer than backyard chop docs. They're also a lot safer than pregnancy-to-term and live birth...
So once someone's pregnant, then yeah, abortions are safer. But the only really safe option is to not get pregnant in the first place. The only effective method there is better education regarding contraception. What I'm saying is, there is a health benefit to reducing abortions if that reduction is as a result of increased contraception.
There are a lot of people who falsely believe that abortion is harmless, and see it as a primary method of contraception. This is not good. There are far more appropriate primary methods of contraception, so in that context an education campaign to reduce the abortion rate is a good thing.
The massive problem here, the skin-crawlingly bad thing, is that a "counselling" service can only be expected to come in after someone is already pregnant. That's an idiotic time to encourage contraception, too idiotic even for the Libs. Obviously the plan is to talk people out of abortion, which is dangerous and stupid. Let's be clear: if this "service" is successful, some women will die who should not have died.
It's doubly cringe-worthy when it's being run by the freaking Catholics, who have a clearly stated conflict of interest. Not only are they (obviously) expected to encourage people to carry-to-term, but they also have moral objections to the only truly beneficial method of abortion reduction, contraception.
...so I want my bloody taxes back, thanks Tony. Convincing women to die for some guy's religious beliefs is beyond repugnant.
"...it's the right of a woman to remove a small number of cells from their body if they like." Clearly, science is not being referred to here. It would damage the author's position. Abortion is not Birth Control. Use the pill. Get a condom. Use a diaphragm. Did you know, at conception the embryo is genetically distinct from the mother? A geneticist can tell the difference between the DNA of an embryo and that of a sperm and egg. A geneticist cannot, however, distinguish differences in the DNA of a developing embryo and a full-grown human being. Ain't science cool?!