Restricting abortion

If the Minister can decide the circumstances in which Medicare benefits are payable, what circumstances will he take into account? Rape, for example?

Last November, The Age reported Mr Abbott as saying, "The government had no plans to change existing policy about the public funding of terminations". However the Catholic Church certainly thought it should, and said so at the time. Catholic Health Australia chief executive Francis Sullivan called for the issue to be put on the agenda for the next health ministers' summit. Australian Federation of Right to Life Associations spokeswoman Kath Woolf said Medicare funding for late-term abortions needed to be stopped.

Perhaps what Mr Abbott really meant was what he said to the Catholic Administrators Conference in Sydney last October:

I want to invite representatives of the Church, leaders of the Church, to consider the Church’s role in combating the great tragedy of abortion in Australia today …

"If only as a culture we were as clear cut as even John Kerry, the US presidential candidate who says that abortion should be safe, that’s what he says. Available, that’s what he says, and almost never chosen. And that’s the issue. It should not be chosen …

But Catholic attitudes to abortion over the centuries have not been consistent and unchanging. From St Augustine until the 19th century the dominant Catholic view was that “life” began at 40 days after conception, when the soul entered the body ("animation"). St Augustine (AD 354-430) said, “There cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation”. St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) also considered only the abortion of an "animated" fetus as murder. The contemporary Catholic position that life begins at conception was adopted only in 1869, when the distinction between “inanimate” and “animate” fetuses was dropped.

In Australia today, there is much proper concern about the rights and wrongs of the termination of a pregnancy. It is desirable that the community debates such an important issue. After doing so, the community will perhaps seek to alter the status quo.

What is not reasonable is the imposition of the Health Minister's ideological point of view on this or any other issue, by “legislative instrument”, without proper public awareness and the necessary debate.

Soon after his last election win, Mr Howard told the ABC that he believed that abortion was in some circumstances "absolutely justified". He also said that he was not "somebody who seeks to impose my own personal views on the rest of the community." But this legislation is a back door route to permit the Minister for Health to impose his views on the community.

Australians have until this Wednesday to let the Senate know just how they feel about that.