BY ROBYN MARSHALL
BRISBANE — After attending an evening lecture at one of this city's universities last August, a young woman was dragged into the bushes and raped in a badly lit area of the campus. She could not identify her attacker. The woman was traumatised, embarrassed and terribly ashamed. Unfortunately, she also became pregnant.
In denial about her condition — and hoping she would start menstruating again soon — she tried all sorts of folk remedies. Her period never came. She told no-one.
Finally, she came to terms with her condition. She tried desperately to find the money to have a privately done abortion, thinking fewer people would find out that way. On December 24, she broke down and told her parents that she was pregnant.
Her parents were supportive and took her to Ipswich public hospital on December 28 to seek an abortion. A doctor took her details and indicated that there would be no problem obtaining the abortion. But after nine days of anxious waiting, the hospital said it would not perform the abortion because she was now more than 22 weeks' pregnant.
Hospital management argued that legal terminations could only be performed if the health and well-being of the mother was at risk. In fact, there is no law in Queensland that stipulates a time limit on terminations.
The woman then tried to get a private abortion. The only centre willing to perform the termination was in Victoria. It wanted $10,000 up front.
This woman's ordeal reveals the lie that is the ALP's claim that abortion in Queensland is available to any woman who requests one for reasons of mental or physical trauma or ill health.
“This woman should not be further punished by being forced to undergo the birth of an unwanted child”, Coral Wynter from the International Women's Day Collective told Green Left Weekly. “We have been demanding for more than 30 years that the decision to go ahead with a pregnancy must be decided by the woman herself, not the police, not the state and not lawyers — certainly not bureaucrats”, Wynter continued.
“The Labor state government should implement recommendation 82 from its own report on women and the criminal code. It says that sections of the code criminalising abortion should be repealed.”
Repeal of abortion laws will be a demand of the International Women's Day rally in Brisbane on March 9. To get involved, contact Coral on (07) 3831 2644.
From Green Left Weekly, February 13, 2002.
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