By Tuntuni Bhattacharyya
SYDNEY — Not long after she was elected leader of the NSW Liberal opposition, Kerry Chikarovski told the Sydney Morning Herald that she "believes in a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy safely, because New South Wales cannot go back to the days of backyard abortions" (December 12).
Abortion is still a criminal offence in NSW, encoded in sections 82 and 83 of the state's Crimes Act. However, access to the operation is made possible by Justice Levine's 1972 ruling in a common law case which found in favour of a woman's right to abortion under certain circumstances, and set a legal precedent.
By contrast, in 1994 Justice Newman found against a woman who was suing her doctors for failing to diagnose her pregnancy, thereby removing her choice of whether to continue or terminate the pregnancy. Newman argued that the woman was claiming the "loss of an opportunity to perform an illegal act".
That case highlighted the need to repeal all abortion laws (that is, remove all references to abortion from the Crimes Act) and public calls for repeal increased. The office of the attorney-general said at the time that any such changes to the law must be proposed by the Minister for the Status of Women. The response of that minister at the time — Kerry Chikarovski — was that she was not convinced of the need to change the Crimes Act.
It seems that Chikarovski's recent statements about supporting women's choices are election-time crowd pleasers. In 1994, she refused an opportunity to propose changes to the law which might have ensured that NSW would not return to the days of backyard abortions, then last December she told the Sydney Morning Herald that she thinks the abortion debate poses the wrong issues. "We should be talking much more about preventing unwanted pregnancies ... We need to say to young people first of all, 'you don't need to be out involved in sexual relationships'", she said.
This statement echos the ignorant (and ineffective) "Just say no!" campaign of the conservative "morals police" who oppose women's right to have an abortion. It also indicates that Chikarovski thinks abortions are sought mainly by young women, an assumption not supported by the statistics which show that women from all age groups need free, safe abortion services.
[Tuntuni Bhattacharyya is a doctor, an active feminist and the Democratic Socialists' candidate for the seat of Marrickville in the March NSW election.]