Key Factors
- South Australia’s parliament has narrowly voted down modifications to abortion legal guidelines.
- The invoice was launched by Ben Hood and would have prevented termination of pregnancies from 27 weeks and 6 days.
- Girls dressed as handmaids protested on the steps of the South Australian parliament earlier than the vote.
South Australia’s parliament has narrowly voted down a invoice that might have made it unlawful to terminate a being pregnant after 27 weeks and 6 days.
The ultimate vote was 9 in favour and ten in opposition to.
The controversial proposal had drawn criticism from opponents inside and outdoors parliament, and was labelled an “excessive right-wing tradition battle invoice” by SA Well being Minister Chris Picton.
Forward of the vote, the South Australian Abortion Motion Coalition had additionally staged an illustration exterior parliament, which included girls dressed as handmaids, impressed by Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Story.
The lengthy purple attire and white bonnets symbolised the dystopian society depicted within the ebook, through which the state controls girls’s reproductive lives.
A spokesperson for the SA Abortion Motion Coalition, Brigid Coombe, mentioned the combat to guard reproductive rights stays an ongoing concern.
She believes many anti-abortion activists have been influenced by the US, which has had abortion rights wound again in lots of states over the previous two years.
“In Australia now we have had an undercurrent of anti-abortion activists, usually getting their concepts from america – which isn’t an excellent place to get their concepts from as a result of the way in which that American legislation operates in opposition to girls means they’ve in actual fact a really excessive maternal mortality.”
Liberal MP Ben Hood launched the non-public member’s invoice within the Legislative Council to amend the modifications to SA’s abortion legal guidelines, which handed parliament on a conscience vote in 2021 beneath the previous Marshall Liberal authorities.
Hood’s Invoice proposed that in circumstances the place pregnant girls search a termination of a kid after 28 weeks, girls must finish their being pregnant by way of early supply moderately than abortion.
Beneath the present legal guidelines, abortions are authorized after 22 weeks if two practitioners agree it’s medically applicable.
Within the first 18 months after the laws was handed, fewer than 5 individuals terminated a being pregnant after 27 weeks, in keeping with SA Well being.
Forward of the vote, Coombe mentioned abortion care all the time wanted to be addressed as healthcare.
“Legislating circumstances round how individuals’s healthcare must be offered reveals an infinite misunderstanding of how healthcare is offered,” she mentioned.
“Imposing a violent methodology of controlling girls’s reproductive autonomy is just not the way in which to go about it.”
She mentioned Mr Hood’s invoice was a “political stunt”
