Culture

Accessing Abortion Services In Queensland Is About To Get Much Harder

Queensland already has the toughest abortion laws in Australia.

by Matilda Dixon-Smith  4 November 2016

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For women in Queensland, access to a safe abortion is already severely restricted. The state has some of the most draconian legislation around women’s health in this country, and women are routinely turned away by health providers, or harassed by sign-waving nutjobs outside abortion providers. (This may or may not surprise you, considering how lawmakers in Australia and around the world continue to attack women’s right to bodily autonomy.)

Now things for regional Queensland women are about to get a whole lot tougher: Marie Stopes International, Australia’s largest abortion provider, has just announced it will cease surgical termination procedures in two of its Queensland clinics, one in Townsville and the other in Rockhampton.

The scaling-back in these clinics will make it virtually impossible for northern Queenslanders to access safe and legal abortions. This is a huge blow to remote communities already hamstrung by socio-economic hardships. It’s estimated that around 800 women travel to the Rockhampton and Townsville clinics each year; these women will now have to travel much further, at great cost, to access the safe health care that is their right.

Queensland’s laws already make most abortions illegal, except in cases where the mother’s health is considered “critically at risk” (under its criminal code, which dates back to 1899). So women in Queensland, particularly in remote communities, have to endure unnumbered hardships and humiliations in order to access a safe and legal abortion. The scaling-back of operations in the Rockhampton and Townsville clinics is what the Mary Stopes International has called its “very last option”.

Queensland women currently have just ten abortion clinics available to them, seven of which are in the south-east of the state, around Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Women who live north of Gympie and west of Brisbane have no close access to a clinic at all, and have to travel great distances to find a centre that will service their needs. Although some remote-access GPs are able to administer medical abortions, there is no publicly available list of the doctors who provide this service, which forces many women to go searching and risk being turned away and humiliated by their physicians.

Access to a safe and legal abortion for women all across Australia, an important way for women to exercise their bodily autonomy should they choose termination, is constantly put in jeopardy by backwards laws, cruel protesters and indifferent physicians. This news from Queensland is just the latest in a long line of assaults on women’s right to choose.

And Queensland isn’t the only state lagging behind, accessing an abortion is still a criminal offence in NSW as well. Yes, it’s also the state that actually debates on restrictions proposed by mouldy old fish finger Fred Nile, including mandatory counselling and viewing of an ultrasound before women can elect to undergo a termination. In all other Australian states, terminations have at the very least been decriminalised (South Australia in 1969, the Northern Territory in 1974, Western Australia in 1998, Victoria in 2008 and Tasmania in just 2013).

Regardless of your feelings on abortion, it’s just a fact that when women are prevented from accessing safe abortions (particularly young and geographically or socio-economically disadvantaged women), they increasingly take drastic measures that can result in serious injury, disfigurement or death. So hi, please can we not have people (especially old-man politicians and crusty codger lawmakers) tell us what to do with our bodies?

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Image from Twitter.