A group of Coalition parliamentarians, including Barnaby Joyce and Andrew Hastie, have seized on a proposed new law to give paid parental leave to parents of a child who is stillborn or dies, arguing it should not be available to anyone needing a late-term abortion.
A senior doctor has labelled the comments as “terrible, cynical, awful” things to say about an often heartbreaking decision, as experts point out that the vast majority of later terminations are forced by major health issues and warn fearmongering about the issue is straight out of the anti-abortion handbook.
Federal parliament has been debating “Priya’s law”, an amendment to the Fair Work Act, which would protect employer-funded paid parental leave for parents of a child who is stillborn or dies.
The bill has bipartisan support but a quartet of conservative Coalition members – Joyce, Hastie and Liberal MPs Tony Pasin and Henry Pike – gave speeches to parliament backing the broad intention of the change but raising reservations about whether paid parental leave would apply to parents who undergo a late-term abortion.
“A number of us feel we do not have a clear answer on this, so, unfortunately – I hate to bring it up – there remains the issue of late-term abortion. We have a right to know if it includes that,” Joyce said.
Hastie, a Liberal leadership aspirant, praised the bill’s “noble” intent but said “I do have a question about the unintended consequences of this bill and it applies to late-term abortions … It’s no secret that I am opposed to late-term abortions.”
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Pasin said he was concerned the bill would “treat an intentionally late-term aborted child in the same way as it would a natural stillbirth or a baby who dies shortly after birth”.
“I think it’s clear in the title ‘paid parental leave’ that it should be available to parents and that it should be available to people who had wished to become parents but for the grace of God have not become parents through an incident or outcome – but it shouldn’t be available to people who don’t wish to become parents,” he said.
Academics and doctors have accused those politicians of “a lack of understanding” about stillbirth.
“Losing a baby after 20 weeks is losing a baby. We should treat anyone who loses a baby with compassion, instead of playing politics with people’s emotions and people’s distress,” said Dr Nisha Khot, the president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (Ranzcog), adding that she thought the comments were “terrible, cynical, awful”.
Greg Johnson, the managing director of abortion provider MSI Australia, urged parliamentarians to debate the legislation with “empathy and respect for the facts”.
“We are seeing a troubling trend of American-style abortion politics being imported into Australia,” he said. “It’s not coming from moderate voices but from a small group on the right seeking to politicise a deeply personal issue. It should stop.
“Misrepresenting abortion care not only causes distress to families and clinicians, it undermines compassion for those who experience loss or complex pregnancies.”
Kirsten Black, a professor of sexual and reproductive health at the University of Sydney, said people were “very rarely terminating a pregnancy after 20 weeks that’s not wanted”.
“Ninety-nine per cent of abortions occur before 20 weeks,” she said. “We’re talking about 1% of abortions anyway and the absolute vast majority [of those] are done for medical reasons.”
Black said later-term abortions were still very distressing for parents.
“That most losses of pregnancies after 20 weeks are wanted, and they may occur in the presence of genetic syndromes or major foetal abnormality or situations where continuing pregnancy would severely harm the mother’s mental or physical health,” she said.
Speaking in the debate on “Priya’s law”, the Labor MP Jerome Laxale said the bill was “about fixing a loophole in a law identified by her grieving parents”.
“It is not about anything else. It is not about a culture war.”
The shadow health minister, Anne Ruston, said the Coalition remained committed to supporting the bill and in a press conference declined to endorse or repeat the claims from her colleagues.
“We maintain absolute bipartisan support to make sure that mothers who have stillborn children, who have lost their child soon after birth, get the same consideration for somebody who has a child,” she said.
Asked whether she held the same reservations as Joyce and Hastie, Ruston replied: “I think this bill is about something completely different and I’m very focused on making sure that we keep our bipartisan commitment to Priya’s mother.”
Prudence Flowers, a Flinders University senior lecturer who looks at the importation of anti-abortion tactics from the United States, said the focus on later gestation abortions was a US tactic and the “thin edge of the wedge”.
“The idea is to generate disgust and revulsion towards abortion more generally as a procedure and to use that to chip away at rights,” she said.
