The Rationalist Society of Australia has called on the Barr government to adopt a number of the recommendations by a parliamentary committee to improve access to abortion services in the Australian Capital Territory.
In a letter to the territory government’s health minister, Rachel Stephen-Smith, the RSA urged the government to remove remaining barriers to women accessing abortion services – which were identified in the Health and Community Wellbeing Committee’s report during its inquiry into abortion and reproductive choice.
In particular, RSA president Meredith Doig raised concerns about the territory’s publicly funded religious hospital, Calvary, utilising the notion of ‘institutional conscientious objection’ to prevent lawful abortion services – and the provision of contraception – being offered in their hospitals.
Rather than the ACT government “advocating” that Calvary Hospital provide full reproductive health services in accordance with human rights – as the committee recommended – Dr Doig urged Minister Stephen-Smith to go further.
“We urge your government to require that any publicly funded hospital providing gynaecological, obstetric or neonatal services provide advice and services for medical and surgical abortion,” she wrote in the letter (see below).
“While we support the right of individual medical practitioners to exercise a conscientious objection and, therefore, not directly take part in providing abortion or contraception services, we believe taxpayers’ money should not go towards funding religious hospitals that seek to apply an ‘institutional conscientious objection’.”
The Health and Community Wellbeing Committee noted that Calvary Hospital – which is funded by the ACT government but operated as a Catholic healthcare provider under the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary – refuses to provide the full suite of reproductive services, such as medical and surgical abortions.
Dr Doig also urged the Barr government to: insert a requirement into the territory’s Health Act 1993 to require individual conscientious objectors to provide a referral to an equivalent service; and expand exclusion zones around places that provide abortion services to 150 metres to bring the territory into alignment with all other Australian jurisdictions.
The Health and Community Wellbeing Committee reported the “distressing” evidence of a woman who said Calvary was unable to treat her despite needing urgent medical care for an incomplete miscarriage.
Chair of the committee, Greens spokesperson for education in the ACT, Johnathan Davis, told ABC Radio Canberra that there had been a “long and ongoing conversation in the community” about Calvary’s ability or willingness to provide the full suite of secular abortion and reproductive healthcare that ratepayers expected for publicly funded services.
“The committee’s exact recommendation is that the ACT government advocate to Calvary Hospital to provide full reproductive health services in accordance with human rights,” he said.
“…we have advised the government to advocate to Calvary and maintain an ongoing dialogue with Calvary, as a provider of public healthcare in this city, that our own Human Rights Commission and the committee believe the expectation of Caberrans is that healthcare be free, universal, secular and accessible.”
If you want to support our work, please make a donation or become a member.
Photo: Rachel Stephen-Smith MLA (Facebook)
Letter to Minister Stephen-Smith, 26 April 2023
Dear Minister Stephen-Smith,
I’m writing on behalf of the Rationalist Society of Australia (RSA), Australia’s oldest freethought organisation promoting evidence-based policy, reason and secularism, in response to the recommendations by the Health and Community Wellbeing Committee’s inquiry into abortion and reproductive choice in the ACT.
At the RSA, we believe women and girls should be free to make decisions about their own bodies and reproductive functions, without interference from the state or others. We welcome your government’s recent decision to provide free access to abortions as part of an effort to improve accessibility.
However, a number of barriers still remain for women wanting to access abortion services in the ACT.
Institutional conscientious objection
We are deeply concerned that publicly funded religious hospitals in the ACT, and across Australia, utilise the notion of ‘institutional conscientious objection’ to prevent lawful abortion services – and the provision of contraception – being offered in their hospitals. This is despite the community, the government, individual doctors and patients all agreeing the services should be provided.
As the Health and Community Wellbeing Committee noted, Calvary Hospital – which is funded by the ACT government and operates as a Catholic healthcare provider under the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary – refuses to provide the full suite of reproductive services, such as medical and surgical abortions.
We welcome the committee’s recommendation that the ACT government “advocate Calvary Hospital to provide full reproductive health services in accordance with human rights”. However, the ACT government should go further.
We urge your government to require that any publicly funded hospital providing gynaecological, obstetric or neonatal services provide advice and services for medical and surgical abortion.
While we support the right of individual medical practitioners to exercise a conscientious objection and, therefore, not directly take part in providing abortion or contraception services, we believe taxpayers’ money should not go towards funding religious hospitals that seek to apply an ‘institutional conscientious objection’.
By allowing Calvary Hospital to continue operating in this way, the ACT government would continue to privilege narrow religious interests above the well-being of women and the wider community. This should not be happening in 21st-century Australia.
Publicly funded hospitals operating under a religious code of ethics are serving the interests of religious leaders rather than the interests of the general public or even the people of the hospital’s faith background.
Religious clerics who claim to speak for their communities are out of touch with their own flocks on many social issues. In Religiosity in Australia (Part 1): Personal faith according to the numbers, social researcher Neil Francis shows how the views of Catholic bishops on issues such as abortion and voluntary assisted dying are at odds with the majority of Catholic Australians – and have long been so.
The 2019 Australian Election Study conducted by the Australian National University showed that, overall, 93 per cent of Australians (including 90 per cent of Catholics), support abortion being available.
And as Francis notes in Religiosity in Australia (Part 2): Religious minds, religious collectives, ‘institutional conscience’ is a confected notion. A ‘conscience’ is the interaction of the private thoughts and emotions of a natural person exercising moral judgement. Institutions are not natural persons; they are legal confections of ‘personhood’. There is no such thing as ‘institutional conscience’.
Obligation to refer
As the committee noted, the combination of the lack of abortion services and a lack of information has a “greater impact on a person’s ability to access abortion services” than would otherwise be the case.
We believe there should be full transparency. Individual health practitioners and health institutions ought to be obliged to immediately disclose any objections they may have to providing lawful health services and to refer patients to places that will provide such services.
We urge the ACT government to heed the recommendation of the committee and insert a requirement into the Health Act 1993 for individual conscientious objectors to provide a referral to an equivalent service.
Making this legislative change would bring the ACT into line with other jurisdictions that have added ‘obligation to refer’ clauses as best practice in regards to the provision of abortion services and voluntary assisted dying.
Safe zones
While all Australian jurisdictions now have an exclusion zone of 150 metres to prevent harassment and intimidation for people accessing abortion services, the ACT is the only jurisdiction that has a 50-metre exclusion zone.We support the Health and Community Wellbeing Committee’s recommendation that the ACT government expand this exclusion zone.
We urge you to act swiftly to introduce into the Health Act 1993 exclusion zones of no less than 150 metres at any point from protected facilities.
Sincerely,
Dr Meredith Doig
President, Rationalist Society of Australia