Media Statement by Reason Party Leader Fiona Patten MP
I am moving legislation to protect and extend fundamental human rights currently being denied in public hospitals. The health system is mistreating those who fund it.
Publicly funded hospitals and other health institutions have no right to refuse these legally enshrined rights that a woman has control over her body and reproductive health and that some terminally ill people have access to assisted dying.
The Bill protects abortion rights and extend abortions and family planning services. It ensures end-of-life rights.
Religion is a blessing to many, but imposed religious faith has no place in the public health system.
My bill will:
- protect abortion rights and extend abortion and family planning services
- ensure end-of-life rights.
- extend access to abortion and contraception across all hospitals that get taxpayers’ money.
- have zero impact on the rights of individual medicos to refuse certain services on the basis of personal religious conviction or conscientious objection.
It does not undermine any rights of people within the private health system, where people have choice over service providers, some of whom receive no money from the public treasury.
On the contrary, it protects medicos’ rights from institutional edict – a hospital will not be able to prevent a doctor from performing legal procedures.
It protects and insists upon the rights of patients in the public health system. They should not have to depend on their postcode for access to the full panoply of public health services.
It reflects my focus on women’s health, which led to safe access zones to private abortion clinics. This bill is in no small part about progressing from safe access to more access.
It buttresses my longstanding call for nurses and midwives to be permitted to perform abortions.
It fits, too, with my initiative, embraced by the Victorian and Federal governments to create ground-breaking research and treatment of the crippling hidden disease of endometriosis and other chronic pelvic pain.
Religion is a blessing to many amid the mysteries and vagaries of existence, but imposed religious faith has no place in the public health system.
Institutions, by legal definition, have no conscience, therefore cannot argue conscientious objection to abortion and assisted dying. The reliance of some institutions on the false construct of institutional conscientious objection has no rational, legal, or moral basis.
Extra quotes:
We’ve made progress but much more change is need. It is disappointing Prime Minister Antony Albanese deflected calls only last week for increased access to abortion and contraception by saying it’s a matter for the states.
This is a man who only recently decried the appalling decision of the US Supreme Court – overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision that established a constitutional right to abortion – to return abortion law to state governments, many of which immediately stamped on women’s rights.
Well, my legislation is a state response. It’s based on first principles and can and should be supported across the political spectrum.
Women are half the population, but women’s health affects us all. And all of us are going to die, in circumstances none can know in advance. This is about every human, and some stuff can be readily remedied.
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