Abortion The True Statistics
Uploaded by tori on Aug 12, 2005
91 percent of Australian respondents said there were too many abortions.
The Health Minister Tony Abbott has claimed that heath insurance statistics show there are 100,000 abortions performed in Australia each year- about one for every three live births. But this figure is misleading as it includes tens of thousands of dilatation and curettage procedures, commonly known as D and C, carried out after women spontaneously abort- that is miscarry.
Obstetricians say the real abortion figure could be as low as 25,000. This is because the same Medicare item number is used for all abortions and medical procedures undertaken as a result of miscarriage or foetal death.
As the uncertainty about matter as fundamental as whether termination rates have risen or fallen in the past decade suggests the abortion debate is factually undernourished.
There are those who say we need to normalise the level of abortion in Australia but what needs to be normalised is the distribution of non-corrupted statistics.
Late-term abortions represent less than one percent of all terminations, according to the Health Department, The majority of these are performed either because the mothers life is at risk or the baby is likely to be severely impaired- or still born. A number of late-term abortions occur after women have an amniocentesis, which is usually performed at 16-20 weeks.
In Abbott’s tidy world of wishful thinking, contraception works perfectly. That way, those who fail to use it can be written off as reckless, narcissistic or plain stupid.
Suzanne Dvorsk, managing director of reproductive healthcare provider Marie Stopes international states “Politicians should ensure that women have access to unbiased information, support and the highest medical care when making this decision”
In February of this year it was revealed that right-to-life pregnancy counselling services run by the Catholic Church received nearly $1 million in federal funding this year – as apposed, for example, to the secular immigrant women’s health counselling service who receive an eighth of that sum.
Some agencies provide information that is misleading. Women are told often that abortion causes breast cancer, where there is absolutely no evidence of that.
The commonwealth government needs to increase resources into improving sex education for teens, collecting move accurate abortion statistics, increasing access to sexual health services and addressing the issue of contraceptive failure.
In Victoria, the crimes act prohibits any person from wilfully destroying a child, who otherwise be born alive, of a woman who is greater than 28 weeks pregnant.
Common...