Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the two speakers before me who have put totally different points of view. Indeed, Senator Webber gave some fascinating insights into the statistical analysis, which we need to make a decision on here, but more particularly into the real purpose of reviewing this legislation, which is to remove the Minister for Health and Ageing as the arbiter of a drug which, like so many other thousands of drugs, should go through to the Therapeutic Goods Administration and then its use become a matter for doctors to determine with their clients.

It might not seem like it, but Senator McGauran and I have got some things in common. We both come from the bush and have very conservative backgrounds. I have to tell a little story that I do not find all that comfortable, I suppose. I went knocking on the door of the Liberal Party too many years ago. Senator McGauran has done that just recently. The trouble is, I was late and the door was shut on me. So Senator McGauran has had a bit of better luck there.

At the same time I was at medical school. I went on to practise medicine and if there was one thing that terrified me it was the prospect of having to deal with somebody who wanted an abortion. But I was in family medical practice and very quickly was faced with this dilemma. For a conservative young man, I can tell you it was a horrific dilemma, until I realised that it was not my right to make a decision; it was my right to give information and counsel. So when the woman involved, and very often it was a very young woman, wanted an abortion and spoke to me about that—and we are talking here about the early 1970s, and how the world has changed since then—I would ask her to come back if possible with her partner at night and spend as long as it took to explain the options of becoming a mother, adopting out the child or proceeding to the option which I was being requested to provide, which was an abortion. In those days that required a plane flight from Tasmania to Melbourne. I found it was not only my choice but my responsibility to go through all those options. It became very evident that, if the people involved wanted an abortion and I was to deny them that, they would simply go somewhere else. How I wish that the options had been wider. We are discussing here the ability of doctors to be able to prescribe a drug-induced abortion as against an instrument-delivered abortion to women and, hopefully, their partners who are faced with that dilemma. Of course it is something we should be able to counsel about as medical practitioners but it is not something we as politicians should deny as an option available to women in those circumstances.

I say this to my male colleagues in this place because I would not presume to give this counsel to women: we have to advisedly allow those who have the knowledge and are confronted with the on-the-ground circumstances, which can be extraordinarily complex and outside our own cultural experience, to have all the options available to give to patients, to people—these are human beings, of course—who are in an invidious situation and want help and the best options available. For us to continue to preclude from this option, on Senator McGauran’s own figures, something like 100,000 women each year, is just beyond the pale. How can we politicians say, ‘This option shall not be among the options available to women in that circumstance’? Of course we cannot. If there are senators listening to this who are having difficulty making up their minds, let me as a past medical practitioner ask you not to make this decision as a politician but to allow it to go to the medical practitioners of this nation and the people who come seeking their advice. I support the legislation.