Abortion law needs changing
Abortion has been in the politically too-hard basket for 40 years. Now it will come back into contention as Labour leader Jacinda Ardern, who promised a reform of the abortion law, is prime minister.
This will have the advantage of dragging a bad law into the sunlight. The Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act of 1977 is a theoretically restrictive one. It allows abortions if the pregnancy is a risk to the physical or mental health of the mother and if two certifying consultants agree.
In practice, abortion is fairly freely available, but this relative freedom is based on dishonesty. Women and doctors must, in essence, regularly agree to the fiction that the mother’s mental or physical health really is at risk. Last year there were 12,800 abortions in New Zealand. Though this is less than the year before – the number of abortions has been declining for years – it would still have horrified the conservative architects of the 1977 law.
Ardern would remove the law from the Crimes Act and leave the decision up to the woman. This would take the fiction out of the law and put the decision where it should be, with the woman herself.
Whether this would entirely decriminalise abortion, however, is not so clear. Ardern said in September, for instance, that she did not support abortion on demand up till birth. She was not proposing to change the time limit already set out in law, which is 20 weeks. Presumably any abortion which occurred later than this would remain illegal.
Most politicians have been happy to leave this dishonest law on the books. Abortion arouses strong emotions and political debates about it are hard to control, even in a relatively secular state like New Zealand’s. What’s more, the debate does not fall easily along party lines.
Parties have traditionally allowed a conscience vote on these deeply personal issues, because they know that trying to whip their MPs into line would probably be futile. So there is no obvious party advantage in abortion law reform. Far better, the politicians have apparently decided, to let sleeping dogs lie.
But this is not a very good way of doing politics or law reform, although its pragmatic appeal is obvious.
Democracy should be robust enough to face the truth about the actual effect of the law and try to resolve the problem. Ardern’s decision to raise the issue has the merit of requiring the country to face up to the issue.
Her proposal, however, will have to be much more detailed before a proper debate can take place. The idea of keeping the 20-week time limit, for instance, is reasonable. Abortions should always be done as soon as possible. Late-term abortions horrify even the staunchest liberals.
How the decision to have an abortion would be made, for example, and whether ‘‘informed consent’’ (after counselling) might be required, remain unclear. There will be a lot of argument, not only about the details and the process but on much more fundamental issues. Some people will violently oppose any law change.
But this difficult debate can’t be avoided.
We cannot avoid this difficult debate.