It’s the status quo that is criminal
Tomorrow, up to 120 members of Parliament will have their say on abortion. They have been freed from usually tight party lines to search their conscience for the right way forward in what is, understandably, a difficult moral journey. And it is the first step for Justice Minister Andrew Little’s legislation, which would remove the procedure from the Crimes Act and instead acknowledge abortion as a health issue.
It is right that the decision should be an individual one, made after careful thought and soul searching.
Between the extremes of this often harrowing debate are many people, women and men, who must weigh such things and more before making their own potentially traumatic and life-changing decision.
They are not the people seeking ‘‘abortion on demand’’ to support a morally lazy and permissive lifestyle, and neither are they driven to raise a child in a completely inadequate or even dangerous situation just because of particular traditional, conservative or religious ideologies.
Undoubtedly those people exist, but like the general support for decriminalisation of abortion in this country, which a Newshub Reid Research poll put at 69.9 per cent, the great majority of women considering having an abortion will have searched their own conscience beforehand. Some will continue to struggle with that long after the event.
Given that such a decision is more difficult and intensely personal than the one MPs face
tomorrow, it is wrong that it should be regarded as a criminal act, potentially heaping even more trauma on what is already a stressful situation.
The feeling of inequity, experienced by women in that situation, is magnified when one considers the way the original legislation was framed in 1977.
Like the current conversation between a doctor and a woman seeking treatment, in which they must address the legislative pretence of a risk to her mental health, abortion’s inclusion in the Crimes Act was a contrivance, political expediency in the face of strong support for the practice.
The largely male protagonists of the time appeared to sense that it was supported by most New Zealanders, that it was going to happen, and that their only recourse was to drag it out for those seeking the treatment while making their own objections, moral and otherwise, clear.
What they created was a messy regime that places a male-driven legislative distortion on what should be a conversation between a woman and her doctor, one that doesn’t seek to punish a person for a decision that is already wrought with angst.
It should be possible for people to hold strong views for and against abortion but still support its removal from the Crimes Act. As strong as those opinions can be, in this country they are not delivered at the end of a loud hailer or a fist – or worse – as has been seen elsewhere.
There should be enough compassion and common sense to recognise a woman’s decision to consider an abortion is difficult and painful, but not the workings of a mentally unstable criminal.
The great majority of women considering having an abortion will have searched their own conscience beforehand. Some will continue to struggle with that long after the event.