TWO Catholic Queensland pro-life commentators are suspicious of motives behind recent media claims that a poll published in the Medical Journal of Australia shows broad support for decriminalisation of abortion in Australia.
Queensland Bioethics Centre director Ray Campbell and Cherish Life Queensland state president Teresa Martin believe the details of the 2008 survey have been used as part of an ongoing push to liberalise this state’s abortion laws.
Ms Martin said the claims that “almost 90 per cent of Australians believe abortion to be okay up to 12 weeks were grossly misleading, given only 800 people were surveyed which is hardly 90 per cent of Australia’s population”.
Mr Campbell, a spokesman for Brisbane archdiocese on ethical issues, found it “interesting” a survey from 2008 was being “dredged up” as the court case involving a young Cairns woman charged with illegally aborting her pregnancy continues next month.
The article to which Ms Martin and Mr Campbell refer was reported in various national and local media outlets last week.
It claimed a “nationally representative poll of Australians over 18 years found 61 per cent said abortion should be lawful without question for a woman in her first trimester of pregnancy, while 26 per cent said it should be lawful depending on the reason”.
Ms Martin said she had sent a letter for publication to one of the media outlets saying a poll from the outlet’s own website in September 2009 showed a clear majority of (5392 or 68 per cent of a total 7875) do not wish abortion to be liberalised.
“And the pro-abortion e-petition on the Queensland Parliament website had a mere 2453 voting to decriminalise it,” she said.
Mr Campbell said the most in-depth study on Australian’s attitudes to abortion he had come across was Common Ground by Adelaide priest Fr John Fleming and Melbourne bioethicist Nicholas Tonti-Filippini.
Common Ground’s research grew out of a range of surveys, took two years and was done in four stages involving 1200 people.
At the time, Fr Fleming said two of the study’s key findings were validated by Newspoll as part of the research methodology.
One finding was that only 24 per cent of the survey’s focus group found abortion to be morally justifiable.
Another strong response was to the statistic that between one in four and one in three pregnancies in Australia for the past 20 years have ended in abortion.
Most respondents were dismayed and many declared this “a national disgrace”, Fr Fleming said.
