A PROMINENT pro-life doctor has warned there will be more sex-selection abortions and women would suffer serious physical and psychological harm if Queensland parliamentarians push ahead to decriminalise abortion modelled on Victoria’s legislation that allows terminations up to birth.
“It can be abortion up to birth for any reason including sex-selection abortion,” Sydney general practitioner Dr Cath Lennon said ahead of a looming abortion decriminalisation debate in the Queensland Parliament.
“We know that abortion has serious negative impacts on women physically and psychologically, especially late-term abortions.
“Abortion increases the risk of depression, anxiety, (and) drug and alcohol use in women, and late abortions are especially traumatic and have increased risks of bleeding, infection and negatively impacting fertility.”
Dr Lennon, a keynote speaker at a Cherish Life conference in Brisbane, has 20 years’ experience as a GP, a specialist on women’s health, fertility and counselling, and is the NSW president of Doctors for Life.
She said it was important for people to have an urgent voice to the Queensland Government opposing decriminalisation of abortion, which is likely to be introduced into the state parliament as early as August and likely be debated before the end of this year.
The Queensland Law Reform Commission was due to deliver a final report into new laws decriminalising abortion by June 30, with the report expected to contain recommendations for draft legislation, which Dr Lennon said was modelled on the Victorian model, and would allow late-term abortion and establish safe-access zones around clinics.
Toowoomba GP David van Gend, who spoke at the conference on June 24, said he feared young Christian men and women would shun medicine and nursing as careers if they were “required to participate in abortion or euthanasia”.
“The ethical stress that they can foresee might be so much that they would rather choose a less hostile profession,” he said.
“This year will determine whether Queensland embraces this agenda of state-sanctioned violence to babies and suppression of conscience with this expected Labor-Greens legislation.’’
Dr Lennon warned Queensland could become part of “the worldwide problem of sex-selection abortions and infanticide”.
“In countries like India and China sex-selection abortions are now banned,” she said.
“At least thirty million girls in China had died through abortion or infanticide. We know that every life is precious.
“We want the Queensland Government to focus on better health care, better support for pregnant women and families.
“We want the pregnancy support services that provide pregnancy counselling and post-abortion grief counselling to receive some funds from the Government because there is a huge number of women who face difficult pregnancies.”
