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I was present in New South Wales Parliament last Wednesday night to watch the beginning of the debate on the Greens abortion bill.

It’s always sad for me to hear women stand up in parliament and advocate in favour of abortion because it is just so antithetical to the role of women as mothers and nurturers of life, and so I found listening to Penny Sharpe, Rose Jackson and Abigail Boyd talking about abortion until birth as something that empowers women quite disappointing.

The bill, each of them asserted, was not about the legality of abortion but its availability. They wanted us to know it was about ensuring equal access, about — as Boyd put it — uniting regional and rural women with their city peers.

It was not until the following day that the irony of the appeal to equitable access would become clear.

Lack of Rural Maternity Care

Just a few hours after the debate adjourned, a report on the delivery of health services and specialist care in remote, rural and regional NSW was tabled in NSW Parliament.

The committee that drafted the report referred to a 2022 parliamentary report that “identified that women in remote, rural and regional NSW did not have access to the same standard of maternity care that was available to women in metropolitan areas” and noted that there were recommendations for this to be improved.

The committee expressed concern that in the latest round of hearings, despite NSW Health asserting that all the recommendations had been implemented, nothing much had changed on the ground.

“We found that hospital birthing services continue to close and there is little evidence of plans to re-establish rural and regional birthing units. Stakeholders also noted that there are persistent and unresolved workforce challenges, including challenges with attracting and retaining obstetric trainees and midwives.”

The committee went on to say that in addition to the closures, “obstetric services at Bathurst, Lithgow, Kempsey and Cootamundra are on the brink of closing down.” It heard evidence that of the 150-200 annual births in the regional NSW of Tumut, only 30-40 of those babies were delivered locally. In other words, 80 per cent of women who need maternity care need to travel in order to obtain it.

But is that something the so-called pro-choice advocates for equal access to reproductive health care mentioned in their speeches on Wednesday night?

Of course not.

Deadly Irony

They waxed lyrical about the need for equal access, and if you didn’t know the context, what they said could easily have been applied to the crisis in maternity care.

Rose Jackson said, “There are barriers that presently exist, particularly for rural and regional women and particularly for poor women, and that unequal access to health care is problematic and should be rectified where possible.”

“It is poor women and women who live a long way from health services that bills like this target, and that is why it has my support,” she continued.

I haven’t heard her advocating for the rectification of unequal access to maternity care, but to paraphrase the great George Orwell, perhaps some health services are more equal than others.

Abigail Boyd said:

“If you are living somewhere in the middle of, say, central New South Wales and you have to travel to a city in order to get the health care that you require, you may have to put your children into some sort of babysitting arrangement and you may have to fly or drive or whatever it is and then stay over at a place. There is a huge financial cost involved for something that might be free to somebody who lives in a city.”

She could have easily been speaking about mothers who want to have children, rather than abort them, but she wasn’t.

“Ultimately, it comes down to equity,” she said. “Although it is great for wealthy women who are living in areas where reproductive health care is readily accessible, that is simply not the case for people living in regional areas.”

If the Greens sought to introduce a bill that would seek to make maternity care more accessible in the regions, then perhaps we could take these comments seriously. But while they continue to use “reproductive health care” as synonymous with “abortion”, it’s hard to see their rhetoric as anything except pro-abortion ideology dressed up as a call for equality.

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Republished with thanks to The Catholic Weekly. Image courtesy of Adobe.