The February 8, 2020, rally outside S.A. Parliament House (Photo: DM Forbes)
Here is a letter, written by veteran nurse Elinor Nan Wilson, addressed to the parliamentarians of South Australia:
Dear South Australian Parliamentarians
I understand from the Advertiser that there is a new law being drafted which, if passed, will allow abortions to be performed up until full term of pregnancy in South Australia.
I have been a nurse for almost 50 years, and a midwife/child-and-family nurse for 45 of those. I trained at the Queen Victoria Hospital in 1975 and have been working in midwifery and child and family health in three states ever since. Having spent most of my career trying to help families deliver their children safely and seeing how difficult it is for some people to become pregnant and then carry to full term, I cannot understand why we would extend the age for aborting other pregnancies. Surely 28 weeks, which the law has allowed in SA since 1969, is long enough to determine whether there are abnormalities, or whether the pregnancy is unwanted for any other reason?
I understand from the Advertiser that there is a new law being drafted which, if passed, will allow abortions to be performed up until full term of pregnancy in South Australia.
I have been a nurse for almost 50 years, and a midwife/child-and-family nurse for 45 of those. I trained at the Queen Victoria Hospital in 1975 and have been working in midwifery and child and family health in three states ever since. Having spent most of my career trying to help families deliver their children safely and seeing how difficult it is for some people to become pregnant and then carry to full term, I cannot understand why we would extend the age for aborting other pregnancies. Surely 28 weeks, which the law has allowed in SA since 1969, is long enough to determine whether there are abnormalities, or whether the pregnancy is unwanted for any other reason?
I understand that there have been at least 4,000 abortions performed in SA during the last 12 months and only one adoption! Studies have shown that between 20 and 80 per cent of women have psychological problems after an abortion, so if we take a conservative estimate of 25%, that means over 1,000 women in SA now have developed these problems during the last 12 months. What a strain that must be on the already stretched Mental Health facilities! I have also spent a lot of time working with women who have Post-natal depression, and abortion is one of the risk factors for developing this condition. Surely some of the counselling services for these problems would be better allocated to pre-abortion education and alternative choice provision (i.e. prevention rather than cure).
Some believe that the right of the woman to do what she likes with her own body is the main factor here, but I ask what about the rights of the unborn child, who is a person but is unable to exercise their choice until they are born alive? What happens if the baby is born alive, despite the efforts of the accoucheur to kill it before delivery? If a mother kills her baby for any reason after it is born alive, she would be charged with manslaughter at the least. What will pushing a baby about to be born back into the womb – to kill it – do to the woman's ability to have more healthy pregnancies later on? I am sure that the medical and nursing fraternity, in the main, will not appreciate having to perform the acts necessitated by such a change in the law.
I hope that you as our elected representatives will take these factors into consideration when it comes time to make your conscience vote, and I am asking you to vote against the change.
Yours sincerely,
Elinor Nan Wilson
