Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

Even on the ‘up to’ figure which the minister interjects that he uses, he would know from departmental advice he has received that the department’s best estimate is somewhere between 73,000 and the 91,000 he mentions from the table. This is not a debate where someone should round up. Statistics can be so important. This is a debate where accuracy should be striven for. The minister is in a better position to be accurate, given the range of expert departmental advice available to him.

It is not a debate in which one should use terminology like ‘an epidemic of abortions’, ‘backyard miscarriages’ and ‘pop and forget pill’. I do not think any of those terms have any place in this debate. There is not one woman in this country who would view the decision to have an abortion as being a matter of taking a ‘pop and forget pill’. I would certainly want to believe that there is not one doctor in this country who would prescribe RU486 and then let a woman go into dangerous circumstances. If there are large numbers of such unscrupulous doctors in this country, then shouldn’t we be desperately worried and acting today on what they may be doing with dangerous pain-killing medication, dangerous cancer medication and the like? We can overwhelmingly trust our medical professionals because overwhelmingly they have proven they should be trusted. That is why the argument about backyard miscarriages should not be entered into.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in this debate. As I have made clear, I will certainly be supporting the legislation. The senators who are in the gallery here today are certainly in a position to tell us that senators managed to conduct this debate in a very civilised way overall and had an exchange of views about this very important issue. I look forward to a debate in this House in that spirit.

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