Fraser Anning (Queensland, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today the Queensland Labor government introduced new laws to legalise the abortion of babies up to 22 weeks old, effectively as a routine means of contraception. Babies much older than 22 weeks can also be terminated, with medical support. Let us be clear: what is being legislated here is nothing less than state-sanctioned murder. A baby at 22 weeks is a fully formed person and, although premature, capable of growing to an adult and living a full and normal life. James Elgin Gill was born in Ontario when he was barely more than 21 weeks old and still survives today. In most US states, if a woman who is 22 weeks pregnant is run down by a drunk driver, the driver will be charged with killing two people, not one.

In defence of these laws, some may say, 'It's a woman's right to decide what happens to her own body.' But this is disingenuous. No-one disputes a woman's right to decide what happens to her; only her right to decide what happens to someone else. Just because the unborn cannot speak for themselves doesn't mean they aren't still entitled to the same rights as anyone else. Even if you have conceived them, no person should be able to own another. If it was wrong for a plantation owner in the antebellum south to have the power of life and death over his slaves, so too is it wrong for a woman to have the power of life and death over the child within her. Life once granted by God may only be taken by God.

This appalling law by the Queensland government also actually forces doctors to act against their own conscience. Doctors who morally object to their involvement in abortion will be legally permitted to refuse only if they can find another doctor who agrees. A human being asked to sever a baby's spine and then crush its head is the most barbaric murder imaginable. In compelling doctors to undertake abortions, this law by the Queensland state government actually contravenes the Hippocratic oath, which includes the words:

I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art.

Dating back 2,500 years, the earliest known expression of medical ethics, the Hippocratic oath has survived the millennia only to be extinguished by the laws of the Palaszczuk government.

Why murder of the innocent is being legalised in Queensland is beyond my understanding. I can only conclude that the state's new abortion laws are a direct result of the influence of the hard left on the current Palaszczuk regime. These laws are an affront to free speech, an affront to the medical profession and an affront to the sanctity of life. I, and my party, condemn this immoral action by the Queensland government in the strongest terms. I pledge that if Katter's Australian Party gains the balance of power after the next Queensland election we'll insist that these heinous abortion laws be repealed.