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

Firstly I would like to say that I'm stunned at Senator Faruqi's claim that her religion cares for women. This is a religion that has probably the worst history of abuses of women that I've ever heard of, including genital mutilation and stoning, and every woman is a second-class citizen.

However, I rise to speak on the MPI that abortion not be regulated by laws which penalise a woman's decision over her own body. How wrong can anyone be? Again and again we hear the claim that abortion is about a woman's rights over her own body, as though the child that is the subject of the action did not exist. This is simply an outright lie. The life of the unborn is a sacred trust, not an inconvenience to be disposed of. Today in Queensland the Labor Party is introducing new laws to regulate abortion of babies up to 22 weeks old, effectively as a routine means of contraception. At 22 weeks, a stillborn in Queensland gets a birth certificate, a death certificate and a funeral, which would indicate that the state believe this is a person. Babies much older than 22 weeks would also be able to 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, is capable of growing to an adult and living a full and normal life. James Elgin Gill was born in Ontario, barely more than 21 weeks old, and he still survived to adulthood. In most US states if a woman was 22 weeks pregnant and was run down by a drunk driver, the drunk driver would be charged with the killing of two people, not one.

No-one disputes a woman's right to decide what happens to her body, only to decide what happens to someone else. Just because an unborn cannot speak for themselves, they are still entitled to the same rights as anyone else. Even if you've conceived them, no person should be able to own another. If the plantation owner in Antebellum South having the power of life and death over his slaves was wrong, so too is a woman having the power of life and death over a child within her body. When you choose to conceive a child, you have made a choice that endures forever.

Today in Queensland the socialist Palaszczuk government is trying to force doctors to commit abortions on babies against their own conscience. Doctors who morally object to their involvement in abortion will only be legally permitted to refuse if they can find another doctor who agrees. In compelling doctors to undertake abortions, this law by the Queensland state government actually contravenes the Hippocratic oath, which includes the phrase:

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 2,050 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, but 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. I and my party condemn this immoral action by the Queensland government in the strongest terms. I pledge that if the Katter party gain the balance of power after the next Queensland election, we will insist that these heinous abortion laws are repealed. Abortion should be regulated, because the killing of the unborn is not a woman's right to choose but simply murder.