Australia resumes aid funding for abortion
Updated
After a sensitive, six-month long internal debate, Australia's government is to resume the use of aid funding for abortion services.
Most of Australia's aid community is celebrating the effective reversal of a 12-year long ban, which Canberra and family planning advocates say has cost lives and seriously eroded Australia's child and maternal health and family planning services.
Australia's Foreign minister Stephen Smith made the decision, though his boss, the country's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, opposes it.
Presenter: Linda Mottram
Speakers: Jane Singleton, chief executive officer, Australian Reproductive Health Alliance; Bob McMullan, Australia's Parliamentary Secretary for Development Assistance; Ary Laufer, executive officer, Marie Stopes International Australia
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MOTTRAM: It's estimated that of the 42-Million abortions performed around the world each year, almost half are medically unsafe. Around 68-thousand women die annually, Australian officials say, as a result of those risky terminations, some 220-thousand children lose their mothers this way. The policy change announced by the Australian government overturns a 12 year old ban, imposed under the previous conservative government, which had stopped the use of any Australian overseas development funding for activities involving abortion.
A vocal Australian campaigner for the change is Jane Singleton, chief executive officer of the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance. She spoke while en route to Papua New Guinea, where last year she said maternal death doubled.
SINGLETON: It will have huge impacts on hundreds of thousands of women and their families who want to make choices about the numbers of children they have and the spacing and it will also free up funds for family planning generally. Because whilst these guidelines have been in place, Australian government funding for family planning generally, the whole range of family planning, diminished by 84 per cent.
MOTTRAM: Australia's parliamentary secretary for development assistance, Bob McMullan has long been known for his pro-choice stance. Speaking from Europe, Mr McMullan welcomed the overturning of the ban, agreeing that the impact on women and families had been serious and that aid groups had felt heavily constrained.
McMULLAN: The NGO's have reported to me that they not only were constrained by the letter of the guidelines but they felt that they couldn't even provide other family planning services that might have been within the guidelines because of the risk of breaching the guidelines unwittingly.
MOTTRAM: In the announcement the minister has said that Australia will provide additional funding of up to 15-million dollars for family planning and reproductive health activities, what will be the impact of that spending do you think?
McMULLAN: The cumulative effect of other things we are doing about maternal health, this initiative and the change of the guidelines will mean that we will start to make an impact on the millenium development goal about reducing maternal mortality. A woman is 300 times more likely to die in childbirth in a developing country than in Australia, it is the greatest gap in health services between the developed and developing world and we need to do everything we can to give women in the developing countries a chance of having their children safely and living a decent life.
MOTTRAM: And of all the millenium development goals, that particular one is furthest from being achieved.
Australian aid groups will still need to operate within the laws of individual nations. So in countries where abortion is legal, like Vietnam, aid groups funded by the Australian government will quickly be able to begin providing safe abortion, abortion advice and training. But in Papua New Guinea, for example, service provision is more complex because abortion is allowed only where two doctors determine a woman's life or mental state is threatened by a pregnancy. Ary Laufer is executive officer of reproductive health organisation Marie Stopes International Australia. He says his organisation still hopes to have a widened role in a country like P-N-G.
LAUFER: What I would hope is that we would be able to provide training for doctors throughout the country to determine what is a life-threatening situation for women, particularly if they are presenting themselves with an unwanted pregnancy and it may affect mentally or physically the woman who's presenting.
MOTTRAM: What has also become clear after this announcement is that Australia's Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is opposed to using aid for abortion services. He said so in the meeting of his party in Canberra that learned of the Foreign minister's decision. Mr Rudd though has not sought to impose his view.
Bob McMullan says its an issue on which there are strong views passionately held.
McMULLAN: But I think there is an appreciation that its been a careful considered process and everybody's been heard and that always makes people more likely to accept a decision.
MOTTRAM: It remains to be seen though if that's the view of one particular politician, named Steve Fielding, who's passionately anti-abortion and who holds a potential casting vote in the Australian Parliament's delicately balanced upper house. There'll be no vote on the abortion aid decision. But there'll be lots of other votes on equally vital matters.
