As pro-life campaigner Margaret Tighe put it when news of the Croydon case broke last week, ”psychosocial reasons are just an excuse”.

But are they? In Victoria, the reasons women seek abortions after 24 weeks include the women not being a woman at all but a girl aged 11 to 15. They include the fact that the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. Psychosocial indicators take in women who are victims of domestic violence and women with intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions such as paranoid schizophrenia and suicidal depression. Heroin and alcohol addiction also fall under the psychosocial heading, as do cases of women from religious migrant families that might, upon learning of the pregnancy, set them alight. Women who had planned to continue the pregnancy until they learnt an existing child or their husband had cancer fell into this category, as do women who have been delayed by medical incompetence (like failures to diagnose pregnancy) or obstructed by ignorant or pro-life doctors who wrongly advise that abortion is illegal or that they are too far gone.

8 months ago  /  17 notes  /  Source: theage.com.au