Tuesday, 28 May 2024

Women’s sexual and reproductive health

Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (20:41): (906) The action I am seeking from the Minister for Health is to compel all state-funded health services to provide essential reproductive and sexual health care, including contraception and abortion. Right now health practitioners, pharmacists and entire hospitals can deny a whole host of health care, including medical and surgical termination of pregnancy, if they have a conscientious objection to its provision. With respect to termination of pregnancy, there are laws that exist which place a positive obligation on objectors to provide an effective onward referral – that is, to ensure that someone seeking an abortion can get the care they need elsewhere. But too often this is not occurring, and women are being let down. I have heard it directly from community members who have had this experience. I have heard it from providers of reproductive health care, where this problem is widely acknowledged, and it has also been identified in research undertaken in Victoria.

While the government protects the rights of individual practitioners to not participate in certain aspects of their profession, people are being denied basic health care not only by the individual providers but by entire institutions. Under this Labor government, denominational hospitals continue to receive public funds to open new health services despite the fact that they refuse to provide the whole suite of women’s health care. This is essential, often critical, health care, yet women and gender-diverse people are being left to be further stigmatised, left to suffer and left unable to access care. For many women, being turned away from receiving the care that they need not only makes a stressful situation more difficult, it also delays care, adding additional complications and limiting options, especially in the case of terminations. In fact in the case of abortion, accessing care quickly can mean the difference between paying $42.50 for a medical termination or up to $8000 to access surgery in the later stages of a pregnancy.

I have said it before in this place, but I am compelled to repeat myself: equity for women, especially in health care, has been hard fought for by a legacy of courageous and persistent women, but it is clear that the fight is not over. Despite years of attempted reforms there remain many parts of the state in which women cannot be sure that they will be able to access abortion care from a public hospital, and it is about time this ended.