SYDNEY, Australia — Australia’s most populous state decriminalized abortion on Thursday, becoming the last jurisdiction in the country to revise blanket penalties enacted decades ago.
The measure in New South Wales, a state of more than seven million people that includes Sydney, overturned a 119-year-old law that made it a criminal offense to procure or administer an abortion.
Under the new legislation, women can seek termination of a pregnancy in the first 22 weeks. After that, they can receive an abortion if two doctors sign off.
Abortion is widely available in most of the West, with one of the last holdouts, Ireland, approving it last year, though several American states have passed restrictive laws in recent years, many of them challenged in the courts.
“I am sorry it has taken so long,” Alex Greenwich, an independent New South Wales lawmaker who introduced the bill’s first iteration, said in a statement. The final bill passed after days of debate and more than 100 amendments.
In practice, abortion has generally been available to women in New South Wales, though doctors have been required to attest that the pregnancy posed a mental or physical risk to the woman’s health. Doctors could also consider social and economic factors in some cases.
Prosecutions of women undergoing the procedure have been rare in the state. Since 1994, only a dozen people have been prosecuted under the Crimes Act of 1900, with most cases involving the actions of doctors. In 2017, a woman was convicted of taking abortion drugs while 28 weeks pregnant.
The procedure is legal in other Australian states, though there are varying restrictions on time frames and approval processes. It remains part of the criminal code in the state of South Australia, where a campaign to remove it is underway, though the procedure is generally available there for women in the first 23 weeks of pregnancy.
The move in New South Wales was “a massive step forward for women and other pregnant people,” Penny Sharpe, a key lawmaker behind the bill, wrote on Twitter. “Not a minute too soon.”
It was also welcomed by abortion rights advocates and doctors. The state branch of the Australian Medical Association supported decriminalizing abortion, saying the procedure should be “free of stigma.”
But many groups, including religious organizations, opposed the legislation. The Roman Catholic archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, said it was a “dark day” for the state and called it “a defeat for humanity.”
It is unclear how many abortions are performed each year in Australia, which has a population of about 25 million people.
Government figures from 2005 estimated that about 80,000 women a year obtained the procedure, but with the rising use of long-term contraceptives, that number has probably dropped closer to 60,000 in recent years, according to a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Source : Nytimes
