Abortion activists are pulling out one argument after another to push for the legalization of abortion in Queensland, Australia.
The Queensland bill in its current form would legalize abortions without any limits through all nine months of pregnancy. It would be a major setback for unborn babies in the Australian state, which currently prohibits abortions except in rare cases when the mother’s life or health is in danger.
In a new opinion piece for The Courier Mail, Hugh Harris, a member of the Rationalist Society of Australia, presented a series of arguments in support of the pro-abortion bill, one of the more odd being that abortions should be legal because so many unborn babies already die in miscarriages.
Harris wrote:
Although the pro-life argument is consistent in Catholic dogma, conservatives and Christians have not always opposed terminations.
When thousands of poor, US women were dying from unsafe abortions in the 1960s, due to laws identical to those in Queensland, it was the New York clergy who took up the pro-choice cause.
The 1973 book, Abortion Counselling and Social Change, describes how Jewish and Protestant religious leaders evinced a “pastoral obligation” to help women obtain safe and affordable terminations.
New York legalised abortion in 1970 and the landmark pro-choice ruling in Roe vs. Wade occurred in 1973. But more than 40 years later, Queensland still has the same draconian laws.
Follow LifeNews.com on Instagram for pro-life pictures and the latest pro-life news.
Given this disagreement on what God thinks, perhaps we can take a cue from nature. Since half of pregnancies end in spontaneous natural termination and 20 per cent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, God himself must be more permissive than Queensland law.
Abortion activists use the miscarriage argument occasionally to try to justify the deliberate killing of an innocent unborn baby in an abortion, but the argument does not work. Secular Pro-Life’s Clinton Wilcox responds this way: “… the fact that people die naturally does not justify our killing them intentionally. People die of old age, but that doesn’t justify murder. As my friend Josh Brahm likes to say, people die in natural disasters but that doesn’t mean we can nuke cities.”
Harris made other pro-abortion arguments, too, including that abortion is a common but difficult decision that women should be allowed to make for themselves. He also argued that because there is no easy or agreed point when an unborn child becomes a person, the woman’s right to control her body should always take precedence over the unborn child’s right to life.
Science proves that unborn babies are human beings from the moment of conception, however; and most countries have laws prohibiting people from killing innocent human beings. But activists like Harris pull out the legal term “personhood” (which also is used for animals and businesses) to claim that unborn babies are lesser human beings and therefore should not be protected under the law.
The debate about abortion in Queensland grew louder this spring in response to the heavily publicized story of a 12-year-old pregnant girl who had to seek a Queensland court’s permission to have an abortion. Queensland Member of Parliament Rob Pyne introduced the pro-abortion bill after the story broke, saying it was “cruel and unusual” that the 12-year-old girl had to receive permission from a court to have an abortion.
Without gestational limits, his bill would legalize abortion through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason. It is similar to what the U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade did in America in 1973, when it overturned many state pro-life laws and allowed abortion for basically any reason up until birth.
Australian state laws vary on abortion. New South Wales has similar laws to Queensland, allowing abortions only when there is a serious danger to a woman’s health, according to ABC Australia. Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory allow abortions up to nine months, with certain restrictions for late-term abortions.
