Saturday, July 07, 2007

supervising abortion laws


The Herald has an article on abortion. Our abortion laws haven't been administered, as there is nobody on the Abortion Supervisory Committee to issue licences to doctors and facilities. In effect, our Government is the Abortion Supervisory committee,but are not supervising abortion laws.

Therefore those hospitals and other facilities that have applied to renew their licences haven't had them renewed - but they are still doing abortions. Sure, Parliament recently appointed three on the committee but these members haven't yet been officially appointed by the Governor General so they can't yet look at the licence reapplications or do monitoring visits to ensure that abortion facilities are breaking the law in a consistent manner. Which they are. Within a month, each practitioner who performs an abortion has to forward documentation of that abortion to the committee within a month. Who administers this - and are records being forwarded?

But when this committee is officially appointed, it has no authority to do anything about our abortion laws, due to a 1982 Court of Appeal decision stated that they committee could not interfere with doctors' individual clinical decisions. And according to our legislation it is the doctor who is responsible for ensuring abortions are legal, not the Abortion Supervisory Committee.

So despite our law stating that this committee has to ensure that this law is adhered to in practice, it is unable to do so if doctors don't, which is why we have abortion on demand in this country. The committee is powerless to do anything about the both the abortion rate and how laws are upheld and the Government is too afraid to do a review of our laws - even when told by the committee that 98 percent of abortions are conducted on "pseudo-legal grounds".

Instead all the committee does is ensure that there is a consistency in the application of the law - irregardless if that means that the law is consistently broken.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dave
Wonder if David Cunliffe knows that no one notices if you consistently breaks laws.
MikeNZ

Anonymous said...

Prosecute the bastards!