RU486 ruling
By Kath Gelber
The misnamed Right to Life Association lost another battle last week when its court challenge to Australia's participation in World Health Organisation (WHO) trials of the so-called "abortion pill", RU486, was rejected.
The anti-choicers had attempted to halt the trials on the legal basis that women's interests would be "adversely affected". The court decision had nothing to do with protecting women's rights or women's right to safe abortion, but was simply based on legal principle. The court held that the association could not claim to be an "aggrieved person" under the terms of reference of its claim. Being a "busybody" or "intermediary" wasn't enough.
Was this, then, the right decision for the wrong reasons? When the Right to Lifers originally wrote to the Health Department to complain about the trials, the basis for their opposition was that they believed there was "a real danger that some or all of the tests would involve illegal abortions".
In other words, they were referring to the tenuous legal circumstances under which women in NSW and Victoria (the two states participating in the WHO trials) can access abortions legally. In both states, access to legal abortion rests on common law interpretations which allow women to have abortions who are seen to be at risk to their mental or physical health from continuation of an unwanted pregnancy.
The conducting of the trials in Australia has raised public debate about these legal limitations on abortion access. Claims and counter-claims have run amok; confusion reigns about what is or isn't legal. What the whole debate has highlighted is that the ultimate decision on whether a woman has access to abortion still rests with a judge, a court, a psychiatrist or a doctor — not with the woman concerned.
World trials of RU486, conducted in strictly supervised and controlled conditions, and with the women involved in the trials being fully informed of all possible intended and unintended side effects and consequences, provide the possibility for the safety and efficacy of a new abortion procedure to be assessed.
The two crucial issues still remain: increasing our knowledge about how to safely perform various abortion procedures and increasing legal access to safe abortion on demand for all women.