Australian Faces Up To Seven Years for Abortion

[ccharles000]

Tegan Simone Leach, a nineteen-year-old Australian woman, faces up to seven years in prison for allegedly facilitating her own abortion. Abortion is criminalized in the Australian state of Queensland, where Leach resides, with an exception only to save the life or health of the mother.

Leach reportedly used a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, which can be used to induce abortion but is typically used to treat gastric ulcers, to terminate her pregnancy, according to News Australia. The drugs were imported from the Ukraine.

Leach's 21 year old partner, Sergie Brennan, is being charged with supplying drugs to facilitate an abortion and faces up to three years in prison if convicted. Brennan told the Cairns Post, "I want to give my kid the best when I have a kid but at the moment I don't feel I can give them the best and that's the way she feels too."

Leach is the first woman in 50 years to be brought to trial regarding abortion in Queensland, despite the fact that 14,000 abortions are performed there annually, according to the Children By Choice Campaign. Queensland's Premier, Anna Bligh told the Australian. "I can understand that many people will be concerned about the circumstances of this young woman. It is, I think, a very tragic case...I'm not going to comment about the law while it's still being judged in the courts."

http://feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=11942

[parasim]

1. There's many justifications for having an abortion...

But a simple cop-out to avoid parenthood is not one of them for me personally.

Hey, but to each his own.

[armyowalgreens]

3. The point is that you don't need an excuse to get an abortion. It's a right.

[Ken Burch]

2. Weirdly enough, Queensland has a Labor government

You'd think that would mean it's policies would be pro-choice.

[cali]

6. I wouldn't necessarily. Look at Nicaragua

[Ken Burch]

14. Were the Sandinistas ALWAYS antichoice, though?

I thought that was a compromise they made in trying to get the Catholic hirearchy to stop working all out to keep Daniel Ortega from returning to office. Am I wrong about that?

[MrModerate]

4. Australian law and practice, although fairly liberal by American wingnut standards . . .

has some pockets of Victorian (and I don't mean the State of Victoria) weirdness. This is one of them.

I think at bottom the legal establishment and pro-choice supporters are forcing this case through the courts to highlight the law's absurdity, with the ultimate aim of getting the law invalided (more like other Australian States). That's my theory, anyway. Pretty hard on the young couple, though, and I haven't read anything that suggests they're getting support from anyone outside their families during their ordeal.

Anna Bligh, the Labor Prime Minister of Queensland, is something of a moral coward and doesn't want to stir up the religious nuts who are fairly quiescent in Oz. They are, happily not very numerous and not nearly so nutty as American christianists, but politicians here are still loath to set them off.

[ccharles000]

5. ...

interesting

[Ken Burch]

9. The premier's last name is Bligh...I gotta ask...

any relation to THIS guy?

[starroute]

12. Actually, yes

A minute's googling turns up this:

http://www.abc.net.au/queensland/conversations/stories/s2110472.htm?queensland

Born in Warwick in 1960, Anna Bligh and her family then moved to the Gold Coast where she attended Miami State High School. She then studied a Bachelor of Arts in social sciences at the University of Queensland. Anna was elected to parliament in 1995 and in 1998 became the minister for Families, Youth and Community Care and Disability Services. She was promoted to deputy premier in 2005 and then in 2007, with Peter Beattie's retirement, Anna became the first female Premier of Queensland. A local newspaper has also managed to trace Anna's family back to Captain Bligh.

[MrModerate]

18. Charles Laughton? No. But William Bligh, you betcha.

Great-great-great-great-granddaughter.

[Violet_Crumble]

11. I think yr theory might be right, but this case is also different because....

...unlike the thousands of other abortions that happen in QLD each year, this one is a case where it was a DYI abortion and I haven't read that there was any medical supervision at all. I wish there were laws against being utterly stupid, coz I don't understand why anyone would import drugs from the Ukraine to terminate their own pregnancy when all they needed to do was go see a doctor...

[Ken Burch]

13. Point of information:

Has the young woman said why she didn't just travel to an Australian state in which abortion IS legal?

[KamaAina]

15. Cairns is in far northern Queensland, up by the Great Barrier Reef

hundreds of miles (or kilometers) from the New South Wales border.

[Ken Burch]

16. Ok. That clarifies the picture further. Thanks.

n/t.

[A HERETIC I AM]

22. Just for a little more clarification.....

The distance from Cairns to the New South Wales state line is about the distance from Boston to Atlanta. Roughly 900 miles.

[Ken Burch]

23. So it's not just a question of buying a bus ticket

or, as is the case in Ireland, just a short ferryboat ride to a prochoice locale.

It's useful to establish these facts to help non-Australians understand the situation.

[Violet_Crumble]

25. Ken, there's no need to travel. There's plenty of clinics in QLD...

http://www.childrenbychoice.org.au/nwww/clinicqld.htm

Cairns isn't some remote frontier town, and it is possible to get an abortion there. Also, if someone can afford to buy drugs online from the Ukraine, they can sure as hell afford a bus ticket to an even bigger city than Cairns if they want a bigger choice of abortion providers. Sorry, but there's really no excuse for this woman's stupidity. And that's coming from an Australian who has been in the position of having to travel to Sydney coz there were no doctors who performed abortions in my city back in the early 1990's...

[MrModerate]

31. Well, there's "available" and "available" . . . I noticed that the listing for Cairns . . .

Didn't list any locations. And according to the paper (I saw it in the Courier-Mail, so it has to be true) Cairns doctors are -- in general -- reluctant to perform abortions generally and prohibited by law if the mother's life is not demonstrably in danger.

It has little to do with Cairns' lack of remoteness and a lot to do with Queensland's archaic laws. Admittedly, I've only been here for a few years, but I can tell a pocket of Victorianism when I run across it, and the current debate in Brisbane over indemnifying doctors for performing abortions just highlights the fact.

As "excuse for stupidity," I'd not be so harsh. More like inexperience, naivete, shame, and fear.

[MrModerate]

19. Young and foolish seem to go together (along with unplanned pregnancy) . . .

But they also tell me that doctors in Cairns (which I still can't pronounce properly after two years here) are so skittish about performing abortions that it's actually very difficult to obtain one.

But Ukranian abortifacient drugs? No thank you.

[Violet_Crumble]

26. That probably explains the entry for Cairns in the list of QLD clinics I just posted...

http://www.childrenbychoice.org.au/nwww/clinicqld.htm

I don't understand why they'd be skittish, but I've seen stranger things....

Heh, how do you go pronouncing Melbourne or Canberra? Being a Canberran, I still can't help snickering when I hear American tourists mangling Canberra :)

[MrModerate]

29. I do better with . . .

MELb'rn and CAn-b'ra, but Cas defeats me.

[GodlyDemocrat]

21. Fairly liberal? Newsflash: Abortion is a constitutionally protected right here for EVERY state

[Ken Burch]

24. Which hardly explains why this young woman was forced to self-induce

n/t.

[Violet_Crumble]

27. She wasn't forced to self-induce...

I haven't read anything yet that says that she was forced to...

[Ken Burch]

28. By "forced", I meant left with no alternative due to lack of abortion services in the state

Not that anybody MADE her do that.

My post was in response to the poster that asserted that abortion was legal in ALL Australian states.

[MrModerate]

30. Can't tell what you're commenting on. And what do you mean by "Here?"

Please explain.

[aquart]

7. Prurient patriarchy. Ain't it grand?

[Blue_Tires]

8. ttt

[ccharles000]

10. kick

[girl gone mad]

17. Locking her up during her peak fertility years..

doesn't seem very "pro-life" to me!

[Ken Burch]

20. Then again, in our own Incest and Diaper Belt

(I.E., the South)you still get a lot of "pro-life" politicians who favor forced sterilization of the poor. Especially the poor who, shall we say, are of a certain tint.