Controversial pill RU486, used to induce medical abortions, has been added to the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme—broadening women’s choices by reducing the price from $800 to a mere $12 for Concession card holders.
It’s news that will bring relief to women who value the right to choose, and will irrevocably enrage the loons who endorse chastity belts and believe wombs are precious public property: not to be meddled with. Tony Abbott, overly protective father of his daughters’ virginities and constant cheerleader of the fetus, failed in his attempt to ban RU486 when he was Health Minister under former Prime Minister John Howard.
A post on his blog from 2004 infamously touted Abbott’s views of abortion as “the easy way out”, because Tony Abbott has definitely been put in that situation, and can definitely relate to, nay dictate, you pregnant mothers. So let the man speak.
Abbott started off by saying in a bout of philosophical musing, “The problem with the Australian practice of abortion is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience. Aborting a first trimester fetus is not morally identical to deliberately killing a living human being, but it’s not just removing a wart or a cyst either.” Good thing he’s got a handling on the procedure, then.
He furthered his patriarchal standpoint by saying, and it makes me cringe, “Even those who think that abortion is a woman’s right…” and discourages sexual activity among teens (because if you have sex, you WILL get pregnant. And DIE) by invoking an argument that celebrates the glamour of celibacy: “If half the effort were put into discouraging teenage promiscuity as goes into preventing teenage speeding, there might be fewer abortions, fewer traumatised young women and fewer dysfunctional families.”
RU486 will benefit rural patients who have limited accessibility to a clinical abortion, and will allow those who simply don’t want to be hassled by the assholes that picket abortion clinics to undergo the procedure in the safety of their own home. Health Minister Tanya Pilbersek, who announced the amendments to the PBS, has dismissed the concerns flooding from Westboro-esque anti-abortion naysayers, by stating,”It doesn’t change any legal position around abortion and it doesn’t
change the number of women who are likely to terminate a pregnancy.” Rather, today celebrates an unmistakably simple concept, so often wrought by those that think they know better. The concept of choice.
Via ABC News.
