Former LNP leader Tim Nicholls and Steve Minnikin say they will vote for government’s bill
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| The Queensland bill decriminalising abortion appears to have enough support after two Liberal National party MPs indicated they would support it |
Queensland has moved another step closer to legalising abortion, after two Liberal National party MPs indicated they would vote for the government’s proposed bill.
The former opposition leader Tim Nicholls, who represents Clayfield in inner Brisbane, became the second LNP member to definitively break ranks.
Nicholls said the intent of the 1899 criminal legislation, which treats abortion as an offence against morality, had been intended to treat women as “unfit to make their own decisions”.
“The current law is a bad law,” Nicholls said.
Earlier, Steve Minnikin, the LNP member for Chatsworth, said he would exercise his conscience vote in favour of the proposed laws.
Minnikin spoke about his liberal values, his belief in the separation of church and state “and the fundamental rights of women”.
“If I had a daughter I would want her to have the same chances in life that my two sons currently have,” Minnikin said. “I am not pro-abortion. I am pro-choice, pro-autonomy, pro-respect.
“No one should be able to endure a pregnancy they do not want when there are safe, medical options available ... This should be a health issue, not a criminal issue”
Nicholls, Minnikin, the Greens MP Michael Berkman and independent Sandy Bolton will each support the new laws, which will remove abortion from the 1899 criminal code. Termination would be legalised for up to 22 weeks gestation, and thereafter with the permission of two doctors.
Not all government MPs have spoken but the decriminalisation bill now appears to have enough support. Six Labor members would need to break ranks to prevent it from passing.
Earlier, the Labor backbencher Melissa McMahon told parliament she believed she “may not be here today” if abortion had been legal and accessible when her own mother fell pregnant as a teenager.
“I don’t think I would begrudge my mother for having looked at all the options in front of her,” she said. “I’m sure it wasn’t her plan to have to leave school and to be married before she could vote.
“Maybe she could have finished high school. I know she wanted a career. She could have studied. She could have travelled. All the things anyone would wish for their teenage daughter.”
McMahon said she would support the legislation and also spoke about her personal experience of miscarriage.
“The reality is not all pregnancies have happy endings” she said. “With each successive pregnancy, and with each successive pregnancy loss, darkness and foreboding sets in and optimism goes out the window.
“You don’t get excited. You don’t tell anyone because then you have to deal with the looks of pity when it is yet another loss.”
At least 10 LNP MPs have said they would support the decriminalisation of abortion but want the laws to be watered down, including gestation limits tightened to 16 weeks. Others have taken hardline positions and equated abortion with murder.
“Killing a baby in 1918 is no different to killing a baby in 2018,” Jarrod Bleijie, a Sunshine Coast-based MP, told parliament. “If you don’t want to have a baby, there are options available for not getting pregnant.
“But voting on a law that allows a mother and a father to terminate, to kill a child with a beating heart, up to nine months, is something I would never ever vote for.
“I think it sets a deterrent for those wishing or under pressure to have an abortion. If keeping it in the criminal code means ... one baby is stopped form being aborted, then I think that’s good.”
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