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Government puts the fear of God in pro-choice counselling service

Nina Vucetic looks at recent attacks on reproductive rights from the various levels of government in Australia.

January 2007

While the rest of the city was awash in festivities on last New Year’s Eve, the mood at the Bessie Smythe Foundation was a little more sombre.  It was forced to close its doors after 30 years as a pregnancy counselling service.

The Bessie Smythe Foundation was the only all-options, non-directive, non-judgmental pregnancy counselling service in NSW. It has been providing services to women since 1977 and operated on the principle that women should have access to unbiased information to help with their decision making process.

The issues related to the closing down of this service have been amplified following the Governments’ controversial decision to include the Catholic Church in a pregnancy counselling working party consortium. Women’s groups fear that in the face of ongoing attacks on women’s rights to access information on all options in relation to their pregnancy, it is essential that services like the Bessie Smythe Foundation continue to operate. 

The Foundation was one of only two dedicated pro-choice pregnancy counselling services in Australia — neither of which receives any Commonwealth funding. In spite of the praiseworthy work done by the Auburn-based service, it was closed down on New Year’s Eve, when its private funds were exhausted.

In an ironic twist, two days after the Bessie Smythe Foundation closed down, the Government announced that it had awarded an abortion counselling helpline tender to McKesson Asia Pacific, which will subcontract parts of the job to the Catholic Church’s welfare arms — Centacare and the Victorian-based Caroline Chisholm Society.

The initiative was originally announced on March 2, 2006 when the Federal Government declared that it would establish two new pregnancy counselling services, aimed at reducing the abortion rate. The plan was to establish a 24 hour National Pregnancy Support Telephone Helpline, and a Medicare payment for pregnancy support counselling, at a total cost of $51 million over four years.

Pro-Choice campaigners have voiced concern that objective pregnancy counselling services like the Bessie Smythe Foundation are being de-funded in favour of anti-choice services.

‘It’s a horrible irony that money has been awarded to Mckesson’s in combination with the Catholic welfare agencies when a pro-choice, all options counselling service with the experience like Bessie Smythe has been forced to close its doors due to lack of funding,’ said Cait Calcutt, Spokeswoman for Children by Choice Queensland, the only remaining ‘all options’ counselling service in Australia.

‘I just think it’s extremely disappointing. It’s very bad for women,’ she said. ‘And it’s also very disappointing that McKesson’s haven’t included other agencies with a track record in delivering all options pregnancy counselling as advisors to them.’

Furthermore, the integrity and objectivity of the service is compromised to a large extent as the proposal was rolled out with the underlying aim of reducing Australia’s abortion rate.

Health Minister Tony Abbott said on ABC radio: ‘I hope that the availability of this kind of support service might, in the end, have some downward impact on the number of abortions.’

‘In my opinion one of the reasons why we have so many abortions in this country is because we do not offer enough support to women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant,’ he said.

Such statements have raised concerns that the initiatives are aimed at reducing the number of pregnant women who terminate their pregnancy, not at supporting women in the decision that will be best for them and their family.

Cait Calcutt says that many women are just looking for more information about their options, not necessarily counselling.

‘What women are not looking for is more counselling services that don’t provide information on all options,’ she said. 

Pro-Choice Organisations have also criticized the decision on the basis that the ideological opposition of the Catholic Church to abortion will make it difficult for them to provide unbiased advice and genuinely non-directive counselling services.

Associate Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Law at Flinders University, Wendy Rogers says:

'There is a major problem in awarding a contract for a government provided service when we have a secular society. The services provided by the government should not be faith based in any way, particularly when the faith involved is likely to have a particular view on the service provided.'

'It seems to add an unnecessary complication and barrier to providing good counselling when the funding is coming via the organisation of the Catholic Church,' she said

The Howard Government has been steadily increasing funding to Christian based counselling services opposed to abortion. According to the Association for the Legal Right to Abortion (ALRA), the Right to Life and Catholic Church-run pregnancy counselling services received more than $1 million in federal funding in 2005. $918,000 was given in 2004/05 to the Australian Episcopal Conference of the Roman Catholic Church. The sum is eight times higher than that provided to the secular, non-directive women’s health counselling and referral service, Working Women’s Health.

While the abortion hotline tender explicitly excluded people working in abortion clinics on the basis that they had a conflict of interest, it made no such exclusions over people with philosophical objections to abortion.

The apparently biased process was condemned by Reproductive Choice Australia, a national coalition of women’s health and pro-choice groups.

‘It’s sad, but predictable. The Health Minister clearly believes it is OK to lower the abortion rate by giving women biased information about abortion,’ Reproductive Choice Australia spokesperson Dr Leslie Cannold said.

Cait Calcutt argues that if the concern is about lowering unwanted pregnancy, there are far more effective strategies that the government could utilise.

‘If there is a concern around the abortion rate in Australia, pregnancy counselling is not the way to address that. It has been proven internationally that the way to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies is through better access to education and information on sex education,’ she said.

Labor’s Shadow Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon has also raised doubts as to the independence of the counselling service. ‘Mr. Howard and Mr. Abbott need to guarantee that $51 million dollars of taxpayers’ money does not privilege religious views over medical views,’ she said.

Roxon suggested that the Health Minister — who trained as a Catholic priest during the 1980s — is attempting to lock in his own religious views to government funding.

‘Tony Abbott has a record of letting his own religious views interfere with his responsibilities as Health Minister, and Labor is concerned that this is one of those times,’ Ms Roxon said.

‘That Abbott is a prominent Catholic is not the point. That he seems incapable of dealing with issues involving women’s fertility in a balanced manner is the problem.’

Associate Professor Rogers agrees. ‘There does seem to be a prima facie conflict of interest. It’s easy to ascribe political motives to it given the overt religious position of the minister for health,’ she said.

The counsellors also would not be expected to give referrals to any agencies, with their mandate requiring that they provide only generic information only about where clients can find such information. In this context, it raises the question as to whether a service is legitimately non-directive if it refuses to refer women for abortion.

‘Counsellors need to understand the issues and put it to a woman in a way that is meaningful to her. It is difficult to do that if at the bottom of your heart you believe its murder,’ Professor Rogers said.

However, Andrew Wilson, Centacare Catholic Community Services President is adamant that the service will consider all options, in a non directive context.

‘There will be no referrals provided. The model is non directive counselling. The whole purpose of the service is to provide women with information on a range of options and help them through non directive counselling to reach a decision,’ he said.

‘We are not in any way or shape giving them direct advice, but we will be able to identify where they can get that information,’ he said.

But Cait Calcutt fears that this kind of service could be misleading.

‘This mirrors the services of the anti choice pregnancy counselling services that currently operate in Australia. It mirrors their practices,’ she said.

Similarly, the chairwoman of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, Eva Cox, has misgivings about the ability of McKesson’s to deliver appropriate counselling, information and referral services on all options with an unplanned pregnancy.

‘I think it’s quite a difficult area and McKesson’s underestimates some of the difficulties,’ she said.

‘They have bitten off something a bit bigger than they have dealt with in the past in terms of the level of emotional and social issues that this is going to raise.’

But Mr Wilson is confident that McKesson’s has been appropriately picked for the job.