Abortion Once Frowned Upon, Now Celebrated: Academic Leader

At the same time, abortion has—in just the last two weeks—became one of the most pervasive topics in the 2024 Queensland election.
On Oct. 8, KAP leader Robbie Katter said his party would seek to amend abortions laws in Queensland, prompting a massive campaign by Labor amid speculation the opposition Liberal National Party (LNP) would support the KAP in its endeavours.
The resulting campaign from Labor has drawn comparisons to U.S. abortion laws and prompted petitions calling for access to remain available, despite the LNP itself never having abortion as a policy plank.
Since then, Katter has told media his focus would not be on revamping abortion access, but offering medical care to babies that manage to survive the procedure.
“If a baby, planned abortion, comes out with anything, a heartbeat and is probably going to struggle for life—they can give it some care and dignity,” he told Sky News Australia.
“It’s a human rights issue, it’s not an abortion issue to me.”
Katter said the last time his party put forward a bill to support live aborted babies, it did not receive support from Labor or the LNP.
The North Queensland MP said the major parties were “trying to ride two horses at once” in attempting to straddle a line between pleasing regional voters with more conservative opinions, alongside inner-city voters who were more progressive in their outlook.
While actual data on abortion is patchy, pro-abortion group Children by Choice notes that about a quarter of Australian pregnancies are terminated.
Termination rates, according to the group, cannot easily be tracked through Medicare because the item numbers used to claim for an abortion are the same as those also used to categorise treatments for miscarriage and other gynaecological procedures.
One estimate on abortion rates was collated in 2005 using a range of measures and arriving at a number of 83,210 terminations in Australia that year – the equivalent of around 3,467 average-sized classrooms of Australian children who were never born.
In that same year, 259,800 live babies were delivered.
“In pre-Christian times the Hippocratic Oath specifically forbade doctors from performing it,” he told The Epoch Times. “Early Christians became conspicuous for their opposition to all forms of infanticide—which of course includes abortion.
“I cannot speak with authority on the other major world religions, but imagine that all would regard abortion as an evil. Certainly Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam do, and I suppose Hinduism too, for to Hindus all life is sacred.”
Daintree said those attitudes had changed the most in the modern Western world, where abortions have been labelled as “freeing and empowering” for women.
“Nowadays mothers are being publicly funded to perform acts that would have been regarded as crimes against humanity just 50 years ago.”
In recent years, groups like Shout Your Abortion encourage the normalisation of the practice by asking women to tell positive stories of their experience.
This has led thousands of women to share photos of cakes, or themselves, proudly talking about aborting along with the campaign’s hashtag.
“But we can’t pull the wool over our own eyes any longer—we now know that babies are babies and that their humanity becomes clearer and clearer as they grow in the womb.
“So a defence of abortion is actually much more wilfully and consciously wicked than it was a hundred years ago. We know exactly what’s entailed, but we do it anyway.”
Daintree raised another problem.
“Adoption laws are so stringent that older couple are often excluded, yet they are the ones who would most benefit and would bring maturity to their parenting.
“The current mood of society would sooner destroy children in the womb than fund their adoption.”
Matthew Cliff from Cherish Life urged voters to select candidates who aligned with their values.
“It is a key issue because since Labor introduced its Termination of Pregnancy Act in 2018, which allows for abortion for any reason up to birth, tens of thousands of innocent unborn Queensland children have been killed,” he told The Epoch Times.