Doctor to be deregistered under sick abortion law

Abortion is essentially a moral matter for those who seek it, and it shouldn’t be the realm of the state, but apparently the state is incapable of allowing it to happen without taking away the liberties of others.  While the ability to procure an abortion is considered a matter of choice, for doctors in Victoria there is only one choice.

It appears that in matters of moral judgment, once the government gets involved the lines become horribly blurred as to what rights we have and what freedoms are to be taken away from others in order to accommodate whatever is now about to be granted the blessing of the state.

In Victoria, a doctor faces the prospect of losing his license to practice for refusing to conduct a sex selection abortion and failing to issue a referral to someone who would: 

Dr Mark Hobart, 55, has been under investigation by the Medical Board of Victoria for five months, accused of having committed an offence under the state's controversial Abortion Law Reform Act of 2008.  His patient and her husband requested a sex-selection abortion after an ultrasound determined their fetus was female. 

They only wanted a boy, the husband told Dr Hobart, who, as a practising Catholic, had a conscientious objection to providing the abortion. 

Under Victorian law, he was obliged to refer the patient to a doctor he knew would terminate the pregnancy.  But Dr Hobart doesn't know any doctor who would agree to abort a healthy baby for sex selection reasons. 

"The general response from my colleagues is disbelief and revulsion," he said.In any case, a referral is not necessary for an abortion. Hobart's patient independently procured the abortion a few days later. Neither she nor her husband made any complaint.  But Dr Hobart now finds himself subject to a star chamber inquiry by the Medical Board of Victoria. 

The complaint about his conduct was generated by members of the board itself, a so-called "own Motion."   Yet Dr Hobart's repeated requests for the identity of his accusers and the substance of the complaint have been rebuffed by the board and its parent body, the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency.

It is disgraceful that under the intended or unintended consequences of the human rights act, or the deliberate enacting of political correctness in legislation, acts which are optional for the public at large, are compulsory for those who may be called on to facilitate those acts.  If abortion is a moral issue for the general public, it should also be a moral issue for doctors.

To suggest that doctors do not have a right to act on conscience, is to make them slaves.

Australia has such an undersupply of medical practitioners that we actively recruit in the third world trying to lure theirs here.  We do not have the luxury of tossing doctors to the wolves for failing to comply with PC.