On September 26, 2019, New South Wales became the last state in Australia to decriminalize abortion. The Archbishop of Sydney immediately reacted by deploring it as a “defeat for humanity.”
“Sorry that it took so long,” apologized Alex Greenwich, the independent and progressive elected representative of Sydney, who introduced the bill that on September 26, 2019 abolished a law voted in 119 years ago. Criminalizing abortion, the 1900 law provided for up to ten years’imprisonment for women seeking abortions, or for doctors assisting them.
The current law decriminalizes abortion until 22 weeks of pregnancy; beyond this period, a favorable opinion from two doctors is required. Medical eugenics is on the move. Having already passed in the Legislative Assembly on August 8, it only needed the agreement of the Upper House of Parliament for the law to be finally adopted.
At the Archbishop’s Palace in Sydney, Archbishop Anthony Fischer expressed his regrets for “a dark day for New South Wales,” which has just adopted “the worst law of the modern era.”
The Archbishop of Sydney does not mean to give up: “The Catholic Church will continue to work to transform our culture, so that all vulnerable women and all babies are cared for, in a way to make abortion inconceivable,” said Archbishop Fischer.
Since the legalization of abortion in Queensland, passed in October 2018, New South Wales had been the last state in which abortion remained a crime: the barrier has been broken. In the name of an alleged right of women to kill? In the name of human dignity?
As for the political leaders, they “walk in the vanity of their minds, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their hearts” (St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 4:17-18).
