Reproductive Health (Access to Terminations) Bill 2013

The Tasmanian parliament will soon have to decide on a Bill which would radically change abortion law in Tasmania. Public consultation on the first draft closed last week, and amendments are already being made. So far, DHHS has published 88 of the 140 submissions from organisations. Since it is not clear that the Department will actually publish the approximately 1910 individual submissions, Clare and I decided to publish ours in full here.
--Dan.

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Regarding the Draft Reproductive Health (Access to Terminations) Bill, Invitation to Comment.

We write to express strong objection to the proposed Reproductive Health (Access to Terminations) Bill 2013, as we believe that the Bill's provisions: 

1. are not founded on a philosophically defensible system of ethics, 
2. are incompatible with long-standing principles which are foundational to international human rights law, 
3. disproportionately criminalise conscientious objection, and 
4. will not reduce the demand for termination services.  

These objections can be further explained as follows (n.b. we use 'termination' and 'abortion' interchangeably, as does the Criminal Code Act)...