worryingly jolly batman

Well.....it's true. It's absolutely true.

Current legislation states that certifying consultants may only certify abortions if they judge in good faith that continuation of the pregnancy would resulth in serious risk to the life or health of the woman (mental or physical health.) Most abortions do not, really, come under that provisio. It's worth noting that the ASC has been reporting this every year for the last thirty years and the government has been duly ignoring it. No-one wants to challenge the status quo, basically.

That's not to say that Right to Life aren't misogynistic asses, etcetera; their spokesperson on Morning Report today smarmed his way through comments like "women need to be protected" and "the rights of the unborn child from conception need to be protected". But I'd look at this more as an opportunity to highlight the need for reform than a serious attack on the right to abortion in this country.

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Agreed. Really the law should reflect concern for the mother first and foremost. Hopefully this palaver will lead to the law being updated, but given the current political climate, I doubt it.

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Yeah, it's somewhere none of the political parties want to go, and that's the sad thing; we have a tacit agreement that women in this country should be able to access abortion on demand, but no-one's willing to legislate that. Out of sight, out of mind, etcetera.

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we have a tacit agreement that women in this country should be able to access abortion on demand, but no-one's willing to legislate that.

Which is a pretty serious issue that women in this country (partiularly the women in leadership positions) really ought to address ASAP.

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ITA, of course. Mum will bend your ear about it at length if you ask her. :P

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I'm kind of torn. In a sense it would be nice to have the legislation tidied up, to prevent this sort of ambush-challenge. On the other hand, legislation is only valuable in what it achieves, and the current legislation was working well, albeit with a lot of fudge in practice.

The current legislation is definitely an artifact of an extremely fearsome debate and was probably a good compromise at the time. But attitudes to abortion have moved on massively in the last thirty years - there were only a handful of women in Parliament at the time, quite apart from anything else.

It's kind of a messy issue. I don't think there's a single party in Parliament, not even United Future, that has an issue with the idea of free access to abortion. On the other hand, plenty of them would be willing to pick up the votes of people angry at Labour's stance on abortion, even if such people are likely to be a minority. I suppose it's possible Labour or even National might move, but both groups are likely to depict it as legislative tinkering - a technical issue rather than a policy issue. That means they will basically step back from any ideological debate.

What I guess I don't understand is why this is happened now. The current consensus has always been opposed by groups like Family First. It's endured through thirty years of extremely tense political competition. Why is it only now that a Judge has made this finding? What has changed in the last thirty years - or even in the last five?

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In 2004, 23/27 National MPs - including John Key - voted (unsuccessfully) for teenage girls being legally forced to inform their parents if they had an abortion. And Bill English's wife is part of a anti-abortion group. While that doesn't _automatically_ make him anti-abortion, it's worth noting. I think that there are more conservatives in Parliament on this issue than are willing to let on about it. Of course, the fact that they're unwilling to talk about it means they feel that the public attitude is against them, but....

I think the issue's come up now because the court case has finally gone through, basically. Maybe combined with growing anti-reporductive-rights views overseas.

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I have a suspicion one could find some anti-abortion sentiment lurking around the fringes of the Labour Party too (although one less now that Phillip Taito Field has left the Party), to say nothing of Jim Anderton, but your point is well taken. I always viewed that teenage girls thing as a trojan horse for being anti-abortion - it would be very hard to argue that one of its main effects would have been less abortions occurring, so the Nat's stance is revealing (Shamefully, I was actually unaware it ever came to a formal vote).

But at least in the current Parliament I don't think there is actually a majority for the law as it formally stands. That might not be the case after November, particularly if National gets a significant new intake that reflects its' members views.

What I'd like to know is why these sorts of things always get shilled off as a conscience vote. I've never been happy with it. It must be very hard for a voter who feels strongly about reproductive rights (or for that matter prostitution law reform or civil unions) to decide which party to vote for on that basis, because the parties don't publish manifestos saying how each of their individual MPs will vote in these circumstances.

I think the issue's come up now because the court case has finally gone through, basically. Maybe combined with growing anti-reporductive-rights views overseas.

Technically, I think it's a Judicial Review of administrative decisions, rather than a Court Case. But given that Family First and their ideological predecessors have been banging on about this for donkey's years, why has it taken so long? Or did it just take them this long to decide (or get themselves sufficiently together) to mount a formal judicial challenge?

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Or did it just take them this long to decide (or get themselves sufficiently together) to mount a formal judicial challenge?

That'd be my guess. In some ways I'm surprised it's taken this long.

What I'd like to know is why these sorts of things always get shilled off as a conscience vote. I've never been happy with it. It must be very hard for a voter who feels strongly about reproductive rights (or for that matter prostitution law reform or civil unions) to decide which party to vote for on that basis, because the parties don't publish manifestos saying how each of their individual MPs will vote in these circumstances.

I think it was the pro-choice lady on the radio this morning who said that conscience votes are dumb because they're just an excuse for MPs to break party lines and get away with it. I kind of agree. If your party can have a solid opinion on every other policy (and mostly people _don't_ break party lines for conscience votes) they can have one for things like abortion. The "will of the people" thing is bullshit; unless you're gonna go to your electorate and have a referendum on the issue, you're voting either a) what you feel like or b) what people lobbying you have made you think your electorate feels like, neither of which is actually reflecting your electorate's opinion. If you have one. If you don't....you were voted in as part of your party; have a party line and follow it.

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You're absolutely right re: MPs, but it's even more of a blinder with List MPs in the mix.

Unfortunately there's no way to make parties enforce party discipline, and ultimately MPs who feel strongly may evade it anyway. But I do wish the public would be a lot more sceptical about conscience votes. Sadly the media likes them, possibly because they allow a lot of frenetic speculation, and many lobby groups do as well, presumably because it basically sanctions their attempts to get to MPs directly rather than to go through the public. I always feel rather cold when I hear a lobby group calling for an issue to be made a conscience vote.

IMO the only situation in which a conscience vote could be justified is one in which some genuinely new, unique, unprecedented situation came up which party manifestos hadn't even peripherally addressed. Short of alien invasion, I can't think of one.

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IMO the only situation in which a conscience vote could be justified is one in which some genuinely new, unique, unprecedented situation came up which party manifestos hadn't even peripherally addressed. Short of alien invasion, I can't think of one.

And you can bet if there _was_ an alien invasion it would be party lines all the way on the grounds that it came under foreign policy. Or something.

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confusiontempst.livejournal.com

We did have a change in the structure of our courts such that you no longer have massive legal fees to appear in England as our highest court level. This could be some form of ancillary effect of the (presumably) increased availability of judicial review of legislation.

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Possibly, but my intuition is that a group like Family First, no strangers to large stacks of cash, would not find the need to travel to the UK to press their case a major obstacle.

Kind of funny if it was the case, since Family First are generally aligned with the political parties that opposed the setup of the Supreme Court.

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I'm actually aware of the status of the law and agree that it's kind of a farce. HOWEVER, I do not think it's a good sign that impetus for change is coming from the Christian Right, and I am not impressed with the fact that Justice Miller's comments (as reported in the media - no time right now to read his/her actual statement) do not appear to address the fact that the way abortions are performed at least adequately conforms with what people *think* nis/should be the law - that is to say that (IMO) they reflect society's prevailing opinion. If impetus for change was coming from, say, the Greens? Or ACT (actually ACT's position on this will be very telling: this is the make or break on whether or not the party is genuinely libertarian or just pretending to be)? That would be one thing. Coming from Family First? A different concern.

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The judge basically said that he noted Parliament was happy to let the law as it was be administered as it was. It certainly wasn't an overwhelming victory for the Christian Right by any standards.

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I am not impressed with the fact that Justice Miller's comments (as reported in the media - no time right now to read his/her actual statement) do not appear to address the fact that the way abortions are performed at least adequately conforms with what people *think* is/should be the law - that is to say that (IMO) they reflect society's prevailing opinion.

It's not really a Judge's role to comment on whether any given law abides to public opinion or not, let alone to allow that to influence their decision. Shaping the law to respond to public opinion is the role of Parliament. That's not to say that some Judges don't step over this line, but they're not supposed to.

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That's not to say that some Judges don't step over this line, but they're not supposed to.

I would accept that if judges never said anything other than "that does/does not conform with the law." But that simply doesn't reflect reality.

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So you view the idea of Judges describing the process by which they decided whether or not something confirms with the law as undesirable?

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Er, I don't think that's what I implied, is it? I'm not actually sure what you're asking here.

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What I'm saying is that the situation is basically as you describe it. A formal judgement reduced to its essence consists of nothing but the statement "This does/does not confirm with the law", in the same way that when you write a 5000 word essay on gay marriage its essence consists of nothing but the statement "Gay marriage is good". But just as you need to show how you reached that conclusion, so does the Judge - except s/he needs to be even more explicit, since further decisions may hinge on that judgement, so ambiguity is not desirable. When Judges do this, it might sound like they're pontificating on areas outside of the pure legal technicalities, but they're not - or at least, they're not supposed to.

It's definitely not a perfect system and I'm not even sure it's a good system. But if you're advocating that Judges should take public opinion into account in their decisions, you're advocating an extremely radical break, and one that would have repercussions beyond the Courts. It also begs the question of how a Judge is supposed to inform himself about the state of public opinion without falling into the usual traps.

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But if you're advocating that Judges should take public opinion into account in their decisions

I'm not. *double checks above comments* And it kind of sounded like I was. OK. No, I don't think that. (Although actually Supreme Court decisions... I mean. The law has, at best, been interpreted very, very liberally. Saying that the interpretation is too liberal has to come down to some kind of value judgement here.) I mean, I think this is the accurate decision. On the other hand I think it's worthwhile for someone to acknowledge that actually the law may be out of step with social convention, rather than social convention being out of step with the law.

Actually, I'm having this whole conversation very badly because I did a class last year on ethics that was heavily american-based and included a whooole lot of american position papers written by groups of judges on whether an issue should or should not be legal or illegal. Abortion obviously was one of these areas. it was all constitutional. And I know that that's not how NZ law is practiced, so really I should just shut up (but I do feel the stuff article is appallingly presented.)

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