In August 2019 the NSW parliament tried to rush through a misnamed Reproductive Health Care Reform Bill. It was hardly reproductive as it was designed to aid killing, not the nurturing of human life. Nor did it have much to do with health care, especially not for the babies. Finally, ‘reform’ implies improvement of some kind but this was a big step backwards.

To its disgrace, the Legislative Assembly passed the bill which had an unprecedented fifteen co-sponsors. Yet it was the dismissal of various amendments which indicated just how dark Western society has become. Tanya Davies moved an amendment which urged that any abortion of a child of twenty weeks or older which resulted in an unintended living being must be given appropriate neonatal care.

This would seem to be morally obvious. Not so in modern enlightened Australia. It was argued that such cases are rare, which rather misses the point. Any child is precious, surely. In any case, in Queensland from 2005 to 2015 over 200 babies have survived abortions, and been left to die, in accordance with their parents’ wishes. In one year alone – 2016 in Victoria – 33 babies were born alive and left to die. Babies have been aborted as late as 37 weeks. How doctors and nurses are not traumatized and morally desensitized by this is beyond understanding.

Furthermore, doctors who have moral objections to the killing industry are required to violate their consciences by referring any patient onto a doctor who would be willing to carry out abortions. For what it was worth, politicians were given a conscience vote on this issue, but they did not believe that doctors could be entrusted with the same privilege.

An amendment seeking to prohibit the sale of foetal tissue was defeated. So there is money to be made not just in killing the child but in selling dead body parts. In exposing this practice by Planned Parenthood in the USA, David Daleiden has been hauled before the law courts. Life has a price, but not a value.

Even gender selection abortions are allowed, although the Premier discovered her own belated objection to what she called ‘an abhorrent practice’. There is no way such an amendment could be enforced, but even a pointless amendment could not be conceded in this race down the Gadarene slope.

Brad Hazzard declared that there was no evidence that sex-selection abortions ever happened. If so, what was the danger in banning them? The Director of Marie Stopes then obliged by saying that banning gender selection abortion would ‘discriminate against multicultural and diverse communities in Australia’. Life is dispensable; slogans are sacrosanct.

Any abortion is the killing of human life, and the acceptance of late-term abortion simply makes this point more obvious. Premature babies have survived when this bill decrees their death. A child of forty weeks might look more charming than a child of twenty weeks, but there is a continuity in all of life – indeed from conception to death.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian has said that in supporting this legislation she felt the obligation to separate her faith from her decision. She has done that, and more. She has separated it from decency, common sense, and reality. Any reputable medical textbook will tell her, and anybody else who will read it, that a baby’s heartbeat can be detected at five or six weeks. Professing Christians ought to know the difference between Yahweh and Moloch.