An ABC investigation has uncovered an "unspoken ban" which is denying women access to surgical abortions in rural and regional areas. Abortion has been legal for several years, but doctors say care is being obstructed by ideology unclear guidelines chronic staff shortages and overstretched resources.
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00:00She was booked in for a surgical termination at Queenbeyan District Hospital in southern
00:08New South Wales at 14 weeks. She had been told already that her baby had severe life-limiting
00:16malformations. So her sonologist, the doctor that did the scan and diagnosed that malformation,
00:23referred her to Queenbeyan Hospital, having referred other similar patients for surgical
00:28abortions where there were malformations or fetal anomalies to Queenbeyan Hospital before.
00:33However, on the morning that Melissa travelled two hours from her coastal New South Wales
00:40home to Queenbeyan for that abortion, she received a phone call and she recounted for
00:46us what the obstetrician who called her that morning had to say.
00:53He just basically said, I'm really sorry, we can't do the procedure today. And I was
01:00dumbfounded at that stage because I was broke down. I was like, what do you mean? What is
01:06that? Where does that leave me? And he just sort of said, they said we can't do it.
01:13Well Melissa drove home that afternoon, obviously very traumatised and importantly, she drove
01:19home still pregnant. However, she had a strong supportive healthcare team around her locally.
01:26Her GP, Dr Lisa Hyde, was able to get her an abortion, but it was not at Queenbeyan
01:33Hospital and it ended up having to be what's called a medical abortion. So that's different
01:39to a surgical abortion. A medical abortion is where someone takes pills to bring on a
01:44miscarriage. A surgical abortion is a simple procedure done under anaesthetic. Melissa
01:50had wanted a surgical abortion for very specific reasons and importantly, she was denied that.
01:57Her GP, Lisa Hyde, has been seeking answers from the hospital's management on why this
02:04happened ever since. And she wants guidelines around surgical terminations for medical reasons
02:10from the hospital and the local health district, the southern New South Wales local health
02:16district, which oversees all the rural and regional health services and hospitals in
02:22that neck of the woods, hasn't responded to her emails which were sent weeks ago.
02:29And as I said, she simply wants guidelines so that this doesn't happen again. She's told us,
02:36as well as other doctors having told us as well, that she thinks this is akin to a ban, if not
02:43worse. I think it's worse than a ban because you don't know what you're dealing with. So I think
02:49that makes people feel, you're like, am I missing something here? Why can't I do, I'm just not
02:56following the right pathways? Or in a way, the not knowing, is there an agenda? Why is the
03:07progress so slow? Now, the LHD from southern New South Wales has told us that it supports
03:14medical terminations. Now, as I mentioned, that's a non-surgical abortion, but it hasn't answered
03:21direct questions about Melissa's individual case. At first, Dr. Hyde thought that maybe this could
03:28have been the result of just a bureaucratic bungle. And she's conscious that regional and rural health
03:33services across New South Wales and across the entire country are very much suffering from
03:39chronic staff shortages and often under-resourcing. But she feels that effectively, this is a major
03:47problem because abortion has been decriminalised and every person should have access to safe,
03:53affordable terminations as a form of reproductive health care.
03:56And here we have publicly funded hospitals refusing to provide it.