Your Aussie Taxes - Destroying babies

Billions of dollars, of tax-payer dollars, in Australia are federally funnelled into the abortion industry in order to directly fund it, protect it, and make it sustainable. Ask your candidates "Will you protect life?".

Your AussieTaxes At Work – Making And Destroying Babies

 Mr Roland von Marburg  M.B.B.S., FRACS.

When we think of abortion, we think of civil rights, women’s health, dignity of human life, and spiritual morality.  But if you are a vocal advocate of abortion in Australia, are you really motivated by ideology or is it something else? 

It is a great privilege to be able to speak at the Annual Conference of Right to Life Australia and I wish to express my deep gratitude to Right to Life and Margaret Tighe in particularly for inviting me here.

I will attempt to bring some new information to the discussion regarding abortion in Australia and exactly what is at risk here, and what motivates the advocates of abortion.  When we think of abortion, we think of civil rights, women’s health, dignity of human life, and spiritual morality.  But if you are a vocal advocate of abortion in Australia, are you really motivated by ideology or is it something else?  Unfortunately for many of the proponents of abortion, it is definitely ‘something else’, and that ‘something else’ is greed.  As we will see, abortion is a multi-billion dollar, tax-payer funded industry supporting the incomes as some of the wealthiest medical professionals and health care providers in Australia.

When the media typically comments on the abortion industry, they like to conjure up an image of a humble, honest, poverty-stricken, but idealistic health provider, motivated only by a woman’s right to choose.  They would appear to be providing an essential, even emergency (whatever an emergency abortion is) procedure to poverty-stricken teenage women in Australia.   Doing so largely out of the goodness of their own hearts.

However, the reality is somewhat different, somewhat diabolically different.  The fact is that most women having abortions in Australia are not teenagers, but significantly older and most of these women are in a household with above average incomes.

Billions of dollars, of tax-payer dollars, in Australia are funneled in to the abortion industry in order to directly fund it, protect it, and make it sustainable.

The billion dollar plus figure is arrived at by assessing the direct and indirect cost of abortion on our federal and state budgets.  The direct costs arise through the actual costs of providing abortions both surgical and medical.  The indirect costs of abortion to the tax-payer arise through treating the complications of abortion and the cost of making new babies, to replace those that we kill, through the IVF industry.  Another indirect cost I will deal with is a cost on our demographics.

So how exactly do we arrive at our billion dollar plus tax-payer figure?  Australia suffers about 100,000 abortions per year.  Abortion is the greatest paediatric killer in our nation by a country mile.  The direct tax-payer funding of abortion through Medicare providing both surgical and medical abortions includes the costs of consultations, surgical procedures, anaesthetic fees, and subsequent procedures such as the provision of IUDs and other forms of contraception.  When one considers the fees directly billed through Medicare, we quickly arrive at a figure of about $500 million per year.  

The abortion industry is the master of ‘value adding’ when it comes to Medicare item numbers and the calculation of fees.  An ordinary trip to the abortion mill involving a consultation and surgical abortion alone would usually involve at least five Medicare item numbers and fees, totaling about $1000 per patient.  However, if the abortionist then ‘value adds’ any other treatments such as the provision of IUDs, injectable contraception, or other procedures, one can easily add another three to five item numbers and almost double the cost to the tax-payer from $1000 to $2000 per patient.  Based on these figures alone, one quickly arrives at an overall national figure of $100 million to $200 million per year.  It should also be remembered that approximately a third of all abortions in Australia are performed in public hospitals.  These State run tax-payer funded hospital theatres and care, run at about $70 to $100 per minute.  The average surgical abortion takes somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes and so the cost to the tax-payer of public hospital abortions in Australia is about $100 million a year.

If we add to this, the cost of funding medications involved in abortion through the pharmaceutical benefit scheme, including everything from simple antibiotics and pain relief to anaesthetic drugs and abortifacients such as the morning after pill, one can easily add another $50 million per year to the tax-payer’s bill.

I think we should also include the lifetime subsidy by the tax-payer of contraception in Australia, because it is directly promoted by the abortion industry and has been shown to directly contribute to the incidence of abortion.  That is, where in countries where the use of contraception increases, the rate of abortion also increases.  The cost of corralling women into this failing contraceptive mentality is about $200 million a year to the Australian tax-payer.

So if we add these costs together so far of about $150 million for the direct cost of providing abortion procedures, $100 million for providing them in public funded hospitals, $50 million for general medications, and another $200 million for contraceptive medications, you get through to our first figure of $500 million per year per Australian tax-payer.  This in itself is quite extraordinary and the primary beneficiaries of this figure are the abortion doctors and the drug companies.

Now let us consider further costs of the abortion industry to the Australian tax-payer.

One needs to consider the costs of treating all the complications of abortion in Australia.  Australia performs about 100,000 medical and surgical abortions a year.  10% of women having an abortion suffer an immediate complication.  That is, about 10,000 Australian women per year.  2% of women having an abortion suffer a major immediate complication, such as infection, haemorrhage, embolism, uterine perforation, cervical damage, convulsions, or even death.  That is about 2,000 Australian women a year suffer a serious complication from abortion.  There are over 100 possible complications known in the medical literature associated with abortions and these complications range from minor infection to death.  The cost of treating these immediate complications alone is extraordinary.  It has been estimated, and it is only a rough estimate, but the cost to the tax-payer of treating these complications from minor infections to death is about $500 million per year.

The abortion industry continually tries to play down these risks.  The classic example has been the debate of the use of RU486 in Australia.  In 2006, when the Australian parliament was debating allowing the use of RU486, we were continually told by the abortion advocates that RU486 was safer, or at least as safe as surgical abortion and a much more private approach with less need for hospitalization.  In the only follow up study of the use of RU486 in Australia to date, South Australian researchers discovered that, in fact, RU486 was more than fourteen times more likely to cause complications that require re-admission to hospital than surgical abortions.  The silent response of the abortion industry to this publication was deafening.  

Another important long term complication of abortion in Australia is the adverse effect it has on mental health.  Priscilla Coleman has recently had a very significant publication in the British Journal of Psychiatry which was a metanalysis of previous publications involving the experiences of over a three quarter of a million women.  She was able to show that abortion significantly increases the risk of mental health problems particularly in the area of substance abuse, depression, and suicide.  She estimates in this paper that 10% of the mental health budget can be directly attributed to the treatment of complications of abortion.  In Australia, the national mental health budget is approximately $8.4 billion.  Priscilla Coleman’s estimate means that the cost to the Australian tax-payer of the treatment of mental health conditions associated with abortion is about $840 million a year.  Our tally so far is now over $1.8 billion of tax-payer funding.

Many international studies have also linked breast cancer to abortion.  There are now dozens of papers published in the medical literature internationally in peer review journals, not only postulating how abortion causes breast cancer, but also examining the statistical analysis of the effect of abortion on the incidence of breast cancer in certain countries.  In fact, in the United Kingdom, actuaries use abortion as the primary risk factor for breast cancer in insured clients.  Whilst, I accept that there is still a lot of research to be done in this area and I will not include the cost of breast cancer in our community in my analysis, I think we will see in our lifetime more clear evidence that abortion causes breast cancer particularly in young women whose first pregnancy ends in abortion and have a family history of breast cancer.

Another great link with abortion is the IVF industry.  I have never met an IVF doctor who isn’t a strong supporter of abortion.  It is not hard to understand why.  Without close to 100,000 abortions being done in Australia each year, there would be no IVF industry.  That is, if we didn’t choose to kill 100,000 of our own children per year, these children would be either available to the biological parents or to other parents seeking to nurture them.  The IVF industry is also directly involved in abortion as highlighted recently in the ’60 Minutes’ story on ‘Selective Reduction’.  This is their so called ‘dirty little secret’.  Australia has the most generous tax-payer funding of IVF in the world.  The average, that is, the AVERAGE, income of IVF doctors in Australia is estimated to be $4.5 million.  The cost of delivering one live birth through IVF to a woman over the age of forty is at least $250,000 by the estimates of a medical journal of Australia article published in 2004.  Now that’s what I call a baby bonus!  

It is little wonder when the current government was considering further means testing of our paltry $5,000 baby bonus, we didn’t see Penny Wong and her partner standing on a soapbox and demanding means testing of IVF access to wealthy, homosexual, and fertile couples such as themselves.  The total tax-payer funding of IVF in Australia per year is about $750 million per year.  

We now have over $2.5 billion of direct tax-payer funding of the abortion industry and its associate industries.  This is $2.5 billion per year.  

The next area which I think we need to touch on is the effect of abortion and its cost to our demographics.  Australia is a country short of people.  We have a somewhat contentious, but aggressive immigration policy.  This is necessary when we kill 100,000 of our own people every year.  Although it is hard to find convincing figures on the costs that the Australian tax-payer spends on average per immigrant to Australia, it is somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000 per person.  That means, if we did not kill 100,000 Australians per year, we could save somewhere between $1 billion and $10 billion a year.

I have tried to be very conservative in my calculations and I have baulked at including more peripheral costs to the tax-payer of the abortion industry.  However, even on these simple calculations it is easy to see that the abortion industry costs the Australia tax-payer at least $2.5 billion and probably greater than $3 billion per year.  If we stopped doing abortions and channeled this money directly back to Australian families and the support of their children, we would be able to provide every family with a $30,000 baby bonus per child.  It would also mean that we could free up a significant part of our medical services to provide true life-giving and not life-taking health care.

I think it is important to understand this economic argument, because it helps us to understand the battle we’re in and the nature of our enemy.  Whilst we often think of civil rights and spiritual morality, our adversaries merely think of the financial benefit.  Whilst we think of human dignity and reason, our adversaries often think in dollars and cents.  Whilst our arguments, based in reason, are clearly superior for the protection of human life, I think we need to make the Australian public aware, particularly the secular public, of the hip pocket costs of this evil industry.  Just as St. Augustine used Plato to appeal to the logic of the Pagans, I think we can use secular economic arguments to appeal to the logic of our modern day Pagan society.  As St. Paul points out, the love of money is the root of all evil, and I believe that by exposing this evil more clearly to the Australian people, we will move some way forward in our fight against abortion.