The Catholic sector will be exempt from federal Labor’s plans to tie hospital funding to the provision of abortion services.
Catherine King and deputy leader Tanya Plibersek said a new funding agreement between a Labor government and the states and territories would ‘expect that termination services will be provided consistently in public hospitals’. ‘This is critical to end the patchwork of service provision in Australia’, a joint statement said.
However, a spokesman for Ms King said on Thursday ‘obviously’ this would not be possible in every hospital, …
On Wednesday, King’s office phoned leaders from the Catholic health sector to assure them that a Labor government would not withhold funding from Catholic hospitals refusing to perform terminations on religious grounds.
Source: SMH