Both major parties in Victoria have pledged to use taxpayer funds to pay for abortions in exchange for votes in the upcoming November state election.
Under a $30 million election commitment, Victorian Premier Ben Carroll has vowed that Labor—that is, the taxpayer—will cover out-of-pocket costs for medical and surgical abortions up to 16 weeks, including associated consultations and other expenses.
Carroll warned voters that One Nation wants to roll back access to abortion, while Labor-aligned unions have suggested the Liberals won’t have the courage to stop them.
But the Liberal Party in Victoria isn’t just promising not to change Victoria’s abortion laws. They’ve promised to match Labor’s taxpayer-funded slaughter scheme.
According to The Guardian, Opposition Leader Jess Wilson confirmed on Thursday afternoon that a Liberal-National Coalition government would also cover out-of-pocket abortion costs up to 16 weeks’ gestation. This includes GP and specialist consultations, scans, tests, and medication.
In other words, regardless of which major party forms government in November, Victorian taxpayers have been promised the bill for mothers who want to kill off their unwanted kids.
The language, of course, is entirely sanitised and dishonest. It has to be. So, we’re going to hear a lot about “healthcare,” “access,” “choice,” and “reproductive rights.”
But don’t be duped by the euphemisms. What we’re talking about here is the state’s imagined authority to decide which innocent human beings can be legally and freely put to death in exchange for votes.
Which is all the more ironic, considering the outrage we’ve seen from Australian politicians over news that US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth backed a proposal to livestream the December 3 firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of murdering 13 people and wounding 32 others in the 2009 Fort Hood massacre.
Although President Donald Trump has since cancelled the proposed broadcast, the announcement provoked considerable outrage among Australian politicians.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the proposed broadcast “abhorrent.” Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young described it as “barbaric” and urged the government to prevent Australians from viewing it. Even Barnaby Joyce compared it to a Roman amphitheatre.
One of Hasan’s victims, a 21-year-old Private Francheska Velez, was three months pregnant at the time. Witnesses at Hasan’s court-martial testified that they heard her pleading, “My baby, my baby,” immediately before further shots rang out.
She and her unborn child were murdered.
Think about the absolute moral inversion here.
Australian politicians recoil at the execution of a man convicted of deliberately murdering 13 people, including a pregnant woman. Meanwhile, Victoria’s major political parties are promising to take money from hard-working citizens and use it to fund the deliberate killing of unborn children who have committed no crime whatsoever.
The public execution of a convicted mass murderer is “barbaric” and “abhorrent,” they say, all while promising to cover the cost of abortions with taxpayer funds. We don’t kill terrorists here; that would be backwards. We kill unwanted babies, and then we call it progress.
Of course, the two are not morally equivalent. And that’s the point, really. Not all killing is morally identical. In Scripture, murder is the shedding of innocent blood. It is condemned because man bears the image of God (Gen. 9:6). Civil government, meanwhile, is given authority to punish genuine evildoers with lethal force. Paul says the magistrate “does not bear the sword in vain” (Rom. 13:4).
The state possesses delegated authority to punish the guilty. It does not, however, possess the authority to redefine who is and is not innocent—and what is and is not evil.
This is why the abortion debate matters, and why it should matter even to those who would rather not think about it, or who believe there are bigger, more pressing political issues to confront.
To put it simply: A government that refuses to recognise the most basic human right, the right of an innocent human being simply to remain alive, has already abandoned the foundation upon which every lesser right depends.
Read that again.
A government that refuses to recognise the most basic human right, the right of an innocent human being simply to remain alive, has already abandoned the foundation upon which every lesser right depends.
Do you care about free speech?
Free speech matters because human beings possess dignity and value.
Religious liberty matters because human beings possess dignity and value.
Property rights, parental rights, bodily integrity, due process, and equality before the law all matter because human beings possess dignity and value.
But if dignity and value are things that the state may confer according to arbitrary characteristics, such as age, location, dependency, or convenience, then none of these are inherent “rights” at all.
They are permissions. They are privileges granted by the government that can be withdrawn by the government.
So, the question that should be fundamental to Victoria’s upcoming election is not merely whether taxpayers should fund abortions, but whether human rights exist independent of the state.
Do we really want to live in a country where our right to life depends on the political expediency of those in power? Is that the country we want to leave to our children and grandchildren?
Once the state claims the authority to decide that an entire class of innocent human beings possess no enforceable right to life, every other right is an imagined fiction.
A political party that doesn’t respect the most basic, most fundamental human right will have little difficulty finding reasons to violate all others.
If a political party won’t defend the right to life, why trust them with any other?