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.
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