Just before the opening prayers of the Mass for the Unborn Child on Sunday, March 23, attended by a full-to-standing-room congregation in St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney’s Archbishop Anthony Fisher delivered a pithy warning about the dangers of a recent bill before the NSW Parliament.
The Archbishop explained that the 2025 “Cohn” Bill would radically deny advocacy for the unborn or help for pregnant women, and it encroaches upon professional conscience – especially for those working in the public healthcare sector.
The Archbishop pointed out that the bill actively pressures doctors to refer for abortion, even if they consider other alternatives to be better healthcare for both the mother and the child. If passed, the bill will be responsible for “enabling nurses to administer abortion drugs, and at removing reporting requirements so no data on abortion can be collected and published”.
The Mass for the Unborn Child (an annual event at St Mary’s Cathedral) was this year concelebrated with Cardinal Mykola Bychok of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Archbishop Antoine-Charbel Tarabay of the Maronites, and other bishops and priests.
In an impressive show of unity, the Cardinal, Archbishop, bishops, priests, seminarians and thousands of people in the congregation and from parishes – young people, families with prams and older people – walked prayerfully to Parliament House and back.
The bill referred to by Archbishop Fisher was tabled in late February into the NSW Parliament by Amanda Cohn MLC, herself a former abortionist and member of the Greens party.
She rose to prominence as the first Greens representative in the Albury City Council who has promoted and performed “abortion-services and gender-affirming” treatment along with work in emergency services.
One of the strangest elements in Cohn’s attempts to “liberalise access” to abortion as “healthcare” is her bill’s provision to erase any record-keeping for medical or surgical abortions. As Monica Doumit writes in The Catholic Weekly:
“The increased risks posed to women are a somewhat ironic outcome of this bill, with those who claim that abortion restrictions lead to backyard abortions now advocating for them to be performed by less qualified practitioners with no record-keeping.”
Surely keeping records and amassing evidence is the best way to demonstrate the progress, the transparency and the status of any healthcare procedure?
During the week prior to the Mass for the Unborn Child, thousands of people joined a more political protest in a rally outside the NSW Parliament against the Cohn Bill.
Susan Carter MLC from the Liberal Party, speaking at the rally alongside some other NSW parliamentarians, lawyers and healthcare professionals declared: “We need stronger consciences to shape our society – not a state that seeks to limit how we can use our conscience.”
Archbishop Fisher reminded the cathedral congregation at Sunday’s Mass of the 30th anniversary of the promulgation of Pope John Paul II’s important encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) in 1995.
In 1995, then a philosophy student at Oxford, Anthony Fisher became a key commentator on the encyclical. Archbishop Fisher’s writing, research and preaching over the decades have involved explaining and defending what Pope John Paul II called the “culture of life” and the importance of conscience in the context of the erosion of “religious freedom”.
The Pope’s encyclical links many important aspects of the Christian conviction about the sanctity of human life and dignity to its sources in biblical revelation, in the life and actions of Jesus Christ and in the inspiration of the Church.
The “preciousness of human life” is not only a moral teaching but a pillar of Christian social teaching and cultural priority. The encyclical also emphasises the importance of anticipating individual responsibility and social and existential factors that contribute to the support of all vulnerable lives.
A particular focus is the role of both personal and institutional conscience. Evangelium Vitae uses the word “conscience” over 40 times throughout the document.
Pope John Paul II writes about the “eclipse” of conscience within a society. While unable to “cancel” our innate sense about life because “even though conscience does not cease to point to it as a sacred and inviolable value, as is evident in the tendency to disguise certain crimes against life in its early or final stages by using innocuous medical terms which distract attention from the fact that what is involved is the right to life of an actual human person” (n. 4).
In other words, the culture of death not only neglects, ignores or destroys the lives of the vulnerable but it kills the integrity, empathy, honesty and rationality of the rest of society.
The Thomas More Centre was founded in 1989 with the realisation that Australians of all ages needed to be encouraged to develop informed consciences and to delve into those factors that erase individual and cultural conscience.
We hope to join others who will highlight the depth and power of this anniversary.
Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre
