Parmar ParmjeetDr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you Mr Chair. I would like to take this opportunity to speak to my Supplementary Order Paper 475. This Supplementary Order Paper is to address one specific concern that I have about this legislation. I thought hard about this issue before putting this Supplementary Order Paper forward because I don't want to see any kind of ethnic profiling happening to address this issue that I am going to talk about and I don't want to see any kind of punitive measures put in place for ethnic communities. As parliamentarians it's our job to ensure that the legislation works for all communities and not leave it to the communities to ensure that the legislation works for them. So this is our opportunity in the committee of the whole House to address the specific concern that I have—that is of sex-selective abortions.This is a reality in the world. Yes sex-selective abortions happen and in some communities they happen more than in others. I want to acknowledge overseas Governments. They have taken all possible measures to ensure that it doesn't happen but it is the mind-set that will take a while to change. So the changes I am proposing here through my Supplementary Order Paper can be put into two groups. The first group is about reducing the 20 weeks' time that is allowed in this legislation for open access to abortion up to 12 weeks and this is in clause 7 inserting new sections 10 and 11. I'm proposing that 20 weeks be amended to 12 weeks.Why? Because when a person is pregnant of course they have to go through several medical tests but at week 18 we know that around that time women undergo an ultrasound scan. That is an important part of medical testing to ensure the wellbeing of the fetus but at that time very easily the gender of the fetus can also be found out and that is actually a normal process in the whole medical care that is provided to a pregnant women. I fully support that; yes women should get all possible tests they should have to ensure the wellbeing of their fetus but that is something that is very easy to do at 20 weeks. So by reducing the time from 20 weeks to 12 weeks it will not be that easy. I'm not saying that the gender of the fetus cannot be detected before 12 weeks but what I'm saying is that it is difficult and by 20 weeks it becomes really easy.So for someone who goes for an ultrasound scan at 18 weeks finds out it is a female fetus—and I'm specifically talking about the mentality that is there to prefer a male child over a female fetus—they then have around two weeks' time to access an abortion. I don't want to see that happening here in New Zealand. The argument that there is no evidence of such abortions happening here in New Zealand in my view is baseless because we haven't gone out to collect that kind of evidence so we don't have any evidence and with this legislation it will become really easy for people to access a sex-selective abortion. So the numbers might increase but it will be really hard for us to know if they have been because of this reason because I don't think people will truthfully declare the reason for the abortion if they seek that abortion after their ultrasound scan at 18 weeks.The second component of my Supplementary Order Paper is to insert a new subsection—this is after new section 20F(1). This is again in clause 7. This says that a qualified health practitioner must refuse to provide fetal ultrasound screening to a person where the qualified health practitioner has reason to believe that the person is undergoing that ultrasound scanning only to find out the sex of a fetus and secondly that that information will be used to go out and get an abortion to ensure that the fetus that is carried to the full term is of a preferred sex.So I have objection to this. In this legislation there is no protection for health practitioners to say no on this ground. So it's really important that we provide this safeguard—this ability to health professionals. We put a lot of responsibility on them and they're the best judge to decide if any kind of medical testing is needed for medical reasons or not. I can fully understand that families when they have a woman that is pregnant get quite anxious and sometimes they want to undergo some testing and it should be the medical practitioner deciding whether that medical testing is required or not. And if the medical practitioner thinks that testing is only to identify the sex of the fetus then they should be able to say no to that.