A pro-life professor has blasted the ABC’s treatment of a Western Australia Liberal Party candidate who said the state’s abortion laws should be reviewed.
Candidate for Albany Tom Brough, an emergency room doctor and local councillor, made the remarks in response to a question at a press conference alongside Liberal leader Libby Mettam on Saturday, saying “babies born alive should not be left to die”.
ABC News, which a week earlier attacked Dr Brough over factual statements he made last year that the plus in LGBTQ+ included paedophiles, called his abortion comments “an unwelcome distraction” for his party in an unbalanced article later that day.
The report prompted prominent pro-life activist Dr Joanna Howe to record a video shared with her almost 30,000 Facebook followers on Sunday evening defending Dr Brough, who she called a “hero”, and describing the article as a “stitch up”.
“Finally a politician with a spine,” she said at the beginning of her video.
“He was asked a question about whether he thought WA abortion laws should be reviewed, and he just answered the damn question and said ‘babies should not be left to die after their abortion’.
“It’s a sentiment that 99% of West Australians would agree with, yet it took courage to say it because Liberal Party HQ, like Labor Party HQ, gags its members from saying anything that could draw any attention to the human rights of these babies.”
She went on to say that there have been 31 newborns who survived their abortions in Western Australia but have been left to die without any rights to medical care since abortion became legal in the state in 1998.
“Tom Brough said what any normal, decent human being would say,” Dr Howe said, and added in her video caption that she hoped other politicians would be inspired to speak out also.
In 2018 Western Australia Liberal Party MP Nick Goiran called for an inquiry into the then-27 babies who were born with signs of life after abortions but left to die with no record of resuscitation or medical intervention.
“As soon as you’re born live, you are entitled to all of the same rights and privileges as any other Western Australian citizen,” he told WA Today at the time.
“The fact that the abortion resulted in a live birth doesn’t mean that you have less rights and privileges as any other prematurely born baby.
“That’s just a statement of law and that law needs to be adhered to.”
A week before his abortion comments ABC News published another article on Dr Brough revealing that he had been referred to a tribunal for alleged professional misconduct over his statements about paedophiles being linked to the LGBT+ coalition.
Dr Brough said in a statement that the referral had been leaked by his political opponents, and that he would “respect due process and let the facts speak for themselves”.
The ABC article stated that Dr Brough “falsely linked the LGBTQIA+ community with paedophiles”, but gay rights activists and queer theory academics have long included “minor-attracted persons” in their coalition, which adds the “+” symbol to the acronym LGBTQ because it is expanding too fast to include every so-called sexuality or sexual orientation.
As far back as 1974, a group of “paedophile rights” activists claimed to be an oppressed sexual minority in the UK, and lobbied for the age of consent to be abolished.
In 2015, homosexual Norwegian professor Ole Martin Moen, who is on an advisory board for a trans rights lobby group, wrote in an academic paper that paedophilia should be treated as a sexual orientation and taught in schools.
And another homosexual scholar, Allyn Walker, who claims to be “transgender”, wrote a book in 2021 linking queer theory and paedophilia, and argued in a PhD thesis that men should be allowed to view child sex abuse material.
Dr Brough apologised for his comments after winning Liberal Party pre-selection in May, but was ordered to undergo “inclusivity training” by council in June.
However, he refused to comply, saying at the time that while he would not criticise a decision of council, he believed that the order amounted to “forced re-education by government bureaucracy” that had no place in a democracy.
Noticer News contacted Dr Brough for comment.
Header image: Left, Tom Brough and Libby Mettam. Right, Dr Joanna Howe (Facebook).
