Peta Credlin: Sorry, Gladys. The abortion bill will haunt you forever

I don’t know what’s more gutless: Trying to ram through abortion laws or hiding in her office, refusing to even speak on the bill that will now come to define Gladys Berejiklian’s time as premier, writes Peta Credlin.

Now that Premier Gladys Berejiklian has rammed Australia’s most radical abortion laws through the NSW lower house, what’s next from the NSW Liberal government: Is it assisted suicide; is it genderless birth-certificates; or is it something else stitched up with left-wing independent Alex Greenwich who seems to have an uncanny hold over the Premier?

Voters re-elected the Berejiklian state government in March because they thought it would run public schools and hospitals well, keep building the infrastructure a growing state needs, support the police and resist the extremes of political correctness.

Likewise, voters re-elected the Scott Morrison federal government, in part, because they thought it would protect religious freedom. This is why what’s happened in NSW, where the Coalition has aligned with the green-left, is so dangerous for the Liberal-National brand right around the Australia.

MORE FROM PETA CREDLIN: Why are we terminating 80,000 pregnancies a year?

The statistics from Thursday night’s vote spell ongoing division for the Berejiklian government. Almost two-thirds of Liberal MPs voted against the bill co-sponsored by Health Minister Brad Hazzard. But their leader didn’t. The optics will haunt her, with the majority of her own colleagues sitting on one side of the chamber while she sat on the other, with Labor, Green, independent — and, sadly, yes — National Party.

To her shame, as the first elected female NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian voted against what should have been an utterly unobjectionable amendment to make abortion for sex selection illegal. Picture: AAP Image/Dean Lewins

No that’s not a typo. Other than the Greens, the party that was most supportive of legislation to make abortion legal right up to the day of birth was the once-conservative National Party, that seems in, NSW at least, to have been taken over by a cabal of socially progressive refugees from the far left of the Liberal Party.

Where did the steady and predictable Gladys Berejiklian go?

I don’t know what’s more gutless: Trying to ram through abortion laws that were never raised during the state election less than five months ago; or hiding in your office, refusing to even speak on the bill that will now come to define your time as premier. Why?

The Premier voted against every single amendment designed to give some protection to supposedly unwanted babies, except for one: To have a survey in 12 months’ time on whether abortion is being used for sex selection. And what a pointless bureaucratic response a survey is when no one will want to admit that they destroyed their otherwise healthy child because it didn’t fit with a nursery already painted blue.

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To her shame, as the first elected female premier NSW, Berejiklian voted against what should have been an utterly unobjectionable amendment to make abortion for sex selection illegal. She voted against an amendment requiring doctors to treat (rather than leave-to-die) a baby born alive after an attempted abortion.

As women, the failure to make sex selection terminations illegal should particularly horrify us as we’re the gender most discarded.

So much for the sisterhood. Pro-abortion protesters don’t seem bothered by the amendment for gender-selection abortion. Picture: Saeed Khan / AFP

Is this really what we want for our country? It wasn’t that long ago that feminists marched in the street against the practice of infanticide of baby girls, particularly in India and China; yet today, the same protesters stand with placards outside the NSW parliament hoping to do the same thing here.

As far as political errors go, this is epic and will haunt the Premier for the rest of her time in public office. As inevitably they do, the media will move on but her colleagues and the Liberal Party’s core supporters will never forget, or forgive, this fundamental breach of trust.

You don’t elect a Liberal government to do Labor things; yet this bill, assuming that it makes it through the upper house without extensive further amendment, is exactly the kind of radical social engineering that has alienated the Labor Party from so many tradition-minded workers and families that take religion seriously.

Peta Credlin is host on Sky News Australia.