Twenty-four years ago I thought oral contraceptives should be cheaper and more available to reduce the pain and suffering of 100,000 abortions per year. ("Public hospital abortions and cheaper contraceptives needed, inquiry finds", Age 26/5). My wife had an expensive Little Collins St abortion with a previous boyfriend.
I started a crude website with online ordering called CrowdedPlanet in Wollongong. Business boomed, doubling every three months, with customers in 40 countries, including NZ, USA, Japan, Ukraine and Bulgaria. For my troubles, the ACCC used 16 solicitors and 2 barristers to jail me for seven years - 2001-2008, urged on by US Big Pharma. I was a sole trader but the ACCC said I was a corporation.
Why is change so slow in Australia? Profit margins are much higher on abortions than on Pill prescriptions. Hard line reactionaries within Jewish, Christian and Muslim churches are still powerful . Treasury economists and giant consultants like KPMG, EY and PwC still believe in their religion of population growth for ever. Plague species Homo sapiens has added two billion people since 1999. Curiously, the environmental lobby, and the climate change lobby still choose to ignore human numbers.
This article was originally submitted as a letter to a newspaper under the heading, "Multinational business does not want the pill to be cheaper."
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