Our Philosophy
The Pregnancy Advisory Centre’s role is to provide high quality care for women and their partners in relation to unplanned pregnancy, mindful of the barriers created by language, culture, ethnicity, religion socioeconomic status, disability, age and location. Services address the management of unplanned pregnancy, the provision of information, decision-making, counselling, abortion and contraception services.
The Centre acknowledges that fertility is not always controllable. There will always be a need for abortion as one of the range of women’s fertility control strategies. This is because of the inherent failure rate of contraceptive methods and because of limited options and access to contraceptive methods in Australia, and Australian culture and attitude towards sexuality.
The Centre is concerned with unplanned pregnancy in its broadest social context as well as with its impact on individual women and their partners. The Centre believes that women’s health status is largely influenced by womens’ position in society, which still does not always allow equal access to economic, social and political resources. Fertility control is crucial to women’s health status and as such abortion is a legitimate part of health service provision.
It is a woman’s right to decide when and how she will control her fertility. We acknowledge that fertility control behaviour is influenced by social, cultural, economic, individual and relationship factors which may be beyond women’s capacity to influence directly.
Societal attitude towards abortion is an inevitable and profound influence on women’s experience of abortion. Abortion services have a responsibility to provide a supportive, non-judgmental environment to counter this often negative influence. The Centre aims to contribute to the abortion experience being a positive one for women and will do this by affirming women’s rights, experience and feelings. The Centre upholds the principles of the Amsterdam Declaration 1995.
