In 2022, when the Supreme Court of the United States ended 50 years of federally protected abortion access, pro-choicers across the world braced themselves. Abortion has been a global battleground for so long, and the far-right forces demanding its abolition are well connected. Reproductive freedom fighters understood the ruling’s emboldening effect on anti-abortion zealots everywhere and knew what could follow.
In Australia, abortion has been a potato too hot for any federal jurisdiction — High Court or Parliament — to touch. It languished in criminal codes of every state and territory until the Australian Capital Territory became the first to decriminalise the procedure in 2002. Lasting decades, determined fights by pro-choice campaigners eventually got the procedure off the crime books through out the country. Western Australia was the last to decriminalise — in 2023!
Abortion is now back in the news. The far-right Katter’s Australian Party announced before the recent state election in Queensland that it would push to repeal the decriminalisation legislation passed in 2018. Mid-October in South Australia (SA), which decriminalised abortion in March 2021, just one vote defeated a bill to prohibit terminations after 28 weeks.
In reporting these events, journalists have brought to light moves at the federal level as well. In 2022, around the time of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, two Liberal Party senators from Queensland and SA joined a Victorian senator from the far-right United Australia Party (UAP) to introduce a “child born alive” protection bill. In 2024 the same UAP senator moved a bill recognising the rights of “babies born alive as a result of a failed abortion” as part of a disinformation offensive. Although both attempts failed, an abortion fight is looming. Just recently rightwing Northern Territory Coalition Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price called for a national debate on abortion.
Late term (post-20 weeks) terminations are less than one percent of abortions in Australia. But anti-abortion politicians and religious groups, such as the Australian Christian Lobby, have grabbed onto terminations in the third trimester for their recriminalisation campaign. The debunked claim of “babies born alive,” peddled by the U.S. movement, will help drive it.
ABC News also recently revealed that, despite decriminalisation, abortion access faces a double jeopardy in rural and regional parts of Australia. Inadequate government funding for women’s reproductive health services is one. An “unspoken ban” on abortion access is another. Some hospitals have silently closed their services due to either a resourcing crisis or “conscientious objection” among some doctors who refuse to perform abortions without referring to an alternative provider, as required by law. The latter cause came out in the ABC’s investigation of a woman’s desperate story. She had travelled a couple of hours to a hospital in Queanbeyan NSW, only to be told her procedure had been cancelled.
In June 2022, cities across Australia came out in solidarity with our U.S. siblings. Melbourne’s 15,000 protesters were trans, cis, non-binary, queer, very angry and ready to fight. The speeches, chants and placards were all clear in their message that this war is about more than abortion, and it’s not only aimed at cis women. Anti-abortionists are attacking the bodily autonomy of all whose reproduction, sexuality, gender identity and very existence they want to restrict and control. Horrific events in U.S. over the past two years have borne this out.
A united counter-offensive could stop this. If you want to talk, get in touch with Freedom Socialist Party or Radical Women.
