Anti-abortion activists target reproductive rights in Australia

The headline act at a Sydney anti-abortion rally being held on Tuesday in support of Libertarian MP John Ruddick’s bill to restrict abortion will not be Ruddick.

It will be the One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce.

Joyce left the Nationals last year, not long after he was rebuked for his statements about abortion.

The dramatic rise in the polls of his new party has given fresh impetus to a loose network of anti-abortion groups trying to chip away at reproductive rights.

Since abortion was decriminalised in all states and territories almost three years ago, there has been a slew of attempts to wind back access.

Bills have been brought by different parties and independents in several states, aiming to reduce access in a variety of ways, including banning late-term abortions (which are rare and often heartbreaking), mandating medical care for babies “born alive” after abortions (experts have called such claims misleading) and banning sex-selective abortions.

Those three themes are echoed by a range of rightwing, religious anti-abortion activists.

They also form part of One Nation’s policy to “seek every opportunity to roll back brutal and extreme abortion law”.

Prudence Flowers, a senior lecturer in US history at Flinders University, says the resemblance is not a coincidence.

“One of the reasons these policies are similar … is that the Australian anti-abortion movement is explicitly looking at historical measures in the US,” she says.

“The reason it seems so coordinated is that there is that playbook people can look to.”

In the US, this incremental approach to tackle abortion rights from multiple directions culminated in Roe v Wade being overturned in 2022 and continues now with states implementing abortion bans.

Since then, it has become harder to get healthcare for miscarriages, to access fertility treatments and for obstetrician/gynaecologists to practise, and there has been a rise in infant mortality and pregnancy-related deaths.

Attempts to change abortion law

In South Australia, the former One Nation MP Sarah Game has proposed legislation to ban abortion after 25 weeks, even in cases of severe foetal abnormalities.

The three newly elected One Nation representatives in the 22-member upper house may help it pass, although it is doubtful it would also get through the Labor-dominated lower house.

In Queensland, the Katter’s Australian party MP Robbie Katter has introduced a disallowance motion aimed at stopping nurses and midwives prescribing medical abortions, known as MS-2 Step.

Twenty organisations, including Children by Choice, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Midwives and MSI Australia, released an open letter on Monday saying those practitioners were often the only timely option available to people outside major cities, and that any delay did not prevent abortions but made them “harder, later and more complex”.

In NSW, Ruddick is using an Edith Cowan University study that found indirect evidence that some migrant communities prefer boys to girls, using data from 1994 to 2015, to argue for his bill to ban sex-selective abortion.

But a 2020 NSW Health review found sex selection happened “rarely”. Of 15,973 abortions in the year to September 2020, 13 were done for sex selection, it reported.

Of those, 10 were “likely to be reporting errors” as they were done at less than nine weeks, when “there is no readily available and reliable way of determining gender”.

Ruddick insists “gender selection abortions are happening” and the law is needed to send a message it is not acceptable.

“If a mother still wants to abort because of their child’s sex they can obviously say it’s for any other reason and no one will know, but the law will have a positive ripple effect in cementing into our culture that baby boys and baby girls are of equal value,” he says.

Tuesday’s event in Sydney has been organised by the activist Joanna Howe, who is calling it a rally for “Ruth and Emma”, the names she attached to an image of what she thought were fetuses, but that turned out to be baby sugar gliders.

Howe has worked with state and federal MPs on legislation to reduce access to abortion. She believes all abortion should be banned, and that “everybody involved” should face criminal penalties.

Pauline Hanson has appeared several times on the podcast Howe hosts with her husband, James Howe. Howe told her large social media following to vote for One Nation in the Farrer byelection, even though Hanson has said she is not against abortion in the first trimester – an exemption not mentioned in the party’s formal policy.

Flowers says people “should be alarmed” at the number of measures proposed by activists.

“The pace of activity has really intensified.

“We have had multiple anti-abortion initiatives and protests across multiple jurisdictions. The purpose of this incrementalism is to position it as something that should be subject to political debate, which traditionally in Australia politicians have avoided.

“It’s normalising the idea.”

The Australian College of Midwives (ACM) has said in a statement it was “alarmed” by moves to restrict abortion and that any such restriction “creates real harm for real women”.

The chief executive of MSI Australia (previously Marie Stopes), Adurty Rao, describes them as “attempts to disrupt decades of progress toward women’s rights”.

“Misinformation campaigns will not deter our mission to deliver essential care to women and pregnant people seeking critical abortion services,” she says.

One Nation was contacted for comment.