While the abortion rate in Australia has remained fairly steady in recent years, the powerful abortion lobby has not stopped its attempts to make it even easier, cheaper and more convenient for mothers to have their unwanted babies put to death.
There are estimated to be around 100,000 abortions committed in Australia every year, with about half of those achieved by the chemical regimen of mifepristone, also known as RU-486, and misoprostol. In Australia, this protocol is manufactured and sold by Marie Stopes International as ‘MS-2 Step’.
While the relatively stringent protections surrounding surgical abortions, such as doctor-only provision and a monitoring period after the procedure, remain in place, chemical abortions are almost entirely unregulated. In 2023, the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Act) sought to bring Australia into line with other higher-income nations and removed restrictions on who can prescribe and dispense mifepristone and misoprostol. The current gestational limit for the use of MS-2 Step is 63 days.
Prescribing drugs instead of performing surgical abortions makes life easier for abortion providers, as there is less effort and minimal followup; in many cases, women who experience side-effects are directed to go straight to their local emergency department rather than return to the abortion practitioner.
Despite the availability of the abortion pill, and the general acceptance of abortion by our society, Australian states are experiencing a universal push for abortion expansion. Fuelled largely by the Greens party, at the heart of this push is a diabolical industry which is never content, no matter how many babies it kills.
A new bill for New South Wales
A proposed amendment to the New South Wales abortion law is on the table and it sets a dangerous precedent for the conscience rights of medical professions and institutions. If successful, the Abortion Law Reform Amendment (Health Care Access) Bill 2025 would force pro-life health professionals to refer for abortions. It also seeks to force the Minister for Health to ensure that every woman in New South Wales can easily access an abortion and that abortion is widely, publicly promoted by LHDs (Local Health Districts).
Amanda Cohn, the MLC who has proposed the bill, is a doctor and when in practice, aborted babies via the abortion pill. Cohn, a member of the radically pro-abortion Greens Party, believes that abortion must be ’embedded within mainstream public health services’ in order to guarantee its availability in Australia.
Consistent with the new TGA policy, the bill seeks to expand the number of medical professionals who are able to provide abortions. The existing law allows for ‘medical practitioners’ while the proposed law would enable endorsed midwives, nurse practitioners and other nominated registered health practitioners to prescribe the abortion pill up to 9 weeks gestation.
The bill is very short and there are some sections that seemingly haven’t been thought through adequately. Schedule 1-[5] aims “to expand the class of health practitioners who may perform a termination on a person who is not more than 22 weeks pregnant.” Just who will be authorised to perform these abortions isn’t clear at all. If as it reads now, Health Practitioners who are not doctors appear to qualify then what safeguards will be put in place? Surely they don’t want to take us back to the “backyard abortion” days? FLI attempted to contact Dr. Cohn to have this section explained, but has received no response at the time of publishing.
Killing Babies is healthcare?
Cohn’s website explains the details of her bill and her philosophy of abortion as healthcare:
“At least first-trimester surgical abortions should be provided at every public hospital in NSW that provides reproductive health services, by tying service provision to funding. If a hospital provides birthing services and can support someone experiencing a miscarriage, it can provide abortion. This will not only address the postcode lottery but also provide a level of privacy for people who may not feel comfortable or safe accessing a standalone reproductive health service.
“GPs should be supported to become medical abortion prescribers, so that people can access comprehensive reproductive health care in the community from a professional they already know and trust. This is medically straightforward but currently requires GPs to undertake additional training, unpaid and in their free time, because it is not a standard part of their training.”
Cohn is also calling for the removal of mandatory reporting obligations for practitioners. This requires abortions to be reported to the Secretary of the Ministry of Health within 28 days, which inexplicably, Cohn links to doctors not wanting to provide abortions. Cohn told the ABC that mandatory reporting ” is quite unnecessary and they can be a barrier for some health practitioners wanting to become abortion providers.”
Another concerning section of the bill explicitly demands that departments and institutions be forced to provide abortion services. This means that if a hospital is not able to source an abortionist, then its pro-life staff may be forced to be involved in the taking of an unborn human life.
Cohn’s proposal that mandatory reporting by abortion providers be discontinued is in direct conflict with suggestions contained in the 5-year abortion law reform review. The review’s Report, published last September, recommended that “The Ministry of Health review the data notification requirements to consider how this may be improved to ensure data is consistently reported and of sufficient quality, to support service planning and, if necessary, update”
Canberra is the model for Australia
The proposed New South Wales laws would allow it to conform with more permissive abortion laws already existing in other states. Victoria’s abortion law has included a conscience-violating clause since 2008; Tasmania since 2013.
The ACT introduced a similar amendment last year, as part of its ‘accessible abortions scheme’, forcing pro-life medical practitioners to violate their consciences by referring patients to another practitioner who will provide an abortion or at least providing information so that patients can find one themselves.
The first part of the ‘accessible abortions scheme’, which came in April 2023. made abortions free for ACT residents, even if they are not covered by Medicare. Thus immigrants are able to access free abortions if they live in Canberra! Under the same scheme, residents can receive long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC’s) which apart from being harmful to women, have the potential to cause abortions.
The similarity between abortion laws in the various states, indicates that the long-term goal of the abortion lobby is to have every state and territory mimic the ACT: the end game is to have free abortions for everyone with medical staff and hospitals being forced to provide them.
Pregnancy Support is Decreasing
The NSW bill comes at a time when it is becoming more difficult for women to access pregnancy support; some private hospitals are no longer able to provide maternity services. Healthscope, Australia’s second largest hospital operator, has just announced that its hospitals in Darwin and Hobart are closing their maternity departments. By contrast, Hobart Private, Healthscope’s Hobart facility, will continue to provide abortions to 26 weeks.
Citing population decline and inability to secure practitioners, Healthscope and the wider private hospital industry are hoping for more government funding to enable them to maintain services. It is concerning that under the influence of pro-abortion politicians like those found in the Greens Party, increased funding will almost certainly be tied to abortion provision.
Workforce shortages are currently affecting many medical departments (due in part to mass sackings under COVID vaccine mandates) and the Financial Review reports that maternity and mental health services are suffering the most. It is ironic to think that as the fertility rate decreases, the abortion services which play so large a role in demographic decline are set to expand. To add a cruel twist, the mental health services essential for the healing of post-abortive mothers, are also shrinking.
Unintended consequences
Women’s Health Tasmania has begun to unwittingly highlight the reality of the harm done to women through abortion by providing its own brand of post-abortion support. The programme doesn’t acknowledge the intrinsic harm caused by an abortion, nor the fact that a baby is deliberately killed, rather it seems designed to make mothers feel peaceful about having their children put to death.
Yet, this is really an admission that many women feel so emotionally scarred by their abortion that they require outside assistance to deal with the aftermath. It is likewise a subtle confession of one unintended consequence of terminating a child’s life: the guilt that threatens to overshadow a post-abortive mother’s feeling of relief or empowerment.
In the face of this onslaught of abortion expansion comes a new cause for alarm. The pro-life organisation Students for Life have just discovered that residue from the abortion drug, mifepristone, is being found in drinking water in the US. This constitutes a ‘forever chemical’ and violated America’s EPA standards. The effect this poison is having on female and male fertility across the population can only be imagined.
FLI are currently sponsoring a prayerful vigil on Saturday mornings through lent right outside NSW Parliament House and just 20 metres away from 2 abortion mills. The “safe access” zone legislation in NSW allows for “protests” outside Parliament House; this means this is the closest you can get to an abortion mill anywhere in Australia. Join us if you can.
