Australia is not immune to repressive abortion laws

Some misinformed rubbish has been said about abortion in the past week, as the Australian media, public and politicians react to the sudden loss of American women’s constitutional right to abortion. According to one academic featured on the ABC, it was “highly unlikely that abortion laws in Australia would be reconfigured in the way they are in the US … we are a broadly pro-choice country. Most polling puts us at about 80% or more support for abortion.”

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus agreed, based on a historical understanding of the abortion rights landscape in this country that bears no resemblance to reality. As he told the ABC’s Law Report, “I think we can feel very fortunate in Australia that abortion has decades ago stopped being a matter of public debate.”

Let’s take it from the top. The US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade returned decisions about regulating abortion to the states. This is exactly how we regulate abortion here in Australia. State by state and territory by territory.

In the wake of Roe v Wade’s demise, roughly half of US states have or will criminalise the procedure or ban it altogether. Currently in Australia, most states and territories have pulled abortion out of criminal law. WA is the exception, a state that also needs reforms to its cruel and outdated system for determining women’s “eligibility” for a safe procedure at later gestations. However, like the rest of the states and territories, WA does have safe access zone legislation in place, along with every other Australian territory and state.

Could any of this change? Obviously, yes. All we need is to elect a government with someone like Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce or Matt Canavan at the helm, and foot soldiers like Amanda Stoker, Fred Nile and Bernie Finn and Bob’s your uncle: abortion is back on the political agenda again.

How likely is this to happen? It’s hard to guess, as political polling tells you literally nothing about the odds. For one, most Americans support legal abortion and vote on the issue (far more than Australians do). We don’t, and because of this we have been electing politicians who are more religiously conservative than we are on abortion and voluntary assisted dying for decades.

Indeed, the most likely reason that Australian women don’t currently have much to fear from a state-based reversal of our reproductive fortunes is because state-based activists only completed the task of pulling abortion out of the criminal law last year. Western Australia went first in 1998, the ACT followed in 2002, then Victoria in 2008, Tasmania in 2013, the Northern Territory in 2017, Queensland in 2018, NSW in 2019 and South Australia in 2021. In the ACT, women were forced to fight off a so-called “Right to Know” bill, while in NSW they had to defeat a “Fetal Personhood” one before taking on decriminalisation.

As the attorney-general must know, there was considerable public discord around all these legislative battles, with anti-choice Australians fighting to retain the century-old provisions consistent with their religious beliefs, spreading disinformation about the safety of the surgical and medical terminations, and doing all in their power to reinforce the stigma surrounding the procedure. For example, while we taped over their shouting, anti-choice protesters used megaphones to disrupt an anti-stigma flashmob that Reproductive Choice organised in Melbourne’s Federation Square in 2012.

The bottom line? Just because you’ve won the fight doesn’t mean that fight is over. If what has befallen women’s right to choose in the United States doesn’t teach you that, nothing will. It’s a lesson that those defending the rights of Australian women to choose would do well to remember.