Abigail said:

I contribute to the debate on the wretched Abortion Law Reform Amendment (Sex Selection Prohibition) Bill 2025. As has been made clear in this place in debate on various bills relating to abortion over the years, The Greens have a collective evidence-based policy position on abortion as determined by our membership, and we neither need nor want a conscience vote on this bill. It is perplexing to me that other parties treat it differently. That said, I personally endorse our policy, and I support the comments of my colleague Dr Amanda Cohn and join her in vehemently opposing this bill.

Make no mistake, this bill is an attack on women and girls and on the rights we have fought so hard over decades to achieve. At its core, this bill and those like it across Australia and the world right now are designed to set back our reproductive rights and are rooted in misogyny. As Ebony Bennett of the Australia Institute recently wrote:

We can see what this leads to. When abortion is banned or severely restricted, women die. When politicians insert themselves between the decision of a woman and her doctor, when doctors fear prosecution for providing basic healthcare, women die, more women experience severe medical complications and many women have their future fertility compromised by not being able to access the care they need when they need it.

Despite the far right's attempts to import United States tactics to Australian shores, the vast majority of Australians support abortion. In recent polls, just 8 per cent opposed it outright. Notably, support is highest in rural areas.

Abortion is legal in all Australian States and Territories. But rather than seek to overturn that position in its entirety, the strategy being deployed by the likes of the Libertarian Party and One Nation is incrementalism—to slowly chip away at our rights while keeping abortion in the political spotlight. The playbook is simple: Seize upon a scenario that simply is not happening, harness outrage about that scenario, then argue for strict measures to be put in place to prevent it and in the process make abortion harder to access. So it is with the anti-choice movement in South Australia, where the spectre of late-term abortions has been raised. We dealt with this ludicrous idea that women are somehow aborting full-term babies or choosing a late-term abortion on a whim—when, of course, late‑term abortions are rare and heartbreaking—comprehensively when we had our drawn-out debate on legalising abortion here in New South Wales in 2019. It is not happening, but, by suggesting it is and trying to ban it, we cause real harm to people trying to access abortions at a late stage due to genuine medical need.

The South Australian bill—thankfully defeated, again—would have seen abortion after 25 weeks banned even in cases of severe foetal abnormalities. Here we are in New South Wales with a bill to ban sex-selective abortions when, of course, there is zero evidence this is happening at all. Again, we have had this debate in this place before and, just to put it all beyond doubt, a review was commissioned that proved the point. But, so the manipulative argument goes, it just needs to be a possibility or to have even one example of it happening for us to feel compelled to take steps to rule it out. If we are opposed to the idea of someone aborting a foetus because of its sex characteristics then, the argument goes, we should not be opposed to legislation that stops it. At best, we are supposed to be indifferent.

But what the proponents of this argument do not go on to say, of course, is that real and not just theoretical harm will result from passing the legislation. What they do not tell you is that passing the legislation will put up yet another hurdle for those accessing an abortion, yet another point in time where their motives will be questioned and they will fail to get the support they need when they need it. Perhaps most perniciously, there is a nasty, racist element to this particular bill, because it is people from particular cultures and backgrounds who are more likely to be presumed to engage in sex-selective abortion and more likely to be questioned on their motives when they seek to engage in their right to reproductive health care. As my colleague Dr Amanda Cohn wrote in Women's Agenda, there is no evidence of sex-selective abortions occurring, but, as she also wrote:

There is evidence, though, that criminalising sex-selective abortions harms women. It restricts access to healthcare, subjecting women to racial and cultural profiling and turns doctors into police.

When they are speaking to people like you and me, those advocating for this bill may not be complementing their emotive argument about sex-selective abortions with factual information about the resulting and disproportionate obstacles that this bill will create for people seeking reproductive health care. But they certainly are aware of it because that is, of course, the point. They want these obstacles to exist, not just for the non-existent cohort of people who would otherwise, they say, engage in sex-selective abortion, but for all people wanting to abort a pregnancy because they oppose all abortion.

Rather than just be honest and say that—because they know the vast majority of the public do not agree with them—they use bills like this one and the one in South Australia to attempt to chip away at a woman's right to choose. It is dishonest, misogynistic and, in this particular case, racist to boot. Well done to the Libertarian Party. It has outdone itself and is giving One Nation a run for its money when it comes to pretending to be a party for ordinary people while peddling the elite divisive talking points of the Make America Great Again movement and its billionaires. As Hannah Ferguson wrote forCheek Media:

Winding back reproductive rights doesn't begin with outright bans or re-criminalisation. These far-right campaigns rely on amplifying lies, distorting truth and manufacturing fear. This isn't just political rhetoric, these are concerted information campaigns with significant financial backing from bad faith actors.

She goes on to astutely note:

These campaigns are about money and power, and how women's bodies can be legislated to get closer to it.

The reality is that, while abortion is legal, it is not yet accessible and delays to access can be the difference between requiring a medical abortion or a surgical abortion. This is particularly stark for people living in regional and rural areas who usually still need to spend considerable time and expense to travel to a city to access an abortion. If members care about women in the regions, they would not support this bill. Pregnancy is risky and medical complications are common. Pregnant people can develop life-threatening illnesses and there can be myriad reasons why a person—even a person previously opposed to abortion—decides to choose an abortion. Abortion is health care and the decision of whether to abort a pregnancy should be made by the person who is pregnant and their medical professionals, not by meddling politicians who think they know better. We know how disastrous things can become when obstacles are put in the way of timely abortions.

In the United States, following the overturning of Roe v Wade and the creeping introduction of bans in various states, we already have evidence of the horrors that await us if we follow the far right down this path. In Texas, the sepsis rate in second-trimester pregnancy-loss hospitalisations has risen more than 50 per cent. There have been dozens more pregnancy-related deaths in hospitals, miscarriage care has worsened and there has been an increase in neonatal deaths, particularly those involving congenital abnormalities. Abortion in Australia is legal, but we still have such a long way to go in ensuring that abortion in our country is free and accessible for all. As Ebony Bennett put it, Australian women deserve so much better than to be a political lightning rod for the far-right movement. Bills like this, and the politicians who put them forward, deserve our disdain and should be thoroughly rejected. I oppose the bill.

Read the debate in Hansard here.

24 June 2026