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- An abortion access win.
There is some good news to celebrate this week. The NSW government passed an amendment to expand abortion access. The Abortion Law Reform Amendment (Health Care Access) Bill 2025 raised in parliament by the Greens’ Dr Amanda Cohn (and former rural GP) now allows nurse practitioners and registered midwives to prescribe the pills for a medical abortion up to 9 weeks.
It was passed in the Legislative Assembly (lower house), where both NSW Premier Chris Minns and Opposition Leader Mark Speakman allowed Labor and Liberal members a conscience vote on the bill. It was passed with 65 in favour to 20 against – easily surpassing the majority of 45 votes in favour required.
The 20 politicians who voted against expanding abortion access breaks down like this:
11 men and 9 women (mostly Liberal women)
11 Liberals, 2 Nationals, 5 Labor and 2 independents (one of those independents, Judy Hannan, was supported by Climate 200 in the 2023 NSW election, which is of note I think).
It’s a really good thing this amendment was passed, and I wanted to frame the news as a win – because it is. But when you bring in the full context, it’s clear these wins are hard fought and under incredible pressure from people who want to disempower and control women. Let’s dive in.
Background context
Abortion was only decriminalised in NSW in 2019, thanks to the Abortion Law Reform Act which was brought to parliament by independent NSW MP Alex Greenwich. The Act required NSW Health to conduct a review of how the new laws were working within five years. The department began this review in November 2023, and published the report in September 2024. The report made three key recommendations:
Consider allowing nurse practitioners, endorsed midwives and other registered health practitioners to perform medical terminations;
Find ways to better balance the rights of people wanting an abortion with the rights of medical professionals who choose not to perform them (called “conscientious objectors”), and;
Review the requirements for abortion providers to provide data back to NSW Health (for reporting purposes).
After the report was published, it started to become clear how few public hospitals in NSW were providing abortions (thanks in large part to the consistent journalism of the ABC and Guardian Australia). At the end of October 2024, the ABC reported that only two public hospitals in the entire state provide “formal termination services” and that Queanbeyan District Hospital (a public hospital) had an “unspoken” ban on abortions. One week later in early November, the ABC revealed an executive at Orange Hospital (also a public hospital) issued a ban on abortions for people with "no identified pregnancy complications".
NSW Health Minister Ryan Park quickly instructed the hospital to reverse the ban, but it revealed just how limited abortion access is in the state – especially for people living in regional and rural areas. It also revealed how the personal opinions of people involved in and adjacent to the health sector were seeking to influence medical care.
The full Greens bill
The bill that Cohn originally submitted to NSW parliament in February 2025 included amendments to address all of those recommendations:
Allowing nurse practitioners and endorsed midwives to prescribe medical abortions up to nine weeks gestation (this is the only part that was ultimately passed);
Requiring “conscientious objector” medical practitioners to refer the patient to someone else who will provide the abortion;
Giving the Health Minister power to compel public health services / hospitals to ensure they provide abortion services, and ensure abortion services are available within “reasonable distance” of a patient’s home;
Removing some of the reporting requirements which may be a barrier for abortion providers.
As you can see, ultimately only one of these four amendments was passed. Before the bill passed the NSW Legislative Council (upper house) Cohn said: “The bill that we are now voting on is significantly different from the bill I introduced, but I do not think it is a surprise to anyone that the view of the majority of the House is different to the view of The Greens on the matter. The Greens will continue to advocate for the change that is desperately needed, and particularly to hold the Premier accountable to his promise that access will be provided through the public health system, and that it will be funded.”
So what happened to the rest of it?
"Bullying” by forced-birth agitators
I’ve wrote about the anti-abortion stunts pulled last year in South Australia and Queensland, and some of the same names have been involved in spreading misinformation and lobbying NSW politicians to block this Greens bill. Former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott and Catholic archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher attended a protest on the steps of parliament on Wednesday. It was organised by South Australian anti-abortion campaigner Joanna Howe, who was heavily involved in the attempt to legally force birth in SA (she helped Liberal MP Ben Hood draft his bill, which was thankfully blocked).
Howe was banned from the SA upper house after several complaints by politicians that she was using threats and intimidation to coerce them into supporting Hood’s bill. She used the same tactics against politicians in NSW, making political threats against both Chris Minns and Liberal leader Mark Speakman. Speakman said he “will not cave to brazen bullying like this nor to the Americanisation of NSW” in response to Howe’s antics.
Regardless, heated debate in the NSW lower house ended up stripping out everything else from the bill, passing only a singular amendment. Anti-abortion advocates are celebrating that as a win, particularly eliminating the requirement for anti-abortion medical professionals to refer a person in need to someone else who can help. During the debate in parliament, Liberal MP Ben Rath compared abortion to the Holocaust (he apologised afterwards for making an “unintended” comparison).
So while, yes, it’s a great thing that abortion in NSW is now a bit more accessible, it comes alongside increasingly determined opposition. Australians overwhelmingly support a woman’s right to choose, and for abortion services to be available accordingly. And yet the forced birth movement are getting inspiration and strategy ideas from the US, where 30-year-old Adriana Smith currently lies in a Georgia hospital, being kept on life support against her family’s wishes.
Three months ago, Adriana suffered a blood clot in her brain – by the time the ambulance arrived at the hospital, she was brain dead. She was also in the very early stages of pregnancy. So under the state’s “heartbeat law” (which bans abortion as soon as a heartbeat is detected) Adriana was put on life support as a human incubator to keep the foetus alive, and will likely remain so for another three months until the baby is viable on its own. Adriana’s family says because of Adriana’s medical emergency they’ve been told the baby is likely to be born with serious disabilities and may not survive. Regardless, the family will be responsible for paying for the potentially 6 months of medical treatment Adriana is receiving, though she will also die once the baby is delivered.
It might sound like an extreme situation, but the dystopian laws that allow this are very similar to the ones Robbie Katter proposed for Queensland last year.
We should celebrate the wins like this week’s NSW laws, and stay vigilant to the folks in and around politics who are trying to wrench our rights from us.
Smart stuff on the Internet 💭
All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:
‘It’s about life and dance and colour’: inclusivity still in fashion on Australian runways on Guardian Australia
By one of my favourite new fashion writers, Lucienne Tonti. “Drawing from their community allows Katie-Louise and Lilian Nicol-Ford – the married couple behind Nicol & Ford – to build a sense of intimacy and energy that’s impossible to replicate with a casting call. “When you see someone on a dancefloor in the early hours of the morning, you often see their purest and most liberated form,” they say. The duo try to capture that confidence and presence by putting it on the runway. Casting friends again and again has also engendered trust between model and designer.”
Did Advance sway the election? On the Electioncast podcast
I speak to one of my favourite Australian journalists Cam Wilson about what right wing lobby Advance tried to achieve in this election by running an aggressive, multi-million dollar campaign against progressive MPs like Max Chandler-Mather and Alex Dyson.
Nicol and Ford’s ‘Parrhesia’ was a tribute to the queer trailblazers who came before on Fashion Journal
The creativity of the Nicol and Ford show really stirred something within me – I can’t stop thinking about the dress that looks like ripped flesh. “It’s clear Nicol and Ford’s designs are an act of political resistance. The presentation closes with an eerily flesh-like gown made of latex, fit perfectly to the body of model (and legendary trans actor) Janet Anderson. Naarm-based fabricator Julian Dimarse custom-matched the latex pieces to the skin tone of each model, a process that took hours per piece. ‘[We] wanted to … close [the show] with a provocation of permanence; to think of a trans body as self-affirming through evolution, and growing its own skin and own presence as time goes on’.”
Larissa Waters vows politics with ‘heart’ – but don’t expect compromise on core Greens principles on Guardian Australia
Good initial analysis of what a new leader could mean for the Greens. “To expect Waters’ Greens to radically depart from Bandt’s Greens would be to misunderstand how the party views the election result. The public postmortem into the party’s campaign has been conducted largely by its critics – including Labor and rightwing lobby group Advance – which have cast the Greens’ loss of three lower seats as a rejection of their “extreme” positions, particularly on Gaza. The Greens, in public and private, simply do not accept this narrative.”