In the same week that Family Planning Australia marks its 100th year of operation, there will be an attack on women’s health and the doctors and nurses who provide this care, writes FPA CEO Sue Shilbury.
The resurgence of anti-abortion rhetoric not only in NSW, but across the country, has grown into a concentrated and calculated campaign to recriminalise abortion across the nation.
In NSW, this comes in the form of the Abortion Law Reform (Sex Selection Prohibition) Bill 2025, which is expected to return to the Upper House on Wednesday [24th June].
We know abortion policy in NSW already mandates against sex selective abortions for non-medical reasons. The proposed Bill is needless and harmful and pushed by those who oppose all abortions and a woman’s right to choose.
The NSW Bill goes a step further, citing flawed and dated research to further marginalise and typecast some migrant communities as supporting sex selective abortions. Outdated, vague and racist rhetoric is being referenced to support this unnecessary Bill, which suggests fines of up to $44,000 and five years in prison as part of its criminalisation push.
It’s frustrating to see previously debated – and debunked – arguments against abortion resurfacing as a tool to police women’s bodies and rob them of their rights to safe and accessible healthcare.
Despite the noise, the push to make abortion a crime again is a minority view. In fact, repeated polls tell us that around 80 per cent of Australians support a woman’s right to choose.
However, recent developments demonstrate that wins for women’s healthcare cannot be taken for granted. Around Australia, the state parliaments of South Australia and Queensland have been facing similar attacks on healthcare, and many of us watched aghast and in disbelief as rights were taken away in the US in 2022.
Many Australians mistakenly believe that the battles for access to abortion care have been fought and won.
The reality is that uber-conservative US-style politics have landed, and the incessant lobbying is well-funded and working to claw back hard-won gains.
Ill-informed legislation comes to parliaments like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Across the country this includes South Australia, which last week had a Bill aiming to severely restrict late-term abortions pass through the upper house by a slim margin before being immediately debated and voted down in the lower house 36 votes to 9.
In Queensland, similar attacks came against medical abortions in early June, with an attempt to prevent an update to legislation allowing nurses and midwives to prescribe the necessary medications mifepristone and misoprostol. This happened despite a ban on debating abortion in the Queensland Parliament.
In 2019, after 119 long years, abortion was recognised, officially and rightfully, as essential healthcare in NSW and removed from the Crimes Act 1900. Before this, for over a century, the threat of prosecution loomed for health workers and women until the passage of the Abortion Law Reform Act 2019. At Family Planning Australia, we’ve been advocating for women’s rights to safe and accessible reproductive healthcare for almost as long.
We opened our doors in 1926 with 500 pounds and a goal to improve sexual health outcomes for women. Since then, we have walked alongside a changing society, opening Australia’s first birth control clinic in 1933, beginning sex education in the 1940s and helping bring the Pill to Australia in 1961. So, it is galling that in 2026, doctors, nurses and women’s advocates are still forced to push against anti-choice campaigners with no experience or interest in women’s wellbeing, and who seek to wind back access to healthcare.
For all of us, the alarm that hard-won rights for women’s healthcare are once again under attack is ringing. This latest fight in our 100th year should be a clarion call to all that those who oppose your right to access sexual and reproductive healthcare see these attacks on women, doctors and nurses as history-making, pro-life progress. All Australians need to know and be concerned that they will relentlessly pursue your healthcare rights.
The alarms are ringing. How will you respond?