Anti-abortion rhetoric is becoming entrenched in Australian right-wing politics
- Written by: Weekend Times
Earlier this week, Queensland Nationals MP Llew O’Brien introduced a so-called “born alive” bill into the House of Representatives.
On the same day, August 17, the Australian Christian Lobby held an
event on Parliament House lawns. Against a backdrop of 10,000 knitted baby booties arranged into a cross, Australia’s most prominent federal anti-abortion politicians spoke in support of the bill.
Born alive bills originated in the United States in the early 2000s and the issue has been raised in most Australian decriminalisation debates since Victoria in 2008. O’Brien’s resurrection of this topic reveals much about the ambitions of contemporary Australian opponents of abortion.
What does the bill do?
In Australia, abortion is regulated at the state and territory level. This bill would insert the federal government into the equation.
The Human Rights (Children Born Alive Protection) Bill would require the same medical care for a baby born with signs of life following abortion as for any other baby, a situation that is extremely rare. Any failure to provide such care would be a criminal offence.
Every state and territory in Australia has decriminalised abortion. The bill would reintroduce the threat of criminal penalties for abortion providers with respect to care provided after an abortion. It would likely have a chilling effect on doctors’ willingness to provide abortion services.
This is the third time this bill has been introduced in parliament in the past five years, identical to versions from August 2021 and November 2022.
The 2022 bill went to a Senate inquiry, whose report expressed concerns about its impact on healthcare access, constitutional validity and consistency with human rights.
A human rights bill that isn’t
The bill is framed as human rights legislation, purporting to implement Australia’s international treaty obligations under the Constitution’s external affairs power.
It claims to give effect to rights in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
But it is inconsistent with these treaties and the findings of the United Nations bodies that oversee their implementation.
UN bodies have found abortion restrictions breach human rights, including privacy, protection from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, equality and non-discrimination, and the right to life.
Enacting the bill would likely breach Australia’s international obligations. The bill would not meet the requirements of the external affairs power and would likely be constitutionally invalid.
The use of human rights language to support positions inconsistent with human rights norms is no accident.
It mirrors a pattern in anti-abortion action (sometimes called abortion lawfare) in the US and elsewhere.
Scholars argue human rights misappropriations have been “deployed by nationalist, populist, right-wing and authoritarian movements” worldwide.
False narratives
Contemporary born alive bills rest on false narratives.
Supporters vilify abortion providers and frame abortion as barbarism, not health care.
The people who need abortions, meanwhile, are maligned or rendered invisible.
The vast majority of abortions in Australia occur before 20 weeks. About 2% of Australian abortions happen after 20 weeks, typically involving a step to stop the fetal heartbeat first.
Without that step, a fetus may briefly show signs of life. But because their lungs and other organ systems are too immature to sustain life outside the uterus, survival is not possible.
In rare cases, parents skip this step so they can hold their non-viable baby while it dies – a way of grieving, with the baby kept comfortable throughout.
Calling this “born alive” wrongly implies viability.
Read more: Here’s why there should be no gestational limits for abortion
In 2024, MP Ralph Babet moved an urgency motion to have the Senate “recognise that at least one baby is born alive every seven days following a failed abortion and left to die”.
This claim is extrapolated from a single table in Queensland and Victorian perinatal mortality reports (2010–20), which splits deaths after late abortion into “stillbirth” and “neonatal death”.
Advocates treat the latter as “live birth”, turning a routine statistical classification into evidence for something the data wasn’t designed to measure.
Born alive proponents lean on a handful of cases spanning decades (including from the 1970s and 1990s) and international contexts. Most have little relevance to Australian healthcare practices in the 2020s.
Care that already exists
Born alive bills are opposed by peak medical specialist, nursing and midwifery bodies.
Health professionals must already provide care for any baby born alive after abortion, including palliative or “comfort” care.
Proponents of these bills ignore existing clinical guidelines. Victoria’s guideline, for instance, recommends palliative care for babies born before 22 weeks, and “parental discretion” for resuscitation decisions between 22 and 24 weeks.
So why should parental wishes matter for premature birth, but not for abortion?
The born alive narrative erases the pregnant person, reducing them to a passive vessel. One supporter of the 2022 bill told the Senate the pregnant person is the site where the “child in utero” is “spatiotemporally located”.
Statistics about babies born with no chance of survival showing “signs of life” say nothing about the complex and multifaceted drivers of later abortion.
People seek abortion after 20 weeks when they receive new information, such as a fetal anomaly diagnosis, or when barriers such as reproductive coercion or health system delays make earlier care impossible.
A renewed anti-abortion push
Speakers at the Australian Christian Lobby rally included Nationals Leader Matt Canavan, Liberal Alex Antic, and One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce and Malcolm Roberts.
Roberts frames the born alive bill as a move “to take our country back”.
He recently told an audience of conservative Australian Christians he’ll push One Nation to pursue an abortion ban.
Read more: One Nation’s anti-abortion turn shows MAGA’s creeping power in Australia
Canavan and Antic are prominent anti-abortion figures within their parties. With Babet, they co-sponsored the 2022 born alive bill.
Joyce and Antic are current collaborators with anti-abortion influencer Joanna Howe.
Howe is prominently aligned with One Nation. She’s actively attempting to reshape the Nationals and Liberals in New South Wales, where anti-abortion legislation will be voted on in September.
What does all this mean?
Without the support of the government, this born alive bill is all but guaranteed to fail.
But its impact lies in giving conservative federal politicians an arena to directly intervene in abortion debates.
It mainstreams health care and legal misinformation, while amplifying stigmatising rhetoric about abortion.
The discussion entrenches the idea that abortion bills can work for partisan messaging and movement-building, advancing the Americanisation of Australian politics.
And it positions abortion as a unifying cause for key right-wing power brokers across the Liberals, Nationals and One Nation.
Prudence Flowers is currently receiving funding from the Australian Research Council and has received funding from the South Australian Department of Human Services. She is a member of the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition.
Erica Millar receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a member of the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition.
Tania Penovic is senior co-chair for Women and Girls' Rights and an executive committee member of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights.
