Attempts by conservative forces to whittle back abortion rights in NSW, South Australia and Queensland have all been defeated for now. But what’s behind these efforts and what is at stake?

In the 19th century, each state and territory inherited a version of the British criminal or penal code. All contained some kind of offence of “illegal abortion” with most not stipulating what in particular made abortion illegal. However, all of them formed a framework of prohibition that (like alcohol prohibition) gave rise to illicit, often dangerous, abortion provision and corruption.

At least in some places, abortion providers (sometimes doctors, sometimes not) paid off police to look the other way when abortions were performed. That extended to not investigating deaths and injuries resulting from the absence of safe surgical methods and the fear of prosecution, which prevented treatment for complications.

According to one of my gynaecology lecturers, it was typical in those days for about a third of the patients of a hospital gynaecology ward to be suffering complications from a “backyard” abortion.

Alongside the suffering that came from unsafe, illegal abortion, the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, with its demands for safe, legal abortion, created the impetus for change.

Each state and territory underwent its own specific path, but the overall trajectory has been the expansion of safe services and the liberalisation of abortion law. Typically, the safe medical services came first, followed by case law as courts handed down rulings confirming a widening list of criteria that could be used to determine that a given abortion was legal.

Most recently, each state and territory has removed abortion from their respective criminal codes. Each has enacted laws permitting abortion by the decision of the pregnant person up to the time of foetal viability, with restrictions thereafter giving doctors the final say on whether a physical or mental health condition affects the pregnant person, or foetus, that makes abortion warranted.

Since decriminalisation, many more General Practitioners (GPs) now provide medical abortion (prescribing medication to bring about miscarriage — generally........

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