Last month I sat on the toilet seat staring down at the cheapest pregnancy test I could find at the supermarket. My mind went blank. I knew before the white strip could tell me. I was pregnant.
I live in Sydney. Abortion was decriminalised in New South Wales in 2019. It is almost five years to the day that my healthcare decision hasn’t been legislated under our criminal code. As Australia takes agonisingly slow steps forward, the US regresses faster than someone can say “I have concepts of a plan”. The supreme court’s reinstatement of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban this week affirms this.
I dropped the test in the sink and walk out to my laptop. I opened my phone to my period-monitoring app and tracked my gestation. I counted five weeks and six days. I am not afraid a prosecutor will subpoena that information to build a criminal case against me. I am able to book a medical abortion in a week. I do not need to cross state lines to legally access this healthcare. I am not terrified that my browser history will be scoured by investigators. While abortion is not affordable, the accessibility still feels surreal.
My abortion is the result of failed contraception. The decision to terminate my pregnancy is simple for me. I take a medication that causes high rates of birth defects in babies. This risk would not matter to the lawmakers in Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Idaho, South Dakota or at least 10 other US states. While some jurisdictions make murky exceptions for the life of a mother, none with bans in force allow for the termination of a pregnancy due to the risk of infant mortality.
Let me be clear: I would make the same choice if this medication were not a factor. My age, my relationship and employment status should not define the level of regret or embarrassment I feel about this choice. My abortion is acceptable simply because it is a decision I made. The ability to make this decision about my body and future is something I do not want to feel secretive or destabilised about. I am thankful.
Last month the South Australian Liberal MP Ben Hood tried to amend the state’s abortion laws to require women to undergo an induced birth and put the baby up for adoption after 27 weeks and six days. South Australian Health data tells us that in 2023 fewer than five abortions were performed after 27 weeks. Hood described late-term abortions as “healthy, viable babies” – failing to account for these terminations occurring for reasons to do with the physical or mental health of the birthing parent or foetal anomalies.
In August the United Australia party senator Ralph Babet sought to have the Senate recognise “that at least one baby is born alive every seven days following a failed abortion and left to die, and that Australia’s health care system is enabling these inhumane deaths; and for the Senate to condemn this practice, noting that babies born alive as a result of a failed abortion deserve care”. Babet did not disclose where he had acquired this information. Greens senator Larissa Waters accused Babet of spreading incorrect claims.
As Queensland faces an election, the threat of the Liberal National party criminalising abortion is real, considering that almost every member voted to keep abortion a crime in 2018. According to a post from the Queensland health minister and minister for women, Shannon Fentiman: “This year every member of the LNP voted against giving rural women enhanced access to the termination of pregnancy pill.” This is the future Queensland faces.
In Australia, access to abortion remains a postcode lottery. A woman in remote Western Australia may not have the same access or out-of-pocket costs as me in inner-city Sydney. The Albanese government should be focused on providing federal funding to make abortion more widely available, instead we are seeing anti-choice rhetoric rear its head again.
Australian politicians, overwhelmingly men, are using the US election to fan the flames of a fire we thought had been put out. As we face a federal election in the coming months, it must be extinguished.
We must shift the shame we have been taught to internalise to those who should hold it, the rightwing politicians who have entrenched the belief that my body is theirs to legislate. Trump can “grab women by the pussy” but when women are empowered to make decisions about our sex and reproductive lives outside their gaze and control we are labelled sluts. In Gina Rushton’s book The Most Important Job in the World, she writes about: “Every parliamentary debate I’ve reported on in which physical sovereignty was debated by men who fetishised motherhood, the most important job in the world, while supporting policies that made life harder for mothers.” It has never been about children, it has always been about power.
Last week I visited a clinic where doctors were not afraid they would face criminal charges for providing me with medical care. The emotions I have felt are overwhelming. The gravity of this decision weighed on me – it’s not something I want to repeat. But it’s also worth interrogating how these feelings may be attributed to the messaging I have been exposed to. The anti-choice movement has wrongly convinced many that abortion is evil, an act of murder. I worry that the fear, angst, shame and grief I experience is less about my abortion and more about this taught belief that, if I am going to go through with this, I must struggle with my morality if I ever want to be considered “good” again.
As Trump and JD Vance reframe their abortion policy in the weeks leading up to the election, we are reminded of how fragile these beliefs systems are. Anything goes for the prize of power. As I sat thousands of kilometres away looking down at two pink lines, I understood that hating myself for making a decision about my own life is a level of internalised misogyny the anti-choice movement has designed for me. Australia cannot move in the same direction. Instead of succumbing to taboo, I’ll use that emotional bandwidth to ensure other pregnant people feel supported to do the same.
Hannah Ferguson is the chief executive officer of Cheek Media Co., the co-host of news and pop culture podcast Big Small Talk and the bestselling author of Bite Back. Her new book, Taboo, comes out 12 November