Despite a lively rally with thousands of people in support of an amendment to NSW’s abortion bill to ban sex-selective abortion, the outcome is far from certain.
That’s not just because the issue is finely balanced in the Legislative Council.
Since the amendment is a private member’s bill introduced by independent MLC John Ruddick, it can only be debated for a very limited time on the Wednesday of each sitting week.
There are only about eight sitting weeks left in the year. Of the 41 members in the Upper House who are eligible to vote on the bill, six have already addressed the issue.
The rest are also entitled to make speeches during those eight weeks. If and when the bill is put to a vote, there will be amendments which have to be voted on.
There’s not much time to get all this done and dusted before parliament goes into recess in December.
Furthermore, there’s a state election in March next year. All previous business will be swept away when the new parliament begins.
But is it worth having a go? Should Ruddick be congratulated? Absolutely.
The strongest argument raised by opponents of the amendment is that there is very little evidence that sex-selective abortion is a major issue in Australia.
The most recent NSW data, says the Greens spokesperson for health, Dr Amanda Cohn, shows that “sex ratios at birth are consistently normal.
However, a 2025 study written by academics from Edith Cowan University and Curtin University in a peer-reviewed journal, PLOS Global Public Health claims that in certain migrant communities in Australia girls are being aborted more often than boys.
Dr Cohn and others have pooh-poohed this research and criticised it for using limited data and small sample sizes.
There’s a smidgen of truth in this. Research is seldom definitive.
Sex-selection is not a mass movement; no crowds are chanting “let’s kill more girl babies” in front of Parliament House. The case for the necessity of a legislative ban is not watertight.
But a similar situation existed when the Conversion Practices Ban Act 2024 came before Parliament.
There was vanishingly little evidence that “gay conversion” was a problem; nonetheless Dr Cohn led the charge for the Greens in supporting the legislation.
So even if sex-selection is not a huge problem, it’s still important to pass the bill.
It will send a signal to everyone, especially migrant communities from India, China, Korea, and Vietnam, that gender equality is one of Australia’s treasured values.
As MLC Rachel Merton said in the debate last week, “We have spent decades building a legal framework that promotes equality between men and women, boys and girls.”
It would be a tragedy if this were undermined by suburban doctors agreeing to abort female foetuses.
The bill properly tackles the problem by targeting doctors, not their female patients.
It is the doctors who will be fined or jailed if found guilty. Doctors are at the centre of this problem – as Indian legislators have recognised.
India banned sex-selective abortions in 1994 because so many girls were being aborted that wives were becoming scarce.
But some doctors circumvented the law by using portable ultrasound machines to do doorstop sex-determinations for village women, followed by a clandestine abortion if the scan showed a girl.
Thousands of billboards across the country advertised the services of these ultrasound machines. Their selling point was simple and brutal – pay 500 rupees now for an ultrasound rather than 500,000 later for a dowry.
As a result, in 2015-17 the sex ratio at birth (SRB) hit an historic high of 111.6 boys to 100 girls. The normal ratio is between 107 to 105 boys per 100 girls.
In 2010, one district in the state of Haryana, Jhajjar, recorded a ratio of 129.2 to 100. And one town in that district, Bahrana, recorded the stomach-churning SRB of 264.6 boys per 100 females.
The abuse of portable ultrasound machines was an outstanding example of the “technological paradigm” denounced by Pope Leo XIV in Magnifica Humanitas: “technology is not simply a tool.”
“When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency,” the pope wrote.
Yes, the Abortion Law Reform Amendment (Sex Selection Prohibition) Bill 2025 chips away at legal abortion.
But just as important is the signal it sends to everyone that we will not ever tolerate treating women and girls as second-class citizens.
The famous English jurist Lord Denning put it this way: “The ultimate justification of any punishment is not that it is a deterrent, but that it is the emphatic denunciation by the community of a crime.”
And what crime deserves fiercer denunciation than importing gendercide into Australia?
