One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts pushes for blanket abortion ban

Senator Malcolm Roberts of Australia's One Nation party has declared he will push for the party to adopt a complete ban on abortion, speaking at a Christian conference in Brisbane. His comments stand in contrast to those of party leader Pauline Hanson, who told the National Press Club on Wednesday that abortion is only “too late” after 20 weeks.

The weekend Church and State summit heard how anti-abortion groups formed an alliance about two years ago to campaign for law changes and replace politicians who are not on board. An audience member asked Roberts why One Nation wasn’t aiming to “get rid of it altogether.” “That’s becoming my goal,” Roberts said. “That’s something I’ll be putting to the party. We need to reconsider some things [but] it will be a conscience vote.”

One Nation’s current policy is to “seek every opportunity to roll back brutal and extreme abortion law.” Its new recruit Barnaby Joyce recently spoke at a rally against sex-selective abortion. Hanson has previously said she is not against abortion in the first trimester, up to 12 weeks’ gestation, earlier than the 20 weeks she nominated on Wednesday. “I’m not against … women that need to have an abortion for medical reasons, for some circumstance,” she said at the press club. “I’d rather educate women to use contraceptives than to go through an abortion. Too many abortions in this country, anyway.”

At the summit, Church and State founder Dave Pellowe, who describes himself as a “writer and speaker on Christian engagement in the public square, specialising in what Almighty God says about complex social issues,” told the crowd that women who committed “child sacrifice” were condemned by God and guilty of murder, and that “feminism has had a demonic influence on the culture that has normalised, medicalised, subsidised and industrialised child sacrifice.” “My job here this morning is not to condemn women who have killed their children, for God already does that,” Pellowe said. “Every murderer knows they’re guilty of murder.”

The anti-abortion movement has grown more vocal since abortion was decriminalised in Australia and since Roe v Wade was overturned in the United States. Multiple legislative attempts have been made to remove abortion from the healthcare code and place it back in the criminal code. A recent Queensland bill to stop nurses and midwives prescribing abortion medication was defeated; a sex-selective bill is before the NSW parliament; and a South Australian bill to restrict abortion from 25 weeks was defeated on Wednesday night. While it passed the 22-person upper house with the help of three new One Nation MLCs, it was soundly defeated in the lower house by 36 votes to nine.

Former One Nation MP Sarah Game, who quit in May last year to form the Fair Go party and then quit on Tuesday night to join Family First, introduced the bill in the upper house, and One Nation MP Chantelle Thomas introduced it in the lower house. The premier, Peter Malinauskas, treasurer Tom Koutsantonis, opposition leader Ashton Hurn, four One Nation MPs, Liberal MP Sam Telfer and Labor MP Michael Brown all voted for the bill. The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said in a statement that Game’s bill “would eliminate access to abortion in a range of serious and complex circumstances. It also disregards the quality of a woman’s life, including situations where continuation of pregnancy poses significant risks to a person’s physical or mental wellbeing.”

The International Women’s Development Agency said on Monday the bills being introduced in various states were “not based in evidence” and “form part of a broader strategy to chip away at reproductive rights and bodily autonomy by introducing incremental barriers to abortion care over time.”