Australia’s conservative federal politicians have been warned they should think twice about picking an argument on abortion given how damaging such debate it has been for US Republicans.

It comes after Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was the latest Coalition politician to put changing abortion laws on the national agenda this week.

Nampijinpa Price’s comments followed Queensland state Liberal leader David Crisafulli’s refusal to confirm his party’s stance on a conscience vote on abortion, along with a ‘dissenting report’ on abortion from Coalition Senators Matt Canavan and Alex Antic in 2023.

Nampijinpa Price declared that abortion changes should be on the agenda and compared abortions after the first trimester to infanticide.

No-go for Libs

Senior Liberals moved quickly to stifle any debate, with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton arguing that abortion rights aren’t “shifting votes one way or the other”.

His deputy leader Sussan Ley stated that the opposition has “no intention to change the settings from a federal health perspective”.

Deborah Bateson AM, Professor of Practice at the University of Sydney’s Daffodil Centre, said that politicians treating abortion as a political issue and not a healthcare decision was both shocking and “a step back”.

“There’s a lot of misinformation about abortion that is commonly spread … and we need to ensure the community and politicians have the facts,” she said.

“There are some organised anti-abortionist groups in different countries and sometimes we can see those impacts in Australia, but we just need to alert and counter with evidence-based information.”

US lessons

Australians support access at a higher rate than Americans, but even in Washington – where one party stands ideologically opposed to a woman’s right to choose – there have been massive ramifications for political attacks on abortion rights.

Ava Kalinauskas, a research associate at the United States Studies Centre, said that since the Supreme Court of America struck down federal abortion protections in 2022, women have been galvanised to register to vote.

“Most Americans support abortion access, but this is especially true among women, and in the month after the Dobbs decision, we saw the number of women registering to vote in the 2022 midterms surge,” she said.

“That election, we saw pollsters suggesting that Republicans were going to take the House and Senate and these predictions of a red wave off the back of inflation being the biggest issue for voters, but what we actually saw was a massive turnout for the Democrats.”

Americans state case

Americans are overwhelmingly voting in support of abortion rights in state ballot initiatives across the country.

Kalinauskas said that following the 2022 midterm election, Donald Trump, who had previously bragged about his role in overturning abortion protections, has attempted to distance himself from the decision in the 2024 presidential race.

“This presidential cycle, abortion has become a major weakness for Trump: He leads on issues like the economy and immigration, but abortion is now an issue that Harris boasts a sizeable advantage,” Kalinauskas said.

“We’ve seen JD Vance say that the situation in California is different to the situation in other states and that Americans should be allowed to decide these issues at a state level, seeming to pivot the issue of abortion to a question of state responsibility.”

Restricted access

The reality is that when countries and states restrict access to abortion, it has impacts on the mortality rates of infants and women.

A study published this month found that regardless of state-level status, restrictions on abortion in America resulted in increased infant mortality rates for the 18 months following the Dobbs decision.

The Supreme Court’s decision to remove federal abortion protections in 2022 has had a measurable impact on healthcare outcomes in America. Photo: Getty

Bateson said that the ability to access safe abortions can have a massive impact on health outcomes.

“We’ve just had this slew of abortion law reform bills that decriminalised it across the country and there have been great strides and the government has been behind positive changes in Australia,” she said.

“We need to be alert and ensure we can counter this politicisation and remind people that this is health care and needs to be regulated in the way that any other healthcare procedure is.”