Anti-immigrant rhetoric is playing a growing role in the pro-life movement as conservative politicians attempt to revive their attacks on abortion rights.
The debate over reproductive healthcare has returned to the national spotlight after One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce spoke at an anti-abortion rally outside NSW Parliament as his party rides a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment to new polling highs.
While the anti-abortion movement has a long history in Australia, this latest push appears to have a new, racialised tilt.
“It feeds into this broader anti-migration current that is swirling in the far-right and right-wing circles in Australia,” Flinders University abortion politics expert Prudence Flowers tells AAP.
“You can see quite racialised claims about the parenting decisions of people of Indian or Chinese background.
“This is then extrapolated into racialised questions about why we are letting these types of people into Australia.”
The latest effort to ban sex-selective abortions in NSW has been led by Libertarian Party MP John Ruddick.
When introducing his private member’s bill, Mr Ruddick used a study from Edith Cowan University to claim Chinese and Indian communities – which have a “culturally high son preference” – were conducting abortions because “the parents so wanted a boy that they decided to discard the baby girl only because it was a girl”.
The cited research examined births in Western Australia and NSW from 1994 to 2015 before abortion was officially decriminalised in either state.
While the study found skewed birth sex ratios within Chinese and Indian communities, it provided observational evidence and did not establish causality, the researchers said.
The paper also said one of the most feasible approaches to preventing sex-selective abortion is to end the use of sex-determination technologies, like non-invasive prenatal testing, to reveal non-medical traits of a fetus.
There is no evidence sex-selective abortion is happening on a wide scale in NSW.
Of the 15,973 abortions that occurred between October 2019 and September 2020, a NSW Health report found 13 notifications of termination were for the sole purpose of sex selection.
Of those, 10 are likely to be reporting errors as they were for pregnancies less than nine weeks gestation, and there is no reliable or readily available way of determining gender before 10 weeks.
But during debate of the bill on Tuesday, other proponents including Liberal Rachel Merton and One Nation MP Rod Roberts continued to echo Mr Ruddick’s arguments.
“Something that was implicit is now being made explicit,” Dr Flowers says.
“This kind of linking of abortion with population and whiteness has a really long history that goes back to how population was talked about in the early 1900s and the White Australia policy.
“These claims that we have all these abortions and have all these immigrants coming in is a quite noxious brew of anti-feminism, anti-abortion and anti-immigration all tied together.”
This inherent racialisation is part of the reason supporters of abortion healthcare have always opposed bans on sex-selective abortion, Dr Flowers says.
Independent NSW MP Alex Greenwich, who helped spearhead the 2019 bill that officially decriminalised abortion in the state, urged the parliament to reject Mr Ruddick’s proposal.
“It is really a racist trope that focuses on certain migrant communities and makes assumptions about them,” he said on Thursday.
“The last thing our parliament needs is an unnecessary culture war on women’s reproductive rights.”
Others have cast the latest attacks on abortion as an attempt to “manufacture a crisis”.
“This isn’t about healthcare or safety; it’s a calculated, Trump-like political stunt that relies on lies to justify stripping away bodily autonomy,” says Democracy in Colour national director Noura Mansour.
“The politicians pushing this claim to be protecting women but in reality, they are targeting the most vulnerable.”
Health groups including the Australian Medical Association, the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have also opposed bans on sex-selective abortion.
But the Libertarian Party MP has hit back against criticisms linking his bill with racism.
“I am the one trying to save baby girls from being aborted,” Mr Ruddick says.
“I don’t care what skin colour they are; it does not enter my mind.”
He points to a May 2026 Roy Morgan poll which found 51 per cent of Greens voters in NSW approved of a ban on abortions for the purpose of sex selection.
Though Greens health spokesperson and former GP Amanda Cohn acknowledges the idea of terminating pregnancies on the basis of sex is distressing, she notes abortions for the sole purpose of sex selection are already prohibited under NSW Health policy.
She says the bill is part of a longer-term strategy to erode abortion access, despite a majority of Australians supporting access to abortion, according to a 2026 Redbridge poll conducted for the Australia Institute.
“Anti-abortion advocates are striving to incrementally recriminalise abortion and will grasp at any opportunity to do so,” Dr Cohn said during the debate.
“When the overwhelming majority of the community supports access to abortion as a legal health service, the only way to grow anti‑abortion campaigns is to rile people up with misinformation.”
While Mr Joyce and SA One Nation politician Cory Bernardi have both long held anti-abortion beliefs, the party did not have a clear pro-life stance until the 2020s – with its website page on the issue only seeming to have appeared in 2022.
A 2026 Australia Institute analysis of One Nation voters found 50 per cent supported abortion access.
This has raised questions over how the party is attempting to leverage the issue.
“Is this an attempt to make One Nation more anti-abortion? Is this opportunistic capitalising on what’s seen as a grass-roots right-wing movement? Is this pulling opponents of abortion into anti-immigration circles? On this I am less clear,” Dr Flowers says.
AAP has sought comment from Ms Merton and Mr Roberts.
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