Sarah Game’s late-abortion bill is not about ‘saving babies’, but forcing births among South Australia’s most vulnerable pregnant patients
By Associate Professor Catherine Kevin
The Termination of Pregnancy Amendment Bill seeks to nullify a patient’s right to determine their own future, their right to healthcare that responds to the needs of their complex situation, and any requirement for their consent to caesarean section or induced labour.
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Next Wednesday, the South Australian Legislative Council will vote on the Termination of Pregnancy (Restriction on Termination after 22 Weeks and 6 Days) Amendment Bill. This anti-abortion Bill is dangerous, misguided, and out of step with the views of South Australians, who overwhelmingly support access to abortion healthcare.
This Private Member’s Bill, introduced by Independent Member of the Legislative Council (MLC) in South Australia, Sarah Game (formerly of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and now the founding leader of Fair Go for Australians), attacks pregnant people navigating extremely challenging situations later in pregnancy. Approximately 1% of abortion patients in SA currently access abortion care after 22 weeks and 6 days. They are the targets of this Bill.
Game has claimed that her Bill fixes the ‘unintended consequences’ of existing abortion law. This claim attempts to erase years of expert deliberation that shaped the Termination of Pregnancy Act 2021 (SA). This legislation passed following a five year community campaign and a rigorous review into abortion law and practice by the South Australian Law Reform Institute, which involved widespread consultation with experts and the broader community.
The recommendations of the review noted the ‘preferred approach’ would be to have no legislated upper limit as long as a patient consented and was treated by an appropriate healthcare practitioner. In the end, the law allows for abortion from 22 weeks and 6 days’ gestation with a patient’s consent and with the approval of two doctors. Although more conservative than the expert recommendation, the law nevertheless recognizes the need for this form of compassionate healthcare in our community.
Sarah Game wants to drastically limit healthcare professionals’ ability to provide this care. Specifically, by removing provisions for medical consideration in the Termination of Pregnancy Act 2021 (SA), her Bill seeks to block access to abortion after 22 weeks and 6 days for the following pregnant people:
Those who have not been able to access timely and necessary specialist services that would have allowed for an abortion earlier in the pregnancy, including those who face significant geographical, socio-economic, cultural, or linguistic disadvantages;
Minors;
Adults subject to sexual and physical violence and others who have been denied agency in their decision-making about their pregnancy, including those whose pregnancy was not diagnosed until later in the pregnancy;
Those whose medical or psychiatric conditions (such as cancer, heart disease, or suicidal ideation) have become apparent or worse during the course of the pregnancy to the extent that they are a threat to the patient’s life;
Those with a deteriorating maternal medical condition or late diagnosis of disease who require treatment that is incompatible with pregnancy.
The current legislation is patient-centred, which the great majority of South Australians understand and support. By contrast, Game’s Bill isolates the pregnant person and shows contempt for some of the most vulnerable patients who need abortion healthcare.
This is a forced-birth Bill that raises the spectre of Margaret Atwood’s handmaids. The intention of the Bill is to require patients after 22 weeks and 6 days of pregnancy to give birth in any circumstances, except their imminent death or to save another fetus (setting aside those arising from serious fetal conditions). When she introduced the Bill to her colleagues, Game made clear her view of how patients needing later abortions should be treated:
“The safest and most effective treatment is to end the pregnancy by delivering the child alive. That can be done by emergency caesarean or by inducing labour.”
Game therefore seeks to nullify a patient’s right to determine their own future, their right to healthcare that responds to the needs of their complex situation, and any requirement for their consent to caesarean section or induced labour. Her Bill also pays no heed to the ethics of intentionally causing premature birth and leaving any surviving baby with poorer health, more disability, and poorer life chances than if it were born at term.
Unfortunately, Game is not a lone wolf. Her Bill will be voted on almost a year to the day since Liberal MLC Ben Hood’s forced-birth Bill failed to pass the Legislative Council. Both Bills have had the vocal support of high-profile anti-abortion campaigner Joanna Howe. Howe was banned from the South Australian Legislative Council after her behaviour during voting on the Hood Bill in October last year. Undeterred, she has been campaigning in support of this most recent attempt to interfere in the settled matter of abortion law.
An innocent reading of this Bill would suggest that Howe and Game are naïve about the impact of geographical, socio-economic, cultural, and language barriers on timely access to abortion care. It would suggest they are blissfully unaware of issues of sexual abuse and reproductive coercion, or the misfortune that can strike unexpectedly during pregnancy, such as a diagnosis of a health condition that can’t be treated without serious consequences for the pregnancy.
In actual fact, Howe and Game (like Hood before her) are determined to demonise women and other pregnant people for accessing the healthcare they need. They do this while the majority of South Australians regard abortion care as healthcare that rightly centres the patient and their unique circumstances.
This Bill fails to reflect South Australians’ expectations of their healthcare system. It also ignores the political direction across the country, where every Australian state and territory has decriminalised abortion. When it comes to abortion healthcare, Game and her supporters want to make South Australia an archaic and cruel outlier state.
References
Cations M, Ripper M and Dwyer J (2020). Majority support for access to abortion care including later abortion in South Australia. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 44(5) 349-352. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1753-6405.12997
South Australian Abortion Reporting Committee. Annual Report for the Year 2024, Government of South Australia, 2025. https://www.preventivehealth.sa.gov.au/assets/downloads/abortion-reporting/South-Australian-Abortion-Reporting-Committee-Report-2024_FINAL.pdf
Kathryn Bermingham, ‘Upper House MP Sarah Game launches new push to change SA abortion laws, ABC 5 September 2025 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-05/sarah-game-introduces-new-abortion-bill-amendments/105734080
South Australian Law Reform Institute, Abortion: A Review of South Australian Law and Practice, October 2029 https://law.adelaide.edu.au/ua/media/996/Abortion%20Report%20281119.pdf
South Australian Law Reform Institute, Abortion, p. 18
Sarah Game, Hansard, 17 September 2025
Wolke D, Johnson S, Mendonça M. ‘The Life Course Consequences of Very Preterm Birth’. Annual Review Developmental Psychology, 2019:1;69-92.
Tory Shepherd, ‘Anti-abortion advocate Joanna Howe banned from South Australia’s upper house for alleged ‘threatening’ tactics towards politicians’, The Guardian, 31 October 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/31/anti-abortion-advocate-joanna-howe-banned-from-south-australias-upper-house-for-alleged-threatening-tactics-ntwnfb
About the author
Catherine Kevin
Catherine Kevin is the media coordinator for the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition (saaac) and an Associate Professor at the Flinders University College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. She teaches and researches in the fields of Australian history and feminist history, particularly gendered violence, the politics and experience of the reproductive body and Indigenous-settler relations.
If this is such a problem that needs a change in legislation to resolve why can't they show evidence of a single termination of a healthy viable pregnancy for the explicit and only reason that the pregnant person simply changed their mind with no other factors at play after 22 weeks and 6 days of pregnancy?
I’m a doctor currently working in rural SA. These legislative proposals to infringe upon a woman’s right to autonomously navigate their lives serve no practical purpose other than to bog down an already convoluted healthcare system. These changes merely serve as moral licensing and political popularity points among people who genuinely have no proximity or direct involvement with the systems they are trying to tweak and control. Pregnant people in rural towns already face barriers in accessing abortion care, not just from the isolation, but because there are almost no GPs to access care in the first place, no privacy because everyone knows everyone so they hesitate to seek out support, and restrictive policies within the hospitals in the first place. The rhetoric of these policies trickles down and further causes delays. It is so infuriating as a provider to see more barriers attempting to be imposed.