08/09/2026
Eloise, a listener of Ladies, We Need To Talk in her late 20s, fell pregnant unexpectedly last year.
"I'm nowhere near ready to have kids of my own," she tells Yumi Stynes.
Like an estimated 1 in 4 Australian women, Eloise chose to have an abortion.
Abortion is legal in every Australian state and territory, and polls show most Australians support that right. So why are experts still worried about women's reproductive freedom?
For many women, access to care depends on where they live, whether local doctors are trained to help, and how consistent hospital services are.
Eloise's abortion was logistically straightforward, using a pill to end the pregnancy at home. But it was still emotionally daunting.
"I felt incredibly alone at the time," she says.
When Eloise told her friends what she'd been through, they shared similar stories of their own.
"The moment I spoke about my abortion, I realised I wasn't alone and neither were the women around me."
"Abortion, of course, is healthcare, but it's also a deeply human experience that I think many of us share, maybe more than we know," she reflects.
Dr Prudence Flowers, author of The Right-to-Life Movement, the Reagan Administration, and the Politics of Abortion, says stigma around abortion can limit women's access to the procedure, including doctors' willingness to train and provide the care in the first place.
In Australia, doctors must complete specific training before they can prescribe terminations.
According to the SPHERE Centre, which specialises in reproductive health, 30% of women in Australia live in areas with no doctors who can prescribe medical abortion medication.
Dr Flowers says activists and politicians using misinformation to shift public opinion. One common claim, she says, is that healthy, viable babies are being aborted "up to the moment of birth."
She says these kinds of extreme, unrealistic examples are borrowed straight from the US anti-abortion playbook.
"What that kind of rhetoric does is ask people to think that women are inherently barbaric," she tells Yumi Stynes.
Most Australian states have a cut-off point before an abortion can be approved, and abortion care later in pregnancy requires sign-off from multiple doctors.
Dr Flowers says the anti-abortion movement in Australia isn't trying to change the law overnight but "every attack chips away at access, chips away at rights, [and] diminishes that pro-choice sentiment."
Nora, another Ladies, We Need to Talk listener, felt pressure to stay silent about her own abortion.
She and her partner wanted children, and this was their second pregnancy, after their first ended in miscarriage.
"At the 12-week scan, I found out the baby had a very rare genetic brain deformity," she says.
Her parents were supportive of her termination, but her father didn't want her telling people what she'd been through. Nora pushed back.
"I remember saying to him: if someone isn't comfortable with the fact that I've had to go through this experience, then they're not someone I really want to have in my life."
Dr Keersten Fitzgerald, a GP researching how doctors are trained in medical abortion, is passionate about making accessible reproductive care the norm, pointing to research showing 95% of women remain confident in their decision five years on.
"The number of people who come and see me and say ‘please don't judge me' as the first thing they say.
Dr Fitzgerald finds the experience of so many of her patients upsetting, given they feel the need to defend themselves against judgement.
"This idea that abortion is going to negatively affect women, and that banning it is going to help them, is a myth."
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