In the 1970s, abortion became a contentious issue that would provoke intense debate and confound the organising divisions upon which Australian parliamentary politics rested. Historians have often discerned, as a consequence, a parliamentary 'reluctance' to liberalise abortion laws in this decade, even though there was wide popular support to do so. This article examines a moment when Commonwealth parliamentarians acted to defeat a proposal to limit women's access to abortion and deployed feminist arguments as they 'protected' some women's access to abortion. It traces the emergence of a feminist politics of abortion centred on citizenship and its, perhaps surprisingly wide, uptake by parliamentarians in 1979. This suggests that a feminist politics of abortion had more impact on the norms of Australian political culture than existing feminist narratives of parliamentary inaction and conservative resistance have allowed.
Leigh Boucher (Sun,) studied this question.