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The New South Wales Greens want midwives and nurses to terminate pregnancies.

Upper House Greens MP Dr Amanda Cohn tabled the extreme bill last Wednesday.

Cohn’s Abortion Law Reform Amendment (Health Care Access) Bill 2025 aims to redefine, as well as amend, parts of the 2019 Abortion Law Reform Act.

These changes will expand “the class of health care practitioners who may perform a termination on a person who is not more than 22 weeks (5 months) pregnant.”

In order to do this, the Greens need to downgrade on the specifics.

The term “medical practitioner” would be replaced with the broader “registered or prescribed health practitioners”.

This widens the definition to include midwives and nurses.

Deadly Contradiction

Cohn’s push to give midwives the tools to do what the NSW legislation effectively defines as “stopping a person from being born” seemingly dislocates midwifery from its reason for being.

According to the Australian College of Midwives (ACM), a midwife “is a health professional who supports you in labour and birth and helps you have your baby.”

The Daily Declaration contacted ACM for comment.

Through a carefully worded statement, ACM told us they supported the bill.

“In enabling midwives to provide reproductive care of all kinds, including pre-conception, contraception and abortion care,” ACM explained, “access to care close to home is more likely for all women and families.”

ACM added that the Greens bill would bring NSW into line with other states.

Alongside the dissonance between midwifery and abortion, Cohn’s law could coerce midwives into participating in or carrying out abortions, even if they’re ethically opposed.

The Greens’ coercion against conscience proposals also applies to doctors and nurses.

Cohn’s coercion bill scrubs Section 9 (3) of the NSW Abortion Law Reform Act 2019, which protects conscientious objection.

Additionally, the Greens want levels of accountability in privacy-protected reporting of terminations aborted.

Expanding Access

The Greens bill further demands that the Minister for Health ensure there is an abortion mill “within reasonable distance from residents’ homes.”

Then, there is the added requirement that the Minister for Health ensure abortion is deceptively marketed to the community as “healthcare”.

Introducing the bill, Cohn dictated to the NSW parliament that NSW Health should be mandated to carry out abortions.

“Only three of the 220 public hospitals in New South Wales are routinely providing abortion and make that information publicly known,” she declared.

Sounding disappointed at the low number of abortions – something Cohn said was due to “lack of access to reproductive healthcare” – she pointed to her bill’s demand that “abortion healthcare” be made available at every large, local hospital for free.

The Greens MP then demonised doctors who choose to abstain from terminating a healthy pregnancy.

Cohn, throwing in some vague references to “studies”, argued that protections for conscientious objection had to go.

This was, Cohn alleged, because:

“It is not the intention of those provisions that a conscientious objector can obstruct access to abortion altogether.”

Doctors, nurses, and midwives would no longer be able to simply provide information to mothers about the process of extinguishing the human life in their womb.

These healthcare professionals would have to stay silent.

They would also be forced to refer the mother on to another “healthcare” professional who would happily “stop a person from being born” – to restate language used in the 2019 abortion law reforms.

Out for more blood, Cohn drooled all over her bill, claiming the proposals were not enough.

More needs to be done, she concluded, while praising organisations such as the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association for their odd collaboration.

Attrition of Conscientious Professionals

Libertarian senator for NSW John Ruddick told The Daily Declaration that they will be opposing the Greens’ proposed abortion expansion amendments.

The Australian Christian Lobby’s Michelle Pearse was also quick to raise concern.

Pearse noted that Cohn’s attempt to turn midwives into more than just abortion activists would “conscript healthcare workers into a moral compromise”.

These amendments, ACL’s boss explained, “would compel those who object, into betraying their most fundamental ethical convictions.”

Arguing that funding would be better utilised by improving general healthcare services in already struggling regions, Pearse condemned Cohn’s aggressive abortion stance.

If made law, the bill would detract from vital, life-giving healthcare services.

“This ideologically-driven bill,” Pearse said, “threatens to drive dedicated professionals from their healing vocation.”

Contra to Cohn’s claims, “The reason abortion access is limited is not due to policy barriers but because most healthcare professionals do not want to participate in ending a life.”

As Proverbs 24:11 commands us: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter.”

We must not stay silent, Pearse added.

“We cannot stay silent while medical professionals face coercion to violate their deepest moral convictions and the fundamental principle to ‘do no harm’.”

Re-educating the majority of Australia’s sane healthcare providers would require mass indoctrination.

Doctors, nurses, and midwives would have to accept Cohn’s “abortion is healthcare” misinformation without question, and be willing to deny all facts about anatomy, biology, and reproduction.

One could even see how the Greens may one day seek to expand our over-the-top hate speech laws to criminalise doctors for refusing to carry out abortions.

Based on Cohn’s words, no doubt she’d consider this a great idea.

It’s not a stretch to say that the NSW Greens and their collaborators appear to have a fresh fetish for “life unworthy of life” fascism.

Ultimately, Cohn’s bill destroys dissent and works to weasel in a justification for mass murder on an industrial scale.

If two healthy patients enter a hospital, and only one leaves alive because the second has been denied the right to life, we can neither call that healthcare nor protection of human rights.

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Image courtesy of Unsplash.