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The push to make midwives abortionists is taking a more extreme turn in Western Australia.

Questions are being raised about students at Curtin University’s Midwifery Clinic offering MS-2 Step medical abortions.

A source told The Daily Declaration that “the university-run clinic was now providing medical abortions on campus, with midwives gaining clinical exposure as part of their training.”

This on-campus abortion service is apparently an Australian first, and is raising valid apprehensions about precedent and potential limitations on civil liberties.

Concerns Over Conscience and Religious Freedom

According to The Daily Declaration’s source, Curtin’s Christian students have expressed “growing concerns about freedom of conscience for pro-life midwifery students, and the overall right to dissent.”

Among those concerns, the source explained, is “how Western Australia’s abortion safe-access-zone legislation and Curtin policies may apply to peaceful prayer and religious expression on campus.”

Especially, “the role of universities in abortion provision and training.”

Added here is the equal concern about “the ability of students to peacefully express religious and ethical objections on campus.”

Their concerns are not unwarranted.

Under WA law, an abortion protection zone is enforceable up to 150 meters of a “protected premises, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

Prohibited behaviour incurs a 12,000-dollar fine.

The 2016 WA Health Act defines that behaviour as hounding, hindering, or harassing “a person accessing, attempting to access or leaving premises at which abortions are provided.”

More specifically, prohibited behaviour is any act that “besets, harasses, intimidates, interferes with, threatens, hinders, obstructs or impedes” access to an abortion.

This includes communication by any means in relation to an abortion which may “cause” the mother terminating her child to “reasonably” feel “distressed or anxious.”

Given its inherent ambiguity, like the Clinton-Era FACE Act in the United States, the WA law is subject to interpretation and therefore weaponisation.

Safe-Access Zones and Campus Expression

Intercession aimed at platforming a well-informed intervention could easily be misconstrued as harmful interference.

These rules could rule out peaceful pro-life protests, public prayer and pastoral care on campus.

This is why The Daily Declaration source said they sought clarification from Curtin on where, and to what extent, the law applied to the on-campus premises where abortions were taking place.

They also wanted to know about the impact those laws “may have on students wishing to engage in peaceful prayer or other forms of religious expression on campus.”

The enquiry was forwarded to Curtin’s Professor Mark Ogden, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Academic (Interim).

Professor Ogden allegedly responded with questions about the type of event Christians might organise to protest the university teaching student midwives to terminate pregnancies.

The Daily Declaration was told that “his response did not directly answer the original questions raised about the laws and what activities would or would not be permitted on campus.”

While no pro-life event or protest has yet been arranged, Curtin’s Student Guild did respond.

They blatantly dismissed the concerns of Christian students by calling them “manufactured outrage.”

The group shared statements given to WA Today on Instagram, blaming the Australian Christian Lobby for what the guild called an “anti-abortion attack” on healthcare.

Referring to the termination of a child’s life in the womb as “abortion care”, they added, “reproductive rights are not up for negotiation.”

“Every midwife student,” the guild declared, “deserves access to the training needed to provide it safely.”

The guild’s statements were also a rejection of ACL’s WA Director, Josiah Trigg, who exposed the practice in a 30 July piece published online.

“This appears to follow changes to Western Australia’s abortion laws that took effect in 2024,” he wrote.

That law “expanded the ability of appropriately qualified midwives and nurse practitioners to prescribe medical abortions.”

A Fundamental Shift in Midwifery Training

Speaking with The Daily Declaration, Trigg said, ACL “will be engaging MPs to clarify questions about conscientious objection.”

“Something lost since COVID,” he explained.

Particularly, “protections for midwives, Christians, and pro-life students.”

Trigg added that ACL will also be “asking about oversight and apparent gaps in accountability and transparency.”

He made it clear that ACL is not opposed to midwifery.

“What we are opposed to,” Trigg clarified, “is the abortion pill being provided through that clinic, and midwifery students being trained to deliver it as part of a discipline built around bringing life into the world.”

“That’s not a technical detail. It’s a fundamental shift in what midwifery training is for.”

“Young women training to bring life into the world are instead being trained to end it.”

Unrelated to ACL, a CitizenGo petition launched on 5 August has garnered 910 signatures of a current 1,000-signature goal.

The petition is urging Curtin University “to respect the ethos of midwifery by ending student involvement in abortions.”

It’s also asking Curtin to “safeguard the welfare of both student midwives and the wider student community, and most of all their children.”

As I argued in September 2025 when challenging Amanda Cohn’s extreme NSW Greens’ legislation, abortion negates the entire life-giving purpose of midwifery.

Thankfully, the majority of that bill was gutted by the Minns government.

This was after 5,000-plus New South Welshmen joined Dr Joanna Howe in protesting the proposed legislation.

Curtin’s Christians and ACL’s Josiah Trigg aren’t grasping at straws.

There’s a violent dissonance in the demand for midwives to birth the life of an unborn child in one room, after taking the life of an unborn child in another.

Curtin protecting the precedent isn’t just detrimental to dissent. It’s detrimental to the mental health of midwives.

Although disguised by the abuse of language, no heavy layering of euphemisms can camouflage the grotesque reality of abortion.

Neither is calling it out a sin.

“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them,” Paul commanded the Ephesian church.

As Dean Stroud reminded the world in his 2013 book, Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow,

“The Nazi group in charge of the actual killing in the gas chambers was called The General Welfare Foundation for Institutional Care.”