South Australia’s Late Term Abortion Discussion: A personal reflection, a deep dive, and a call to action

A note to the reader: This article engages one of the most contested questions in public life. It is written from a position of Christian conviction, but it is addressed to anyone willing to read carefully and in good faith. It will not satisfy everyone. It is not intended to. It is intended to be honest. If you're in South Australia and this piece resonates with you, I'll point you toward some concrete ways to respond at the end, including an upcoming event, ways to contact your representatives, and support resources if any of this touches something personal.

There are topics I approach with confidence. There are others I approach with prayer. The South Australia late term abortion discussion is one I approach with both, and with the full awareness that whatever I write here will not satisfy everyone, and may unsettle some of my closest readers.

Abortion is not a simple topic. I want to say that plainly at the outset, not as a concession to those who would prefer I say nothing at all, but because intellectual honesty requires it. I hold a position I will not hide: as a Christian, I believe life begins at conception. That conviction is not a political slogan for me. It is theological bedrock, rooted in Scripture and in the witness of the Church. But I also know that the conversation does not end there, and that those who speak as though it does often do more harm than good.

What follows is a personal reflection. It is not a policy document. It is not a prosecution. It is one man, shaped by faith, by fatherhood, and by years of watching what happens when institutions claim to protect the vulnerable while quietly serving other interests entirely, trying to think through one of the hardest questions our society faces. I ask you to read it in that spirit.

Every Person in This Story Bears the Image of God

Before I say anything else, I need to say this.

The woman who found herself pregnant and terrified, she bears the image of God.

The woman who was coerced, or abandoned, or told she had no other choice, she bears the image of God.

The woman who made a decision she now grieves, she bears the image of God.

The doctor working under pressure in a system that has normalised what once would have been unthinkable, he or she bears the image of God.

The activist on either side of this debate, certain they are right, they bear the image of God.

And the child, at every stage of development, from the moment of conception to the moment of birth, bears the image of God.

This is not a rhetorical device. It is the framework that makes everything I am about to say either worth reading or not worth reading at all. If I lose sight of any one of these people, I have already failed. The Christian case against abortion does not begin with condemnation. It begins with the recognition that every human being in this story, every single one, is known by name to the God who made them.

I hold that truth with both hands as I write what follows.

A Debate Within a Debate

Before I go further, I want to map the terrain honestly, because many readers may not be aware that the pro-life movement is not a single, unified voice. There is a fault line running through it that rarely gets named in mainstream coverage, and understanding it matters for what I am about to say.

On one side stands what is broadly called the pro-life position, the view that abortion should be restricted, incrementally if necessary, with the goal of reducing and ultimately ending the practice. This position accepts, however reluctantly, that legislation must meet society where it is. It works within the possible. It supports bills like the one Independent MLC Sarah Game has tabled in South Australia, imperfect, partial, but capable of saving lives that would otherwise be lost.

On the other side stands the abolitionist position, the view that any law which permits abortion in any circumstance is a moral compromise too far. Abolitionists argue, with a logic that is internally consistent, that if life truly begins at conception then no exception, not foetal abnormality, not mental health, not even in some formulations the life of the mother, can be morally justified. From this position, a bill that restricts rather than eliminates abortion is not progress. It is participation in a system that still permits killing.

I understand that argument. I respect the conviction behind it. And my own position, that life begins at conception, places me closer to the abolitionist starting point than many would assume.

But I cannot stand where they stand on strategy. Not yet. Not now.

Here is why. A bill that saves some lives while others remain at risk is not a betrayal of the children it cannot yet protect. It is an acknowledgement that we are working within a society that has not yet been moved far enough, and that the work of moving it continues. Letting all die because we cannot yet save all is not faithfulness. It is, I would gently suggest, a form of perfectionism that the most vulnerable pay for. I believe God honours the incomplete step taken in love. I believe he calls us to take it. And I believe, with the abolitionists, that the work does not end there.

I am aware that the pro-choice movement fully understands where incrementalism leads. They know that those of us who hold that life begins at conception share the abolitionist’s destination, even if we differ on the road. And they will use that, and do use that, as a backstop against any change: give them an inch and they will take a mile, so give them nothing.

I want to acknowledge that argument honestly, because it deserves an honest response rather than a deflection.

Yes. The logical destination of my convictions, fully applied, is a society in which abortion is unthinkable. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But consider what that argument actually requires of the other side. To resist this bill, a bill not about conception, not about the first trimester, not about the vast majority of abortions performed in this country, the pro-choice position must argue that it should remain legal to deliberately kill a baby at 27 weeks who, if delivered today, would be placed in a neonatal unit and survive. That is not a defence of women’s autonomy. That is a defence of the principle that no line can ever be drawn, anywhere, at any stage, because drawing a line anywhere concedes that a line exists.

My position for now is this: hold the line where the general public can see it most clearly. Stop the killing of healthy, viable babies in the last trimester, within the right legal framework, and let that become the new settled position from which the broader societal conversation continues. Not the end of the debate. The beginning of a new and more honest one.

My position, stated plainly: life begins at conception. Every abortion is a loss. And right now, in South Australia in June 2026, there is a bill on the table that could stop babies from being killed at 25 weeks and beyond, and that bill deserves every voice it can get.

I want to name one more thing honestly, because it is the argument I expect to hear most from those who disagree with everything I have written so far.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the professional body whose members perform these procedures, has stated publicly, in response to this bill and its predecessor, that terminations after 22 weeks and 6 days occur only for serious medical reasons: a life-limiting condition in the baby, or a serious threat to the health or life of the mother. On their account, the 105 figure I will return to shortly does not represent 105 healthy, viable babies aborted without cause. It represents 105 medical decisions made in already-tragic circumstances.

I do not dismiss that. The people making these decisions are not the villains of this piece, and I said as much at the outset. But I would ask the same question of RANZCOG's framing that I have asked of the legislation itself: if these are, without exception, cases of life-limiting conditions or serious maternal risk, then a bill that explicitly preserves exactly those exceptions, as Sarah Game's bill does, should not meaningfully change clinical practice at all.

The fact that this bill is opposed so strongly suggests that at least some of those 105 cases fall outside the categories RANZCOG describes. Readers can weigh both accounts. I have given you mine, and I have tried to give you theirs honestly too.

Why Women Seek Abortions — And What Grace Requires of Us

I want to be careful here. Very careful.

It would be easy, and it would be wrong, to speak about women who have had abortions as though the decision were simple, or selfish, or made in comfort. The reality that the data and countless testimonies bear out is far more complicated than that, and if the Christian response to abortion does not begin with a genuine attempt to understand that reality, it has already forfeited the right to be heard.

Women seek abortions for reasons that span the full weight of human suffering. Financial desperation, the terror of not being able to provide for a child already here, let alone one on the way. Relationship breakdown, the father gone, or worse, still present but a source of threat rather than support. Coercion, and this word needs to sit with us for a moment, because research consistently tells us that a significant number of women who have abortions did not make that choice freely. They were pressured. By partners. By parents. By circumstances so constrained that what was called a choice was barely a choice at all.

There are women who received a diagnosis mid-pregnancy that shattered everything they had imagined for their child and for themselves. There are women whose mental health was so fragile that they were told, by medical professionals, by people they trusted, that they could not survive the pregnancy. There are very young women who were failed long before they found themselves pregnant, by families, by systems, by men who should have known better.

I do not write any of this to weaken the case for life. I write it because the God I follow did not look at human suffering and offer a policy position. He wept. He sat with people in their worst moments. He reserved his harshest words not for the broken and desperate, but for those who added to their burdens while pretending to serve them.

The Christian response to abortion must hold both things at once, an unwavering conviction that the life in the womb is a life, and an equally unwavering commitment to the woman carrying that life. Not one or the other. Both. Always both.

Where the church has failed in this, and we have failed, and I include myself in that, is in being loudest at the point of the decision and quietest at every point before and after it. If we are not equally present in the crisis pregnancy centre, in the foster care system, in the support of single mothers, in the practical and unglamorous work of making life genuinely possible for vulnerable women, then our public position, however correct, rings hollow. Grace is not a statement. It is a way of showing up.

A Word to the Men

I want to pause here and speak directly to the men.

Not above them. Not at them. Alongside them, because I am one, and I have no platform of moral superiority from which to speak. I have failed in ways I will not catalogue here. I know what it is to need grace rather than a lecture. And it is from that place, not from any height, that I want to say what I believe needs to be said.

Every conversation about abortion eventually arrives at the woman. Her body. Her choice. Her burden. And there is something true in that, the physical reality of pregnancy is hers in a way it will never be the man’s. But the conversation that stops there has quietly let half the story walk out the door. Because in every pregnancy, there was a man. And in far too many of the stories that end in abortion, that man is either absent, or worse, present and silent, or present and pushing.

I am asking men to sit with that.

Not with guilt as a destination. Guilt without direction is just another form of paralysis. But with honest reflection on what intimacy actually means, and what it asks of us. The Apostle Paul did not write to the church at Corinth about sexual ethics as an abstract philosophical matter. He wrote to people living in a hypersexualised culture, not unlike our own, and he was direct:

“Flee from sexual immorality… Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your bodies.” (1 Corinthians 6:18–20)

That is not a prudish sentiment. It is a statement about weight. About the fact that what we do with our bodies carries consequence, for us, for the women we are with, and for the lives that can result. A culture that has reduced intimacy to recreation has not liberated men. It has diminished them. And the children who are gone because a man was not ready to be a father, or was not willing, or simply disappeared, those children are part of that diminishment.

The standard Scripture holds out for men is not comfort. It is sacrifice:

“Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” (Ephesians 5:25)

Even setting aside the marital context, the direction of travel is unmistakable. Men are called toward the woman, not away from her. Toward responsibility, not away from it. Toward the child, not away from it.

But I also want to say something that does not often get said in these conversations.

Men have also been formed by a broken world.

The same cultural machinery that has told women their value lies in their independence from biological reality has told men their value lies in conquest, in detachment, in the performance of strength that looks nothing like the sacrificial love Paul describes. Boys have grown up marinating in a version of masculinity that was never going to produce faithful fathers or devoted partners. That does not excuse the failures. But it does ask us to be honest about what we are dealing with, not just individual sin, but a systemic distortion of what men are for.

And I want to acknowledge something else, carefully and without using it as an escape hatch. There are men reading this who have been genuinely wounded by women. Men who tried to do right and were met with contempt. Men navigating custody battles weaponised against them. Men who offered commitment and had it thrown back. Men living under the shadow of a scorned or damaged woman in ways that are real, and painful, and rarely acknowledged in public discourse. I see you. That pain is real. And it deserves to be named honestly.

But, and this must be said, that wound does not transfer its weight to the child. The failures of women toward men do not resolve a man of his responsibility toward the life he helped create. Grace flows in all directions, or it doesn’t flow at all.

What I am asking, what I believe the God who made us is asking, is not perfection. It is the willingness to begin again. David, the man after God’s own heart, was also an adulterer and a man whose failures cascaded through generations. And yet it was David who wrote:

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” (Psalm 51:10)

That prayer is available to every man reading this. The restoration it asks for is real.

And to the man who is present, who is willing, who wants to do right by the woman and by the child, the Church should be your first port of call, not your last. We have failed you when we have been better at condemnation than at walking alongside. That is also something we need to own.

“Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted.” (Galatians 6:1)

Gentle restoration. Not the loudest voice in the room. The steadiest hand.

The World That Makes Abortion Feel Inevitable

If we are serious about reducing abortion, not just restricting it legislatively but working toward a society where it becomes, as Love Adelaide and its founding director Jodie Pickard have advocated since 2019, something we work together to end entirely, then we have to be equally serious about the conditions that make it feel like the only option. Love Adelaide’s patient, grassroots witness in South Australia over these years deserves recognition here. It is exactly the kind of local, community-rooted advocacy that builds the culture the law alone can never build. For many women, abortion feels like the only available path. And feelings rooted in genuine desperation deserve a genuine response, not a dismissal.

We live in a society that has, over several decades and through a combination of cultural drift, policy choices, and deliberate advocacy, systematically dismantled the structures that once made vulnerability survivable. The stable family. The present father. The extended community that surrounded a young mother before and after birth. The church that was not just a Sunday institution but a genuine network of practical support.

These things have not simply eroded on their own. They have been eroded, by economic structures that require two incomes to sustain what one once could, by a sexual revolution that separated intimacy from commitment and left women holding the consequences, by a therapeutic culture that redefined the termination of a pregnancy as an act of self-care rather than a loss, and by an entertainment and social media environment that has normalised all of it so thoroughly that the abnormal now requires a defence.

The woman who finds herself pregnant, alone, financially precarious, without a supportive partner, without family nearby, without a community that will walk with her practically and not just prayerfully, that woman is not making a free choice when she presents at an abortion clinic. She is making the only choice the world around her has left visible. And if the Christian response to that moment is a protest sign rather than a phone number, a legislative position rather than a spare room, we have misunderstood our calling at the most basic level.

But I want to name something that rarely gets said in the same breath: the same legislative direction that has expanded abortion access in Australia is, in other jurisdictions, actively criminalising the pastoral presence that might offer a woman another path. In the United Kingdom, buffer zone laws under the Public Order Act 2023 make it a criminal offence to pray silently near an abortion clinic. Not to protest. Not to speak. To pray, quietly, privately, in one’s own mind, within a designated exclusion zone. Several high-profile cases have involved arrests or prosecutions relating to silent prayer within these buffer zones.

In Victoria, safe access zones legislation has restricted the ability of pro-life advocates to offer support or information near clinics, laws that survived a High Court challenge in Clubb v Edwards [2019] HCA 11. Closer to home, the Australian Christian Freedom Index 2025, a landmark report produced by the Canberra Declaration in partnership with multiple national Christian organisations, found that nine in ten Australian Christians believe it has become riskier to live out their faith publicly. That is not a fringe concern. It is a documented pattern.

This matters for every Christian reading this article. The pastoral work, the phone call, the spare room, the hand that holds through the crisis, is not a soft complement to the legislative fight. In some jurisdictions it is becoming the frontline of it. If the Church does not show up in the gap, the gap will be legislated away.

This is not an argument against legislation. It is an argument for both. The law matters. The culture matters more. And the culture is made by people who show up, in the hospital, in the crisis pregnancy centre, in the foster system, in the financial counselling service, in the friendship that stays when everything else leaves.

I named this platform Faith Culture Politics for a reason I can only honestly attribute to a prompting I didn’t fully understand when I received it. The sequence is the argument. Politics is downstream from culture. Culture is downstream from faith. And the Christian faith, the faith that holds together the nature of God, the nature of man, and the nature of society in a single coherent vision, is where renewal begins. Always has been. Always will be. Get the theology right and the culture begins to heal. Get the culture right and the politics follows.

The conditions that make abortion feel inevitable to a desperate woman are not primarily a policy failure. They are a cultural failure. And the cultural failure is, at its root, a failure of faith, and of the institutions entrusted to carry it. That is what this section has been about. And it is why the next section matters.

The societal pressures compounding all of this are not accidental. We will come to the institutional machinery behind the normalisation of abortion shortly. But before we do, I want to name what that machinery operates on: genuine human suffering, genuine female desperation, genuine male absence, and a genuine failure of the communities, including the Church, that should have been the first line of support and are too often nowhere to be found.

That is not a comfortable thing to say. It is a necessary one.

Who Benefits From the Normalisation of Abortion?

I want to be careful in this section, in the way I have tried to be careful throughout this article. The women who seek abortions are not pawns. The men who abandon them are not foot soldiers in a conspiracy. The suffering that drives people toward abortion clinics is real, and it belongs to real human beings, not to an agenda.

But suffering can be exploited. And there is ample documented evidence, traceable through government records, published funding reports, and the public statements of the organisations involved, that the conditions which make abortion feel inevitable to so many women have not emerged purely by accident. They have been shaped and influenced by organisations that openly advocate for expanded abortion access and that benefit from a world in which abortion is not a tragedy to be prevented but a right to be celebrated and a service to be delivered at scale.

Let me trace the pipeline, beginning where the money is most visible.

The international funding architecture

Globally, a network of major philanthropic foundations has directed hundreds of millions of dollars toward what they term reproductive rights infrastructure. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, and Melinda Gates’s recently established independent foundation are among the most significant funders in this space, alongside intermediaries such as the Groundswell Fund and the Collaborative for Gender and Reproductive Equity.

According to Inside Philanthropy’s documented analysis, these foundations fund advocacy, legal challenges, political lobbying, and the cultural normalisation of abortion as routine healthcare, in both developing and developed nations.

This is not speculation. It is publicly documented philanthropy, conducted openly, by organisations that publish their grant-making on their own websites. The question worth asking is not whether it is happening, it demonstrably is, but whether Australians are aware that the cultural and legislative environment in which abortion policy is debated here has been substantially shaped by this international capital.

The Australian Government’s own role

Closer to home, the picture is equally documented. The Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been a significant funder of the international reproductive health infrastructure for years. Through its RESPOND program, a multi-year initiative funding the expansion of sexual and reproductive health services, including abortion access, across the Asia-Pacific region in partnership with the International Planned Parenthood Federation and MSI Reproductive Choices (formerly Marie Stopes International), the Australian Government directed AU$33.4 million beginning in 2021 across 22 countries.

A Phase II of that program continued that investment through 2024 and beyond. The Guttmacher Institute, a leading reproductive health research organisation, reported that the Australian-supported RESPOND Phase II program delivered over 1.5 million sexual and reproductive health services, explicitly including abortion care, in its first year alone (August 2024 to June 2025). Australian taxpayer funds, channelled through DFAT, are actively funding abortion delivery internationally. That is not a controversial claim. It is on the DFAT website.

The domestic advocacy network

Within Australia, the same organisations that receive international philanthropic and government funding are simultaneously the most active domestic lobbyists for abortion access. MSI Australia, formerly Marie Stopes Australia, now operating as part of the global MSI Reproductive Choices network, describes itself as Australia’s leading specialised non-profit advocate and provider of abortion and contraception services. It is both a service provider generating fee revenue from abortions performed and an advocacy organisation lobbying government for expanded access and public funding for those same services.

It submitted to the 2025–26 Federal Budget calling for sustained and expanded government funding for abortion care, while simultaneously operating the clinics that would receive that funding. In my assessment, an organisation with a financial interest in the volume of abortions performed, which is simultaneously the leading advocacy voice shaping the policy environment that determines access to those abortions, represents exactly the kind of conflict of interest we scrutinise in every other industry. In the abortion debate, it is rarely mentioned.

The ACT Government’s decision to fund no-cost surgical abortions at MSI Australia’s Canberra clinic, a AU$4.6 million commitment over four years, is the most explicit current example of this relationship: government funding flowing directly to a provider that had actively lobbied for that funding. NSW followed with its own Supporting Safe Access to Abortion Care Grant Fund opened in late 2025.

The Calvary Hospital case in the ACT illustrates where this logic can lead. In April 2023, the ACT Labor-Greens government announced it would compulsorily acquire Calvary Public Hospital, a Catholic institution operated by the Little Company of Mary for 44 years, and transfer it to government control. The government denied the takeover was ideologically motivated. The timing told a different story. The announcement came less than a month after an ACT government inquiry into abortion and reproductive choice.

The Health Infrastructure Enabling Act 2023, the legislation enabling the compulsory acquisition, passed the ACT Legislative Assembly on 31 May 2023. That same inquiry had described Calvary as ‘problematic … due to an overriding religious ethos’ because it did not provide abortion services. Clare Holland House, Canberra’s only inpatient end-of-life hospice also operated by Calvary, was subsequently transitioned to government control.

Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney argued that the acquisition was designed to advance an anti-life agenda through the hospital on both abortion and assisted suicide, a characterisation the government disputed, but one that Archbishop Fisher put on the public record. One year on, the institution that had served Canberra’s sick and dying for nearly half a century remained under government control. Catholic hospitals treat more than 1.5 million Australians annually. Whether one accepts Archbishop Fisher’s reading of the motivation or not, the acquisition of a faith-based institution over its conscientious objection to abortion provision is a development every Christian organisation in Australia should understand clearly.

The South Australian legislative pipeline

It is worth pausing on how South Australia arrived at the law Sarah Game’s bill seeks to amend, because the political lineage matters.

South Australia holds a notable distinction: it was the first Australian jurisdiction to legislate for lawful abortion, in 1969. For decades the law operated within defined limits. Then, in 2020, the Termination of Pregnancy Bill was introduced under a Liberal government, a party that had long presented itself, however imperfectly, as the more socially conservative of the two major parties. The bill was championed by Liberal Attorney-General Vickie Chapman. It passed the Legislative Council on 2 March 2021 and received assent on 11 March 2021. All members had a conscience vote. The legislation came into force on 7 July 2022.

What it created was among the most permissive abortion regimes in the country: available on request up to 22 weeks and six days, and beyond that with the approval of two medical practitioners on grounds that include the broadly defined category of mental health. During the passage of that bill, Attorney-General Chapman gave a clear public assurance. In her own second reading speech, recorded in Hansard, she stated:

"I fundamentally reject the premise that this bill makes it easier to obtain a late-term abortion. I fundamentally reject that. It is a nonsense. There is no such thing as abortion to birth, because it is never medically appropriate, I repeat that: it is never medically appropriate, to terminate a healthy baby at term for no reason whatsoever. Find me a doctor who agrees to this, and I will refer him or her to the regulator myself." — Attorney-General Vickie Chapman, SA House of Assembly Hansard, 16 February 2021

That assurance is on the public record. And as SA Hansard from November 2025 confirms, the Hon. Ben Hood MLC stated in the Legislative Council that parliament had been promised the legislation ‘would not result in healthy babies being aborted after viability if the only factor was the mother’s mental health’ and that ‘the safest option was that the baby be delivered alive.’

That promise was not kept. In the approximately 30 months following the Act’s commencement in July 2022, data from the South Australian Abortion Reporting Committee cited in the SA Parliament recorded that abortions of babies at gestational ages generally regarded as viable had occurred under the legal framework created by that legislation. By the time Sarah Game tabled her third bill in May 2026, that figure had reached 105 babies, cited directly in parliament at the bill’s introduction. To put this in further context, the SA Abortion Reporting Committee’s 2024 Annual Report recorded 48 late-term terminations in 2024 alone, representing 1.0% of all terminations performed in South Australia that year.

Table 8 from SA Abortion Reporting Committee’s 2024 Annual Report

Within two years of the Act’s commencement, pro-life legislators were attempting to restrict what the Liberal government had enabled. Ben Hood, Liberal, brought the first bill in 2024. It was narrowly defeated. Sarah Game brought a second in 2025. It was defeated 11 votes to 8. She has brought a third in 2026. The numbers have shifted. The vote is imminent.

This is not a partisan observation. It is a factual one. The legislation that now permits these procedures in South Australia was delivered by a Liberal government on a conscience vote. The lesson is not that one party is to be trusted and another is not. The lesson is that conscience votes without a Christian conscience behind them produce outcomes that no conservative label can excuse.

The Termination of Pregnancy Act 2021 did not emerge from a neutral policy process. It was actively campaigned for by the SA Abortion Action Coalition, Fair Agenda, and the Human Rights Law Centre, and the same advocacy network that campaigned for the law is now opposing the bill that supporters argue would restore the understanding under which the legislation was originally presented to parliament.

This is the pattern that the pro-choice movement’s resistance to any restriction reveals most clearly. The argument is never about the specific bill in front of parliament. The argument is always that any concession anywhere leads to the abolitionist’s destination.

And in that sense, they are at least consistent: they understand that the logical destination of the pro-life position, including mine, is a society in which abortion is unthinkable. What many of the advocacy organisations opposing this bill will not openly acknowledge is that they oppose restrictions even at stages where many Australians would support them. That is the position the advocacy network is defending on this bill. And it is a position many Australians would find difficult to support when applied to viable pregnancies.

I am not accusing anyone of bad faith. I am observing that the pipeline from international philanthropic funding through domestic advocacy to South Australian law is documented, traceable, and deserving of the same scrutiny we apply to any other form of institutional power. The people who do not benefit from that scrutiny are the most vulnerable women, and the babies who have no voice at all.

The Baby the Debate Forgets

There is a figure that deserves to sit with us before we go any further.

Since the commencement of the Termination of Pregnancy Act in July 2022, 105 babies  have been aborted in South Australia at gestational ages at which they could survive outside the womb, a figure cited by pro-life advocates around the tabling of Sarah Game's bill in May 2026. This is consistent with the trajectory shown in the SA Abortion Reporting Committee's own published annual reports, which record 47 such terminations in 2023 and 48 in 2024 alone.

One hundred and five. Not statistics. Not tissue. One hundred and five individual human beings, each known by God before they were formed, each carrying the image of their Creator, each given no voice in the decision that ended their life.

At 27 weeks, a baby can recognise her parents’ voices. She will react to sudden loud noises. Her eyes respond to light. She has a functioning sense of smell. Her heart has beaten more than 20 million times. She can hiccup. She can dream. She is, by any reasonable measure, a person in every sense that word carries, aware, responsive, alive, and entirely dependent on the protection of the adults around her. At this gestational age, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the peak professional body for obstetrics, survival rates for babies born at 25 weeks range from 67 to 76 per cent in modern neonatal settings. Some Australian neonatal intensive care units provide active care from 22 weeks’ gestation. These are not theoretical survivals. These are happening within the same health system that also permits feticide at comparable gestational ages.

The Gospel of Luke records a moment that has always arrested me in this conversation.

When Mary, carrying the unborn Jesus, visited her cousin Elizabeth, who was carrying the unborn John the Baptist, Luke records that the baby leaped in Elizabeth’s womb at the sound of Mary’s greeting (Luke 1:41–44). The Greek word Luke uses for John in that moment — brephos — is the same word he uses for the infant Jesus lying in the manger after birth. In plain terms: Luke uses the same word for an unborn child and a newborn child. He makes no distinction between them. The Church has never made that distinction. The child before birth and the child after birth are, in the witness of Scripture, the same person.

She is also, under current South Australian law, able to be killed by lethal injection to the heart, a process called feticide, and delivered stillborn. Not because her life is at risk. Not because her mother’s life is at risk. But because a mental health clause in the Termination of Pregnancy Act 2021 creates a threshold broad enough to permit her death on grounds that, in any other context, would be met with care, support, and treatment rather than termination.

The procedure itself is worth understanding, not to shock, but because the language used to describe it, termination, procedure, healthcare, has been carefully chosen to obscure what is physically occurring. The baby is injected with potassium chloride, which stops her heart. Labour is then induced, and she is delivered dead. There is no other way to remove a baby at this gestational age. She must be born. The only question the current law permits is whether she is born alive or dead.

This is what Sarah Game’s bill seeks to address. Not the full scope of abortion law. Not the question of conception. The specific, concrete, documentable reality that babies who could survive, who are surviving, in neonatal units in the same hospitals, are being deliberately killed. And the question her bill forces the parliament to answer is a simple one: does South Australia believe that a baby who could live should be given the chance to live?

Before you watch the video below, I want to prepare you for what you are about to see. It is not graphic. It is beautiful. It is the story of a life, told from the inside, in the full dignity of what that life actually is.

Meet Baby Olivia, a medically reviewed, 3D animated depiction of human development from fertilisation to birth. It was produced by Live Action, a pro-life advocacy organisation, with review by accredited OB-GYN advisers. Many of the developmental milestones depicted are consistent with mainstream embryology and fetal development literature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-lQOooYAs8

Meet Baby Olivia — Live Action fetal development animation (conception to birth)

After you have watched that, I want you to hold in your mind the image of Olivia at 27 weeks, recognising voices, responding to light, dreaming, and then sit with the question of what we are actually describing when we describe a late-term abortion. Not as an accusation. As a reckoning.

This Is the Moment

I want to close this article in three directions at once, because this moment asks something of three different groups of people.

To the woman reading this who is afraid:

I see you. Whatever the circumstances that brought you to this moment, and I know they are more complicated than anyone on the outside can fully understand, I want you to know that you are not alone, and that the God who made you has not abandoned you in this.

“Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you.” (Isaiah 41:10)

There are people, in South Australia, across this country, who will walk with you practically and without judgment through whatever comes next. Not to pressure you. Not to condemn you. Their details are at the end of this article.

To the woman reading this who is carrying grief:

Perhaps this article has stirred something you have carried quietly for a long time. I want to say to you, as plainly and as gently as I know how:

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1)

Not reduced condemnation. Not conditional forgiveness. None. The God who sees everything, including the moment you wish you could take back, is the same God who sent his Son to carry exactly that weight so that you would not have to carry it alone. Healing is available. It is real.

“Behold, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:5)

That promise is for you.

To the Christians of South Australia, and to their pastors:

The 2021 census recorded approximately 800,000 South Australians who identified as Christian. In February 2026, according to Love Adelaide organisers, 4,200 people walked through the streets of Adelaide for the unborn. That is approximately one in every 190 identifying Christians. The other 189 were somewhere else.

I am not writing that to shame anyone. I am writing it because I believe the gap between those two numbers represents something more than apathy. It represents a failure of leadership, not of individuals, but of the institution that is supposed to form them. When the Church is silent on the questions that matter most, its people do not spontaneously find their voice. They take their cue from the pulpit. And the pulpit, on this question and on too many others, has been largely quiet.

I have written before, in Christ at the Centre, about what I believe this moment requires of church leaders. I want to return to that challenge here, with even more specificity:

What would it look like for Christian pastors and priests and ministers, across all traditions, across all denominations, to recover the moral courage that this moment requires? Not the courage to be partisan. Not the courage to endorse a party or wave a flag. But the courage to stand in their pulpits and name, plainly and without apology, that the deliberate killing of a baby who could survive outside the womb is not healthcare. It is not a political opinion. It is a moral reality that the Church has both the authority and the obligation to name. Organisations like the Canberra Declaration exist precisely to resource and equip that kind of courage, I commend their work to every pastor and church leader reading this.

The silence of the Church on these questions is not neutrality. It has never been neutrality. It is a choice. And that choice has consequences that are now visible, in legislation, in culture, in the 105 babies who did not survive in this state alone.

On Wednesday 17 June at 5:30pm, there is a rally outside the South Australian Parliament in support of Sarah Game’s bill — the Termination of Pregnancy (Restrictions on Terminations after 24 Weeks and 6 Days) Amendment Bill 2026. This is the third time this bill has been brought before the parliament. The vote is imminent. The numbers are closer than they have ever been.

If you are in Adelaide, I am asking you to be there.

Not because a rally changes everything. But because politicians need to see that the people who hold these convictions are real, and present, and willing to show up in person, not just in the comments section. And because the 105 babies represented by that figure, and the babies who will follow them if this bill fails again, deserve to see the Church of Jesus Christ standing on the steps of the parliament that is deciding their fate.

And beyond June 17, I want to say plainly that I hope the next Walk for Life in Adelaide in 2027 sees not 4,200 but twenty times that number. The 800,000 South Australians who call themselves Christians are a force that no parliament can ignore, if they choose to show up. Pastors: lead your congregations there. Congregation members: invite your pastor, and if they are not willing to come, ask them, with grace, and with genuine curiosity, why.

Show up. Bring your pastor. And if your pastor won’t come, ask them why.

Contact Your Member of Parliament

Showing up on June 17 matters. So does making your voice heard directly with your elected representatives. Politicians count contacts. They count calls. And when Christians across every South Australian electorate make contact, respectfully, personally, in their own words, it changes the calculus of a vote.

You do not need to be a lobbyist to do this. You need to be a constituent with a view. A brief, respectful message or phone call to your local MP and to Legislative Council members stating your support for Sarah Game’s bill is a legitimate and powerful form of democratic participation. Please do it before June 17.

To give you a starting point, I have written my own letter to all 22 Legislative Council members and to my local member for Mawson. You are welcome to use it as a reference or template for your own. Read or download the letter here.

Copy of email to members of parliament which contained the referenced letter

Find your member:

All 22 Legislative Council members (the chamber that votes on this bill):

All current House of Assembly members

If You Need Support — You Are Not Alone

The following organisations offer free, confidential, and compassionate support. None of them will pressure you toward any particular decision. All of them will walk with you.

South Australia — Crisis Pregnancy & Practical Support

Birthline Pregnancy Support — SA’s longest-standing pregnancy support service, established 1972. 24/7 counselling line, face-to-face counselling, practical baby goods, post-abortion support, and adoption pathways. Helpline 1300 655 156 or 08 8331 1223

Genesis Pregnancy Support — Crisis pregnancy counselling and practical support across SA, including the eMerge post-abortion healing retreats program.

Helpline 1300 139 313 Office. 08 8352 4044

House of Refuge (Love Australia) — A growing network of SA churches equipped to provide practical refuge, mentoring, and sustained community support for women facing unplanned pregnancy or carrying grief from a past abortion. info@houseofrefuge.org.au

National — Helpline & Network

Pregnancy Help Australia — Free, confidential national helpline with support hubs across SA. Available 8am–10pm, 7 days a week. 1300 139 313

Post-Abortion Healing

eMerge Retreats SA — Weekend healing retreats run by trained, compassionate facilitators in a small group, confidential setting.

Helpline 1300 139 313 Office. 08 8352 4044

Rachel’s Vineyard Australia — Interdenominational post-abortion healing retreats operating nationally. 0404 448 532

connect@rachelsvineyard.au

Until next time.

God bless.