It took more than 40 years of feminist activism, three days and nights of parliamentary debate and hours-long speeches by religious right MPs railing against decriminalisation for abortion in Victoria to be taken out of the crimes act. Ten years on, this is still a powerful victory. Victoria is one of only three Australian jurisdictions where abortion is legal, despite strong community support. Given recent failures to decriminalise in Queensland and New South Wales, Victoria’s success is a reminder that change is possible.

However, the victory in Victoria is only a partial one. Decriminalisation was intended to remove big barriers to women trying to access an abortion, as well as make abortions less necessary by increasing access to contraception and reproductive health education. This should have become much easier in 2012, when medical abortions became available in Australia. This was a once-in-a-generation clinical and social breakthrough, enabling women to access abortions from their GPs, not just through hospital-based surgery. Despite that, medical abortions are far less common in Australia than in New Zealand, the UK and Europe, and there is still inadequate access to contraception services. A decade on, the promise of decriminalisation has not been realised.

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Criminalisation has a long tail. Decades of stigma and failure to recognise abortion as legitimate healthcare mean we don’t have enough services or doctors providing abortions. Ironically, in the past, more GPs knew how to provide abortions than now; compounding this, the current workforce is ageing. In the absence of strong policy directions and new government funding, few public hospitals and clinics provide services.

According to Women’s Health Victoria’s service website, only four of Victoria’s 122 hospitals offer surgical abortions. That drops to two for services for women with healthcare cards. Out of thousands of GPs and clinics, 61 services provide medical abortions. Again, the number almost halves for healthcare card holders. Compounding this, the majority of abortions in Victoria are conducted by private providers, for a fee. This is the de facto privatisation of a crucial health service.

This failure to provide abortions as part of normal publicly funded primary healthcare, a key health need exclusive to women, is a form of sex discrimination. The impact of this gendered discrimination is borne disproportionately by young women, poor women, disadvantaged women and women experiencing male violence. Researchers Dr Angela Taft and Lyndsey Watson show that young women who have abortions are more likely to be poor, less educated and not privately insured, and that violence against a woman by her partner is the strongest predictor for her having an abortion. Inadequate abortion services intensify disadvantage.

Young women who have abortions are more likely to be poor, less educated and not privately insured.

None of this is inevitable, or even very hard to fix. Well-equipped health professionals, trained to administer abortions and contraception and also to recognise and respond when women are experiencing reproductive coercion or other violence from their partners, can transform women’s lives. It is relatively simple to roll out more medical abortion and contraception services – we need to train GPs and nurses to provide them, and fund their clinics to deliver them. The barrier is not clinical or technical but political.

In one small sign of progress, in the past couple of years, the Victorian government has taken an initial, tentative step in funding two community health services to provide medical abortions and contraception. As the Greens candidate for Richmond, I am also committing $750,000 for local medical abortion services here. What we need now is for such initiatives to be scaled up statewide. The price tag for transformative health interventions is usually in the billions but we could realistically expand medical abortions to every community health centre in the state for four years for $100m, and, in doing so, change many women’s lives for the better. What will it take for this to happen? More than this, what is needed to take abortion off the crime books in places like New South Wales and Queensland?

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Decriminalisation in Victoria offers some lessons. Here, decriminalisation succeeded in part because of a powerful cross-party alliance of female ALP, Greens and Liberal MPs, backed by a strong campaign led by women’s health activists and organisations. This, in turn, was possible because of an increased number of women in parliament. Around the world, women’s rights have been bolstered when women have entered parliaments in sufficient numbers to make this a priority. With the Victorian elections next month and NSW elections in March, electing more pro-choice women is crucial to decriminalisation in NSW and extending services in Victoria.

In Australia in recent years, women’s anger has, rightfully, centred on family violence and related abuse. But enforced fertility – contesting a woman’s right to decide if or when she has a baby, and obstructing and stigmatising her when she claims that right – is the one of the pillars of male supremacy, and, in itself, a form of violence. Without reproductive rights – whether the right to end a pregnancy, or to seek to conceive and have a child – women are under attack. We need to re-energise our demand for publicly provided, accessible abortion services. The anniversary of the decriminalisation of abortion in Victoria is a reminder that big victories are possible.

• Kathleen Maltzahn is the Greens candidate for Richmond in the Victorian state election, and campaigned for decriminalisation in 2008 as head of a women’s health service.

• Comments on this thread are premoderated to keep the discussion on the topics raised by the author