Dr Catherine Orr knows firsthand how limited the options are for women with unplanned pregnancies in regional and rural Australia.



The GP became a prescriber of medical abortion drugs in 2013, shortly after RU486 was listed on the nation’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

“I have always worked in rural settings and had a special interest in women’s health, because coming across women in rural areas with unplanned pregnancies and trying to get them access to abortion had just been so difficult as there is a big hole in services, so you always ended up referring them to major centres in capital cities,” she said.

Orr works at Gateway Health in Wodonga, Victoria, where abortion was decriminalised in 2008. Increasingly, Orr’s patients seeking RU486 are coming from across the Murray River in New South Wales, where abortion still sits in criminal legislation.

“We are a Victorian service, but we have seen more than 1,000 women for unplanned pregnancies and 60% of them come from NSW,” Orr said. “We’ve had a woman do a 1,200km round trip to see us from NSW.”

In NSW, unlawful abortion is a criminal offence for a woman and for her doctor (or person administering the intervention) and is punishable by up to 10 years jail under the Crimes Act 1900.

Subsequent case law has established that abortion is lawful in NSW if the doctor has an honest opinion that continuing the pregnancy would be seriously harmful to the health of the woman.

Orr said NSW law is “part of the problem”.

“We have had a significant number of women getting to our service after their NSW GP has told them abortion is illegal,” Orr said.

“I am in Victoria and our abortion law reform makes it very clear to me that if a woman comes in with an unplanned pregnancy and she wants an abortion, that is almost all I need to know, but in NSW, because it is technically in the Crimes Act and there have been doctors charged, I think doctors think ‘I take on enough risks and I don’t want to take that on’.”

A medical abortion involves taking two different pills — mifepristone (RU486), which causes the pregnancy to fail, then 36 to 48 hours later, misoprostol, which causes the uterus to expel its contents.