Bill to decriminalise abortion passes lower house of parliament by 59 votes to 31 after lengthy debate

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

After three days of wrangling, a historic bill to decriminalise abortions in New South Wales has cleared its first hurdle after passing through the state’s lower house.

The Reproductive Healthcare Reform bill passed 59 votes to 31 just before 11pm on Thursday night, though not without amendments that altered the bill from its original form.

The house negotiated more than a dozen amendments for several hours on Thursday. Having failed to stop the bill, opponents moved to refer it to a committee, change the gestation period at which a woman would need the sign-off from two doctors from 22 to 20 weeks and impose mandatory counselling on women seeking a termination.

Those amendments failed, but others did not. Doctors will now have a statutory requirement to gain “informed consent” before performing abortions thanks to an amendment put by the attorney general Mark Speakman, a change the Australian Medical Association warned would cause confusion and create an unnecessary “extra hurdle” to accessing a termination.

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Another amendment put by Liberal MP Alister Henskens will require a doctor to assess whether it would be “beneficial” to discuss counselling with the woman, and provide them with options for accessing it if they were interested.

The bill will now be scrutinised by the parliament’s social issues committee next week, before a vote in the upper house.

The bill – a conscience vote for both major parties – split senior Liberals. While the premier, Gladys Berejiklian, and health minister, Brad Hazzard, supported the bill, others including the treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, Speakman and the planning minister, Rob Stokes, opposed it.

The former minister for women, Tanya Davies, led the opposition to the bill. She sought unsuccessfully to move a number of amendments, including one to ban abortions procured on the basis of gender selection.

Speakman, who opposed that amendment, pointed out that it was unclear what a doctor would have to do to recognise that situation. Instead, the bill’s sponsors agreed to a review after 12 months to see whether any cases of abortion on the basis of gender selection had occurred.

The original bill, introduced by the independent MP Alex Greenwich last week, would have removed abortion from the state’s criminal code and made it legal upon request up to 22 weeks.

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Women beyond 22 weeks gestation would need the consent of two doctors. After amendments moved by the bill’s co-sponsors in an attempt to placate opponents, one of the two doctors must be a specialist obstetrician or gynaecologist and it can only occur at a public hospital.

Despite having the support of MPs from across the major parties, the bill has been the subject of significant opposition from conservative MPs, the Catholic church and anti-abortion activists.