The Lusher motion: women's citizenship and the surprising defence of abortion by Australian parliamentarians

In the 1970s, abortion became a contentious issue that would provoke intense debate and confound the organising divisions upon which Australian parliamentary politics rested. Historians have often discerned, as a consequence, a parliamentary ‘reluctance’ to liberalise abortion laws in this decade, even though there was wide popular support to do so. This article examines a moment when Commonwealth parliamentarians acted to defeat a proposal to limit women’s access to abortion and deployed feminist arguments as they ‘protected’ some women’s access to abortion. It traces the emergence of a feminist politics of abortion centred on citizenship and its, perhaps surprisingly wide, uptake by parliamentarians in 1979. This suggests that a feminist politics of abortion had more impact on the norms of Australian political culture than existing feminist narratives of parliamentary inaction and conservative resistance have allowed.