Tag: Gender

Sex Selective abortion

Sex-selective abortion means unborn girls are missing

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Sex-selective abortion is legal in Queensland and other Australian states, particularly among immigrants from India, China and Vietnam. Yet, feminists and other pro-choice activists are silent about this lethal form of discrimination.

By Hannah Newton, Cherish Life Queensland

Sex-selective abortion, that is the practice of ending the life of an unborn child based on that child’s sex, is often thought of as a distant problem confined to other parts of the world like Asia. However, new research has revealed that this lethal form of discrimination is not only happening in Australia, it is also likely happening right here in Queensland. Devastatingly, there is currently nothing we are doing to stop it.

Newly released study

A groundbreaking peer-reviewed study published in PLOS Global Health analysed over 2.1 million births in Western Australia and New South Wales between 1994 and 2015.1 The authors found consistent, statistically significant patterns of male-based sex ratios at birth among certain population groups, particularly at the second or third pregnancy following one or more daughters.

In natural conditions, the sex ratio at birth (otherwise known as the SRB) is about 105 boys for every 100 girls. However, this study showed that the SRB exceeded expectations for children born to Indian, Chinese and Vietnamese mothers. For mothers from China, the SRB was 1.09 at second birth and markedly higher (1.34) at the third birth when the first two were female.2 This pattern was also observed for mothers from India. Indian and Chinese mothers had much higher induced abortion rates in early pregnancy than their Australian counterparts, which also coincided with the introduction of non-invasive prenatal testing. The authors concluded that this provided observational evidence that linked the male-biased SRB with prenatal sex determination followed by selective female-biased abortion.3

So what is non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT)? This is a semi-recently introduced blood test that can reveal the sex of a baby as early as 10 weeks gestation.4 This timeline also conveniently falls well within the legal window for abortion-on-request in most Australian Jurisdictions. What this means is that parents can find out the sex of a baby early enough to legally terminate the pregnancy if they are disappointed.

While this data came from WA and NSW, the same cultural and legal conditions exist in Queensland, meaning that there is every reason to believe that similar sex-selection practices are occurring here.

Permissive abortion laws fuel the problem

Since the passing of the Termination of Pregnancy Act 2018 (Qld), abortion in Queensland is legal for any reason up to 22 weeks gestation.5 Beyond 22 weeks, it can still be performed with the agreement of two doctors.

There is:

  • No requirement to give a reason for seeking an abortion
  • No restriction on terminating based on the sex of the baby
  • No delay in disclosing the baby’s sex via NIPT
  • No data collection or monitoring of why abortions are performed in Queensland

This legal environment effectively created the perfect storm for sex-selective abortions to occur undetected and unchallenged. Parents can learn the sex of their unborn child early, and if they are hoping for a boy but find out it is a girl, they can legally and quietly abort the baby. We must acknowledge this for what it is, gender discrimination.

 Let’s be clear: this is gender-based discrimination

Sex selective abortion is not a fringe concern. It is a form of gender-based violence that targets girls at their most vulnerable stage: in the womb. It says to girls, before they take their first breath, that they are not wanted or valued.

This practice has contributed to millions of “missing girls” globally, especially in China, where widespread sex-selection has created dangerous demographic imbalances and human rights crises.6 The United Nations has even condemned sex-selective abortion as a violation of women’s rights.7 However, in Australia we are turning a blind eye.

We cannot claim to uphold gender equality while permitting a legal system that allows girls to be aborted for simply being girls.

A glaring double standard: IVF vs abortion

Here’s the irony: in Australia, it is illegal to select the sex of a baby through IVF unless there is a medical reason (such as avoiding a sex-linked genetic disorder).

The National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines, which govern reproductive technology, explicitly prohibit non-medical sex-selection. The reasoning is sound: allowing parents to choose the sex of their child for personal or cultural reasons would entrench gender bias and commodify children. And yet, while sex-selection through IVF is banned, sex-selection through abortion is entirely legal. This contradiction is staggering.

In one context, the government rightly says: you cannot choose your child’s sex – because girls and boys are of equal value. But in another says: you can end the life of your unborn baby if the child is not the sex you want – and we won’t ask why. 

This is not just a loophole, it’s a fundamental failure of consistency and principle and it is costing baby girls their lives. How can we ban sex-selection in the lab while turning a blind eye to it in the womb?

The lies used to justify it

Pro-abortion advocates often justify unrestricted abortion laws by invoking tragic scenarios – claiming that if abortion were restricted in any way, women would be denied care for miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy. This is false.

In Queensland:

  • Miscarriage care is completely legal and is routinely provided
  • There is no law that prohibits health professionals from offering and administering life-saving treatment.

This argument is a scare tactic, used to distract from the fact that our current laws allow for abortion purely because the child is the “wrong” sex. This is not about reproductive healthcare, it is about ideological dishonesty and legal cowardice.

So, what needs to be done?

If Queensland is serious about protecting women and girls, we must take urgent steps to end sex-selective abortion. At a minimum the Queensland Government should:

  • Ban the disclosure of a baby’s sex before 20 weeks unless medically necessary
  • Prohibit abortion on the grounds of a baby’s sex
  • Introduce mandatory reporting requirements, including collection of data on reasons for abortion and a baby’s sex at termination
  • Implement clinical protocols in line with ethical standards that prevent misuse of NIPT for non-medical sex-selection.

Equality must begin in the womb

Sex-selective abortion is happening in Australia. It is enabled by silence, fuelled by ideology, and ignored by the very laws that claim to protect women. If we care about gender equality, we cannot look away.

Every unborn girl deserves the same right to life and dignity as a boy. Equality must begin in the womb. It’s time Queensland faced the truth – and acted to protect all of our babies.

By Hannah Newton. Republished from Cherish Life with permission. Cherish Life Queensland was founded in 1970 (as Right to Life Queensland), to advocate for the right to life from conception until natural death and remains one of the largest pro-life organisations in Australia.

  1. Gebremedhin AT, et al. (2025) Indirect evidence of sex-selective abortion practices to the imbalanced sex ratio at birth in Australian migrant populations. PLOS Glob Public Health 5(5): e0004672. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004672 Accessed 7 August 2025. ↩︎
  2. Gebremedhin AT, et al. (2025) Indirect evidence of sex-selective abortion practices to the imbalanced sex ratio at birth in Australian migrant populations. PLOS Glob Public Health 5(5): e0004672. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004672 Accessed 7 August 2025. ↩︎
  3. Gebremedhin AT, et al. (2025) Indirect evidence of sex-selective abortion practices to the imbalanced sex ratio at birth in Australian migrant populations. PLOS Glob Public Health 5(5): e0004672. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004672 Accessed 7 August 2025. ↩︎
  4. Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), Pregnancy birth & baby https://www.pregnancybirthbaby.org.au/non-invasive-prenatal-testing-nipt#:~:text=Non%2Dinvasive%20prenatal%20testing%20(NIPT)%20is%20one%20way%20you,genetic%20conditions%20in%20your%20baby. Accessed 7 August 2025. ↩︎
  5. Termination of Pregnancy, Queensland Government. https://www.qld.gov.au/health/children/pregnancy/termination-of-pregnancy Accessed 7 August 2025. ↩︎
  6. Sex-selective abortions over the past four decades in China. (2025). Population Health Metrics, 23(6). https://pophealthmetrics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12963-025-00368-y Accessed 7 August 2025. ↩︎
  7. Joint Statement by OHCHR, UNFPA, UNICEF, UN Women and WHO. “Son preference” must end. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2011/06/joint-statement-ohchr-unfpa-unicef-un-women-and-who?utm_source=chatgpt.com Accessed 7 August 2025. ↩︎

A Victim of Medical Sterilisation

Medical sterilisation of children ‘paused’ by Qld govt

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by John Morrissey

The Queensland Government has restricted medical sterilisation and mutilation of children despite pressure from gender therapy lobbyists.

The questionable practice of subjecting minors to puberty-blocking drugs is usually met with government indifference and little attention in the local media.

However, Queensland Health’s recently-announced restriction on this treatment for all new child and adolescent patients has clearly provoked the Albanese Labor government’s health minister Mark Butler into action.

On January 31 he announced a review into gender therapies, to be conducted by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), with an interim report to be delivered in mid-2026.

This is seen by many to be a stalling tactic to avert the action initiated by Queensland’s recently-elected Liberal National Party government.

Predictably, the Australian Human Rights Commission and media outlets such as Crikey.com have protested about so-called right-wing “ideology” preventing “trans and gender-diverse” children from accessing this controversial form of medical treatment; but Queensland Premier David Crisafulli and his government must stand firm for the sake of thousands of innocent children.

Note that in Queensland 600 current “gender” patients will nonetheless continue to receive treatment with puberty-blockers or hormonal drugs.

Up-to-date statistics are uncertain, but the numbers undergoing gender treatment each year have bee increasing in all states. In Queensland, the number of patients soared from 190 in 2017 to 922 in 2022. In Victoria, it increased from 472 in 2019 to 1,290 in 2023, with a lengthy waiting list.

It is believed that social media, classroom indoctrination and the entertainment industry — not to mention the ill-considered “advice” of sections of the healthcare industry — are responsible for this surge. In Victoria, health professionals and others are threatened by legal penalties from seeking to dissuade children and others from this irreversible course (see below).

The only recognised guidelines for gender-reassignment practices in Australia are the model developed by Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) and a similar framework promoted by NSW Health. Both were recently described by Sydney journalist Bernard Lane, as “nothing less than the blueprint for gender- affirming medicine in Australia”, created by its very practitioners. Paradoxically, Mr Butler’s intervention, belated as it is, confirms the inadequacy of the RCH and similar guidelines.

Children and adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria are often also suffering from other psychological
problems. These include depression (74.6%) and other conditions such as suicidal thoughts and autism (Australian Trans Pathways Studies in Youth, 2020).

Why normal standards of care, relying on evidence-based research, have been ignored in these cases is explained by Australian psychiatrist Dr Andrew Amos in a revealing study published last year in Australasian Psychiatry. He explains that the principle of the gender-affirming model of care is that “all health clinicians have an ethical responsibility not to question or evaluate patient reported gender identity, even when that identity is unstable, changes rapidly, and is co-morbid with severe mental illness”.

Dr Amos points out that these practitioners “assume access to gender-affirming interventions is a human right that should be available to anyone competent to request them”. That is, they reject the need for any
systematic evaluation of whether these treatments have benefited patients.

Despite a torrent of information from overseas warning of the dangers of this treatment, and the new restrictions on its use for minors in Finland, Sweden, the UK and some U.S. states such as Florida, Australian governments have persisted with transgender “treatments” of children. At no point have they ever felt obliged to produce evidence to justify their practices which lead to the irreversible sterilisation of children too young to make a mature decision about many other facets of their lives.

So-called healthcare professionals have driven a wedge between family members, and bullied parents into withdrawing their objections to their children being subjected to transgender treatment. In Victoria, parents, doctors, teachers and counsellors face heavy penalties if they offer advice, or even prayer, contrary to transgender ideology, as stipulated by the counselling censorship provisions of the state’s draconian Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act 2021.

We have seen in the UK the 2019 scandal surrounding the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). In April 2024 came the bombshell report by Dr Hilary Cass, OBE, commissioned by NHS England, on gender identity services for children and young people. In addition, Scandinavian and U.S. reviews have found the evidence favouring hormonal treatment of gender-distressed minors to be very weak and uncertain. In reality, gender-affirmation or sex-reassignment is impossible, owing to unalterable chromosomes. Moreover, surgical reconstructions are only cosmetic.

Long-term studies overseas do not record positive outcomes, especially for those who later regret an
irreversible choice made when they were children.

Australian governments and even courts have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the weight of evidence from overseas pleading caution. This is how an Australian Family Court judge resolved the case of parents disputing the administering of testosterone to their 16-years-old trans-identifying daughter. He ruled last November that, in the absence of evidence-based guidance, it is “common sense” to accept the “best available guidance” and a “consensus favouring gender medicine”. This judge used masculine pronouns throughout when referring to the daughter and rejected the relevance of “potential later interventions” when endorsing testosterone treatment.

Nowhere in the gender-affirming literature published in Australia does the word “de-transition” appear. There
is no acknowledgement of the many youngsters who subsequently regret what has been done to their bodies.

I once wrote a review of American author Walt Heyer’s book, Gender, Lies and Suicide: A Whistleblower
Speaks Out (2013), in which he describes how, in a bid to overcome a major depressive illness, he underwent so-called gender reassignment after which he tried to live as a woman named Laura Jensen. He explains how he was seduced into this treatment and how his mental health problems returned with a vengeance once the initial euphoria had worn off. After eight years of suffering increasing regret about his decision, he “de-transitioned” and now lives as a man.

More heart-rending are the cases investigated by Channel Seven’s Spotlight program, “Breaking the silence: The reality of de-transitioning” (August, 2023), in which teenagers tell of their disillusionment with transgender treatment and the knowledge that there is no way back from the medical sterilisation and surgical mutilation that they have undergone. Chloe is an American girl, who after being diagnosed with gender dysphoria began medical treatment at 12 and underwent a double-mastectomy at 16. She declares, “I asked for help and they gave me mutilation.”

The Australian Christian Lobby has been particularly active in warning parents, children and teenagers against the transgender cult’s deceptive promise that it has a simple silver-bullet remedy for their mental health issues. The ACL has produced a two-part documentary, “The gender experiment: The truth revealed”, which is available online. It exposes the fraudulent promise of the transgender lobby and features accounts from Chloe Cole and her Australians counterparts on how they were seduced into transitioning and how disillusioned they became with the result.

In the course of the documentary, Queensland child psychiatrist Dr Jillian Spencer explains that adolescents prioritise short-term gains and that brain development and deferred gratification come only with maturity. She describes the tragedy of parents losing custody of their children when they object to their children undergoing gender reassignment, and the unrelenting pressure she has experienced from her professional colleagues to defer to transgender ideology. The ACL documentary is highly recommended.All this shows how important it is for the Queensland Crisafulli government to stand firm on its moratorium on transgender treatments of children. The public has every right to be sceptical about the “independence” of the process being undertaken by the NHMRC.

The transgender medical lobby has already established a bridgehead into the heart of federal government decision-making through an LGBTIQA+ health advisory group chaired by assistant health minister Gerardine “Ged” Kearney.

Furthermore, it is unlikely that the states’ chief health officers will break rank and examine sceptically treatments which have divorced themselves from evidence-based medicine. Notwithstanding being unable to produce “gold standard evidence” to support its recommendations, a particularly accommodating review for the NSW government in 2024 by the Sax Institute alleges that puberty suppression and gender-affirming hormones could be beneficial.

The Australian public should demand much better standards from healthcare professionals, especially for youngsters believed to be suffering from gender dysphoria, which, if left untreated, usually dissipates by adulthood — without harmful interventions …

About the author
John Morrissey is a retired secondary school teacher who has taught in government, independent and
Catholic schools. He lives in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn with his blue heeler, Tammy, and writes
regularly for the Endeavour Forum Newsletter.