I’d never thought I’d say this, but it’s better for women in the US for this one reason

As of last Tuesday, the road map of abortion in Australia has been made significantly more accessible. A landmark decision was announced: to have the medication required to terminate a pregnancy stocked in all pharmacies, as well as permission granted to all doctors and nurse practitioners to prescribe it.

Inevitably, this change in policy will help remedy the deep and enduring socio-cultural divides that impede upon many people when it comes to governing their own reproductive healthcare. Despite abortion being legal in all states and territories, the unrelenting postcode lottery – as well as class, race, age and ability – recurrently impacts a person’s choice when it comes to terminating a pregnancy.

Australia has broadened access to medical abortion pills, but is yet to make contraceptive pills as easily available. Credit: Fiona-Lee Quimby

The same week as Australia announced its plans to make access to medical abortion pills easier, the United States introduced its own historic healthcare measure, announcing oral contraceptives —commonly referred to as “the pill”—will be able to be purchased at supermarkets and chemists without the consultation of a doctor. I mention the pill’s abbreviation deliberately, as its shortened inscription has deep historical relevance. “The pill” is a simple, uncomplicated moniker. When oral contraceptives were first introduced, referring to the pill as just that – a pill – allowed women to be discreet in how they sought their medication.

Over time, the pill has come to represent something larger and more symbolic than itself. Like the condensing of its medical title, what lives in the pill’s political DNA is an abridged pathway for women to be able to exist more freely in the world. Since the 1960s, it has afforded us the agency to govern our own reproductive choices, yielding us more economic, social and domestic freedoms. It is the pill: the-pill-that-trumps-all-pills, at least in how it worked to shift stale and oppressive cultural regimes that decided how women ought to manage their own bodies. So why is it that this pill still requires a prescription in Australia, a trivial hurdle, especially after the leaps-and-strides made on home soil when it comes to abortion access?

For as long as people have been having sex, there have been measures – be they medical or otherwise – to prevent conception. As Margaret Talbot writes for the New Yorker, ″the ancient Egyptians fashioned vaginal plugs out of crocodile dung. The Greeks imagined that conception could be prevented by anointing the womb with frankincense and myrrh.” And yet, despite these ancient rituals, regulations still pose hurdles when it comes to managing one’s own reproductive agency in 2023.

Conversations surrounding sex – and all of its complications – always start well before the first time one steps into the office of a GP or school nurse. Amid the excitable chatter of school girls, the slippery archives of online pornography and our own messy journeys of understanding our bodies, we are introduced to sex well before we have the tools to make sense of it. And yet, modern-day efforts to foil contraception access are still alive and well.

Currently, the logic in Australia is that abortion access and contraceptive measures are inextricably linked.

But, as it stands, the pill does more than just provide security against an unwanted pregnancy. It allows individuals to govern the sometimes debilitating headache of having a female reproductive system, procreation aside: be it aiding painful periods, lowering the risk of ovarian and uterine cancers, improving acne, and treating endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

There is a quiet but dispiriting truth that lives in all global contraceptive and abortion strategies, and it is that managing a female reproductive system requires time, energy and – importantly –money. In a world where women are already economically disadvantaged, the fact contraception is largely unable to be subsidised through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme in Australia, for example, reveals that the monetary disadvantages are only exacerbated through reproductive healthcare access issues.

If Australia is committed to improving abortion access, as it did by taking the step to further individualise reproductive health last week, we must too be willing to look at the messy pathways many women are forced to take when it comes to managing their own bodies, well before a positive pregnancy test looms large over an individual’s future.

Madison Griffiths the author of Tissue, out now with Ultimo Press, and the co-recipient of the Walkley Foundation’s 2022 Our Watch Award for Reporting on Violence Against Women.

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