A university health clinic in Perth is now offering chemical abortions to the public and training its student midwives to provide them. That should stop us in our tracks.
Curtin University’s Midwifery Clinic, run out of its health sciences faculty, has begun offering medical abortion using the MS-2 Step regimen. The service is delivered by trainee midwifery students under the supervision of qualified midwives, as part of their clinical training, and it’s offered to the public at a subsidised cost. A poster advertising the service is what first brought this to our attention, through a concerned Curtin student who has been looking into it closely.
This appears to follow changes to Western Australia’s abortion laws that took effect in 2024, which expanded the ability of appropriately qualified midwives and nurse practitioners to prescribe medical abortions.
As far as we can tell, Curtin is the only university in WA offering medical abortions through an on-campus, university-run clinic while also training midwifery students to provide them. It may be one of the first universities in Australia to fold this into student clinical practice this way. Students studying midwifery at other WA universities, including Edith Cowan, have told us abortion isn’t part of their coursework at all. That makes Curtin’s approach a genuine outlier, and one that could become a template if it isn’t challenged.
Why should this concern all of us?
Young women training to bring life into the world are instead being trained to end it. Most students who choose midwifery do it because they want to care for mothers and babies. Folding abortion provision into that training, without it being sought out or chosen, changes the character of the profession itself.
This is happening quietly, on a university campus, with public money.
A subsidised clinic operating inside a public university isn’t a private medical decision between doctor and patient. It’s an institutional choice, made largely out of public view, that deserves public scrutiny.
Access is being made easy, not just available.
Calls made to the clinic to ask about the service found appointments readily available and the process straightforward. That tells you this isn’t a marginal or occasional part of what the clinic does. It’s a routine, promoted offering.
What can be done?
Christian students on campus are already responding. Several Christian club presidents have raised concerns, though understandably some are wary of taking a public stand for fear of damaging relationships they’ve built with the university. Others, including students outside those clubs, have said they’d support action in a personal capacity. Ideas being discussed include a student petition and a peaceful, student-led demonstration on campus.
This is exactly the kind of moment ACL exists for: to give a voice to Christians who care deeply but aren’t sure how to act, and to help make sure that action is strategic, legally sound, and genuinely effective rather than merely symbolic.
We’ll have more to say as this develops. If you’re a student, staff member, or parent connected to Curtin and you want to raise your voice on this, get in touch with us. And if you’re not connected to Curtin at all, this still matters to you. What one university normalises today; others follow tomorrow.
