HRLA helps to defend fundamental rights and freedoms of everyday Australians, including the right of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals to hold a conscientious objection to assisting in abortions.

HRLA has assisted a number of medical professionals exercise this right over the years.

And this right is crucial for people like Louise Adsett, a clinical midwife with 14 years experience.

In 2024 at a Queensland Parliamentary inquiry, Adsett described the case of a baby boy, born alive following an abortion at 21 weeks’ gestation, who moved vigorously, gasped for breath, and had a palpable heart rate. His parents did not wish to hold or see him. The midwives on duty held him for five hours before he took his final breath.

“These babies deserve better,” Adsett told the inquiry. “They deserve to have the same rights that all of us human beings have.”

Adsett was one of the speakers at Monday’s Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) rally at Parliament House, where more than 10,000 hand-knitted baby booties, sent by supporters from across the country, were laid on the lawns to represent babies that were left to die in Victoria and Queensland from 2010 to 2020.

This rally took place on the day that Liberal National MP Llew O’Brien introduced the Human Rights (Children Born Alive Protection) Bill 2026 into the House of Representatives.

The Bill addresses the legal gap Adsett’s testimony made apparent. Under its terms, a registered health practitioner’s duty of care to a baby born alive following an abortion would be identical to their duty to any other patient.

The Bill would also establish national reporting. No comprehensive Australian data on babies born alive after abortions currently exists. Around 150 such births are estimated to occur each year, though even that figure is acknowledged to be incomplete.

Adsett told the inquiry that she was a “conscientious objector when it comes to providing care for women aborting their babies”, but was “happy to make myself available to hold a baby who was born alive after an abortion”. Her position as a conscientious objector is legally instructive.

She exercises her right of conscience to step away from abortion procedures. The current framework accommodates that right.

South Australia and NSW have already legislated equal treatment for babies born alive regardless of the circumstances of their birth. University of Adelaide law professor Joanna Howe documented 328 such deaths in Queensland between 2010 and 2020. O’Brien’s Bill would apply that standard nationally.