But once Mass was over and she had walked outside, my husband got the iPhone out, and I went up to her and said:

“Katrine, these babies are in the third trimester. Why is it so important to you that they are killed before they are born? Why is that so important?”

For her to turn up, I assumed she had had a change of heart, that she had come to her senses and realised how evil it is to be for injecting these babies first and then delivering them dead. Why is she against delivering them alive? Could we just have a chat about it?

She did not want to answer the question.

“Katrine, you are here at Easter Sunday Mass. Could I assume, then, that you have had a change of heart and repented about the fact that you have supported abortion up to birth?”

I kind of knew she probably had not because she had not made a public statement or anything like that. And I do not know… she turned up to the most popular Mass of the year, so I was a bit cynical about why she was there.

She did not want to talk, but I kept filming. She said, “I do not want to talk.” She just sort of pursed her lips and said, “I do not want to talk, I am not here to talk to you.” And I said:

“Look, but you supported legislation — you were against legislation that would have protected babies in the third trimester from being injected with poison. And you are here at church, and as Christians, we know that every human being has dignity.”

She still did not want to talk, but we filmed it, and it was a video that went to 250,000 on Instagram.

I did have Christians criticise me and say it was too aggressive. But I look at Jesus Christ, and I feel like the example He set was one where He angered a lot of the political leaders and the establishment of His day. I feel like the highest value He spoke for was love and Truth, but that love is not loving if it is not truthful. That is what I take from Him.

You guys know I work at the University of Adelaide, and I get called into these meetings with my boss where she tells me that I am breaching the code of conduct because I am not using respectful language. I say, “Well, what is disrespectful?” And she says, “First of all, you are calling the politicians who voted against Ben’s bill and putting them in the ‘baby killers club.’ Calling them the ‘baby killers club’ is not very respectful.” And I said:

“I think there is a higher value than respect — I think it is Truth. I respect the code of conduct and I love working at the university, but I cannot say things that are not true. Killing a baby in the third trimester is killing a baby.”

I then told her what the method of late-term abortion is.

So in this talk, I guess the big thing is that I really want each of us to walk away with the knowledge that it is on us. It is on every single person that if you come across a politician, you talk to them about this issue, you let them know that this is the issue that changes your vote, and you really become the hands and feet of Jesus Christ.

I do feel that if the churches were awake, and if church leaders preached on this, we would be able to change this really quickly — in a flash. If the churches actually told people, “There is a rally and we need you at that rally,” if we shut down those four lanes on North Terrace… if we had done that at the first rally, Peter Malinauskas would have passed this bill by Christmas. But we did not shut down four lanes; we shut down one.

I had this guy over for dinner on Wednesday and I said, “Why were you not at the rally?” because he is pro-life. And, you know, I should probably… do not worry, if you come around to my household for dinner, I will not just interrogate you. My husband elbowed me — “Jo, that is not polite dinner conversation.” But I think people need to realise that if you are pro-life but you do not turn up to the rallies, then you are not really pro-life, because that is the thing the politicians listen to.

Peter Malinauskas wants to get elected next March. If we had shut down four lanes of traffic, this bill would have passed in the upper house, and then it would have got to the lower house. I just know that. I know that is what they listen to. I feel like Christians really need to act — they need to really believe it — and Christian leaders really need to lead.

And so the truth about abortion in Australia is that it is just the most disgusting thing you have ever come across in your life. It is just so hideously barbaric that it should keep all of us awake at night.

Leah Darrow was not always a Christian. She did America’s Next Top Model and got into the finals. But at some point after that, she had a conversion and gave her life to Jesus. I follow her on Instagram, and I woke up one day to this picture of her seventh child who had just been born. Her waters had broken unexpectedly at twenty-two weeks, and so she had to go to hospital. At twenty-two weeks, her life was kind of in danger because her waters had broken and she could have gone septic. So the doctors did an emergency caesarean and they got the baby out.

I woke up to the picture of this very sick baby on Instagram. He had all of these wires, and he was just holding onto life by a thread. She put a post on Instagram saying:

“Please pray for my baby. His life is in the balance. His name is baby Sylvester.”

A lot of us around the world were watching and praying. The incredible thing is that little baby Sylvester had little operations, little things, but every time he made it through. Now he is about a year and a half old, and he is just this beautiful boy. But what I think about is that in our country, in our state, babies are older than Sylvester — because he was twenty-two weeks. Our law says that from twenty-three weeks up until birth — abortion is legal through all forty weeks of pregnancy — but after twenty-three weeks you just need a second abortionist to agree, and this happens, and they kill these little babies.

I want you to look at that little baby, and I am going to describe the late-term abortion procedure in a little minute. I want you to think about baby Sylvester and someone doing that to him.

I’m going to list the five most disgusting aspects of abortion in South Australia. And I thought I would start with this, which is in our law. This is on us.

It says in the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act:

A stillborn child means a child of at least twenty weeks gestation, or, if it cannot be reliably established whether the period of gestation is more or less than twenty weeks, with a body mass of at least four hundred grams at birth, that exhibits no signs of respiration or heartbeat or other signs of life after birth, but does not include the product of a procedure for the termination of pregnancy.

So in black and white, in our law, it says that if you are a wanted baby and you tragically die because you are stillborn, then you are registered — you are a stillborn child. You are a child of over twenty weeks who weighed more than four hundred grams, who tragically died.

But if you are the product of a late-term abortion — if you are a child who was intentionally made stillborn — then you are just “a product of conception, a product of the termination of pregnancy.” It is dehumanising language, is it not? It really speaks to the dehumanisation of these little children. You saw baby Sylvester. They are talking about him as if he is a product of a termination of pregnancy — product of conception — he is nothing. So that is straight up in our law.

We lost the Live Births Bill by one vote. But the incredible thing about that bill is that it created a huge conversation on abortion in South Australia. This year, in about July, they released the data on abortions for last year. Something that was just so incredible as I opened this abortion report was that South Australia had the lowest abortion rate in twenty-five years last year.

Last year! Up until that point, it had been rising in the previous two years. It had been rising since they introduced abortion up to birth. It had been going up. But then last year, something different happened.

It was our debate. It was Ben Hood’s courage in bringing that bill. It was all of us getting behind him. It was a four-month conversation stigmatising abortion and telling people what it is. It is not a clump of cells or a parasite. We had abortion procedure videos with animated babies that showed people: this is what it is.

I think a lot of women decided, “I am not going to do it.” And that is really, really good. It is actually why we need to have a bill every single year until we end this. We do not get the luxury of resting or waiting. We actually need a bill every single year.

One of the things that came out of that was that I met a journalist from The Advertiser, and we got to know each other a little. She rang me towards the end of the year and said:

“Jo, I have been watching your Instagram and I want to do a story about the payment that is given to mothers for late-term abortions.”

I was really shocked by this because previously she was a woman who, six years earlier — or was it six? — but when Roe v. Wade was overturned, she had an opinion piece for The Advertiser, and it was something like Five Reasons Why We Need to Protest the Overturning of Roe v. Wade. So here is a journalist who went from that to calling me and saying, “I would like to do a piece on the stillborn parenting payment that is given for late-term abortions.”

And so the second most disgusting thing that happens is this: you know how we talked about how a stillborn child who is intentionally stillborn because of a late-term abortion is not recognised in South Australian law as a child? But a mother who has an intentional stillborn can still get $4,200 from the government. She can still get the stillborn parenting payment, even though it was an intentional stillborn.

I have a YouTube channel, and people watch the channel, and I tell people to write letters to the ministers — and this lovely older lady from Canberra came up to me at an event in July where I was speaking. She handed me an envelope and said:

“Jo, I wrote a letter to the minister. I think you will need to see what they sent back.”

Through the letter she received, through the work of this woman — this older woman who has been writing letters to MPs for twenty years, this beautiful, faithful Christian lady — we were able to blow open the fact that not only is the Albanese government paying $4,200 for an intentional stillborn late-term pregnancy, but you can actually get up to $22,000 through the Paid Parental Leave payment.

So if you have a stillborn child — for a wanted baby — you can choose between the stillborn parenting payment of $4,200 or Paid Parental Leave of $22,000. What we managed to uncover through this letter is that for intentional stillborns, you get the same choice. Alex Antic also asked some questions of the minister for us in the Federal parliament, which was really good.

You would think that the minute you get a front-page story like this, you would just end it — that people would be like:

“Oh my gosh, that is disgusting. We are giving money for late-term abortions. Why are we not giving this to the babies to save them?”

You would think we would just end it once the news got out.

But the thing is, people are so evil that it does not just end. That is why I think God needs us. He needs our work. He needs our efforts.

That is why social media is so powerful. In the last month on Instagram, we have reached 9.1 million; on Facebook, 5.2 million. We are getting the word out. It caught the attention of Pauline Hanson — she is not even fully pro-life — but her office rang me and said she wants to do something about it. So it is amazing how an older lady in Canberra writing a letter can lead to Pauline Hanson pushing this to the front of her agenda.

Information about the late-term abortion procedure has been given to us by whistleblowers; it is not like it is publicly available. In the  state parliament last year, when we were debating Ben Hood’s bill, Connie Bonaros got up and said:

“Oh, these babies do not feel anything. It is all done very humanely.”

That is such a gross statement, is it not? How do you ‘humanely’ kill an innocent human being? There is nothing humane about that. It is just gross. And she is someone as well who parades her Christian credentials — she tries to get the Greek Orthodox vote. These people make me sick.

Point eleven of official policy says the procedure is to be performed under ultrasound guidance by a certified MFM specialist (a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist — someone meant to look after really sick babies or mums if the pregnancy is at risk). There are fewer than ten monsters in this country who work at particular hospitals where they send all of these babies slated for late-term abortion.

Point fourteen says:

“Administer local anaesthetic (lidocaine) at the insertion site.”

So they give the mum a local anaesthetic on her tummy so that she does not feel anything at that point there.

It then says:

“Consider use of rocuronium bromide for fetal paralysis, using doses appropriate for gestational age.”

So sometimes, because the baby is wriggling too much on the ultrasound, they will inject the baby for fetal paralysis. That is just to make the baby stop moving. But then this baby is going to be injected in the heart with poison, right? They just cannot move, cannot react, cannot scream or cry out in pain. They would be in excruciating agony like this. That is not for the baby. That is just to make it easier to kill them. Because if they get that injection of poison into the mum, she will die or be very, very sick. So they have to get it right.

Then, point seventeen:

“If using fetal analgesia and muscle relaxant, administer a fetal injection with twenty-two-gauge spinal needle into the thigh.”

But you can see there, it is not mandatory. Pain relief is not mandatory.

And you have to ask yourself: if someone is monstrous enough to kill healthy babies by injecting poison into their hearts, would they really bother giving the baby pain relief first? I really do not think they would.

Then point nineteen says:

“Aim for intracardiac fetal injection.”

So they inject the baby’s heart with a substance called digoxin or potassium chloride.

It causes a burning sensation — excruciating agony. It sometimes does not work, so the baby is left there being tortured.

There have been failed death-row executions where the prisoner has not died and they also have not received appropriate pain relief, and they have talked about the agony of that. This is exactly the same agent we are using on babies — without the pain relief first.

If you look at point twenty-two, it says: “Confirm fetal asystole by ultrasound,” meaning they want to confirm that the baby’s heart rate has stopped. But then it says: “Repeat injection of KCL if it has not occurred.” So we know that the babies do not always die. It is really horrific.

Sarah Game’s bill is about protecting at least some of these babies from this monstrosity. We know there have been seventy-nine healthy babies — so they did not have any kind of disability. And I think we should save all of the babies. All disabled babies get to live too, obviously — that should just be obvious.

But Sarah Game’s bill would save the seventy-nine healthy babies who have had their hearts injected with poison and who were then intentionally delivered stillborn. There is actually a South Australian document, produced by so-called health experts, which outlines what happens to these babies after they are aborted.

The babies prior to twenty weeks — well, they just go in the bin. But after they introduced abortion up to birth, they have a new guideline that says after twenty-two weeks and six days, if a mother declines the funeral, then disposal of the foetus is medical waste.

A beautiful young woman came to my house who was working in the ward where one of the first late-term abortions of a healthy baby had happened. It was around November 2022 — they had introduced abortion up to birth for any reason. She said the midwives and nurses in that hospital ward had no idea that healthy babies could be killed. They did not know the law had been changed.

There was a midwife — not her, but her friend — who delivered this healthy little baby, perfectly healthy. And then the mum declined the funeral, and the midwives had to put the baby in the bin. Can you imagine baby Sylvester? He was twenty-two weeks. But that baby was twenty-six weeks — even bigger. Imagine putting a twenty-six-week-old baby, intentionally killed, in the bin.

The midwife I interviewed — and the interview is on my YouTube channel — said she is a conscientious objector, she does not participate in abortions. But she said even all of the other girls who do not conscientiously object were just shocked and broken. It was horrific for them.

I think the government actually changed it so that after that point, all of those late-term abortions of healthy babies are now happening in the one place, behind closed doors, with a particular abortionist and one or two midwives who are okay with doing it. But it is horrific that in our policy documents we are expecting midwives — who have gone into healthcare to birth babies — to now be forced to put babies in the bin.

I do think the time has come for midwives and nurses and doctors to find the courage to blow the whistle on these stories and to speak up. And we need to pray for that. We really need to pray for courage.

At the end of the day, it can feel like when we write these emails and make these phone calls to MPs that it does not make a difference. But I think that is the bare minimum of what we have to do. I think at the end of the day there is a kind of hierarchy.

So at the bare minimum, you have to write the email. You have to sign the petition. That is the very bare minimum you can do.

But after that, I think we actually need you to give your time. We are letterboxing every single week at the moment. But what is heartbreaking to me is that fewer people are coming than last year. It does dishearten me when I feel like people were so passionate about this last year, and this year some people are a bit less passionate. Maybe they feel more hopeless. They feel like last year was the moment, and we are not going to get it this year.

The thing is, I do not think we can ever be like that. I feel like it is a thirty-year fight. And we have to wake up every day determined to do as much as we did the day before — if not more.

We saw that in Charlie Kirk, and I think we love Charlie Kirk because he showed that commitment and that perseverance and that courage. But that is not just for Charlie — it is actually for each one of us. So the bare minimum is to send the emails to the MPs, to sign the petitions.

The next thing would be to have conversations with people in your life about late-term abortion in South Australia — changing people’s minds. The next thing, I think, would be to turn up to our letterbox drops, to actually volunteer with us to overturn these laws. Everybody needs to come to the next rally on the day of the vote.

And the other thing I want to say is that people — like Tom Koutsantonis — will say, and I felt upset at Tom because I know he is pro-life, I know he is Catholic, but I do not think he should be saying this — he says:

“Oh, this is just a stunt. It is not going to pass.”

But the reality is, if there was political will, it could pass.

We saw that in New South Wales in the opposite direction. When the Greens introduced a radical abortion bill earlier this year, the Labor Premier gave it special time. He gave it government time so that bill could pass.

Now, if Peter Malinauskas and Tom Koutsantonis are really pro-life, what they would do is make sure we pass this in the upper house — we only need one more vote, and that vote has to come from Labor. If Peter gave the green light, I know we would get that vote. Then it could go to the lower house, and it could be passed in a week, and it could be given government time.

But these men do not have the courage or the guts or the actual conviction about these babies to do it.

So I do not listen to people who say, “Oh, this is just a stunt, it is not going to pass.” It can pass. It must pass. We must believe that it will pass — because we have to.

Afterword

by Dave Pellowe

 

We must never, ever, ever weary in well-doing, ‘for in due season we shall reap if we faint not’. There will be ebbs and flows, but let the ebb be the other people, let the flows be the people of God, so that we can overcome.