Jenny’s Bid for Reproductive Freedom

“Jenny” is a single woman living in Western Australia. Five years ago, she decided to do what many single women have done, and freeze her eggs for possible later use. Last year, she thought it a wise idea to use those eggs and was astonished when her fertility specialist told her that they could not be used as a matter of law. She was told that she had to undergo intrauterine insemination i.e. artificial insemination.

Horrified by that prospect, and only wanting to use her eggs, she then sought to use her eggs somewhere else. With some difficulty she found a clinic in New South Wales. She was told by her clinic in Western Australia that in effect she should not making a noise about exporting the eggs interstate and can only export to a clinic that’s part of the same chain at which the eggs were frozen.

Faced with these barriers, Jenny told Tegan Taylor on ABC Radio National’s Life Matters that she was a “reproductive refugee” and all she wanted was reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy, not just for her but for everyone affected by restrictive laws, such as victims of domestic violence and gay couples.

Listen to the Podcast here.

Jenny is pregnant. She said that she is pregnant with a girl and she wants her daughter not to be subjected to these restrictions on her reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy.

It was an honour for our director Stephen Page to speak during the segment. The Human Reproductive Technology Act 1991 (WA) requires that there be a medical reason for treatment for a single woman. This is an archaic provision that was brought in, ironically, in 2002 to enable single women to obtain treatment. This provision was inserted as part of gay and lesbian law reform, of all things.

Way back in 2002, egg freezing was unheard of.

What was once a move to the future and an opening of access is now a restriction on treatment and archaic. It ought to be thrown in the bin.

In 2017 I wrote to the then Health Minister, Roger Cook of the new McGowan Government in Western Australia and called for an end of discrimination against gay couples and single men in surrogacy. We’re still waiting for that reform.

The Government held a review, then tried to get a Bill through the Parliament in 2018 to remove that discrimination – and failed, stymied by a conservative Liberal Upper House Member, among others. Since then, it hasn’t pushed the issue, although it has kept promising and since 2023 has said that a Bill is coming.

Ideally, as Greg Hunt and Rachel Swift have written in the report for the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand (of which Step-hen Page is the Secretary) there should be one uniform fertility law Australia-wide, rather than eight different systems of regulating IVF for a country of 27 million. Until we have that change, then at the very least Western Australia should get its act together and change the law so that single women do not have this unnecessary restriction on their reproductive freedom or bodily autonomy.

This restriction in Western Australia is an apparent breach of Australia’s international obligations, by which women have the right to determine the number and spacing of their children, and the right to privacy, and the right to advance to take advantage of scientific progress.

We hope that the Western Australian Government listens and acts. The time for waiting by the Government is long gone.