A push to ban sex-based abortion in NSW would be a ploy to regress access to pregnancy termination services, a Hunter-based reproductive rights expert says.
Anna Noonan, a public health academic, is concerned at any moves to restrict women's rights to abortion in the Hunter and statewide.
Abortion can be performed by either medication or surgery, but females living in less populated areas of the Hunter have less access to services.
"John Hunter Hospital is one of the public hospitals providing abortion care to a significant number of people outside metropolitan Sydney," Dr Noonan said.
"They are one of the few public hospitals that do this sensitively with cultural considerations.
"Hospitals and clinicians in our region are really competent at doing this work."
An anti-abortion rally will be held outside NSW Parliament on Tuesday.
A parliamentary debate on the Abortion Law Reform Amendment (Sex Selection Prohibition) Bill could follow on Wednesday.
The bill seeks to ban "terminations for sex selections".
Greens MP Amanda Cohn said "it's important to understand why conservative politicians are now pushing changes to the law".
"It's a thinly-veiled attempt to incrementally re-criminalise abortion and reposition anti-abortion activists as being on the side of women and girls," Dr Cohn said.
When Libertarian Party MP John Ruddick introduced the bill in October last year, he cited an Edith Cowan University study, published in May 2025.
The study found more males were born "among certain immigrant groups in Australia, particularly from countries with a strong son preference such as India and China".
"Indian and Chinese mothers had much higher induced abortion rates in early pregnancy than their Australian counterparts," the study said.
The study, funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council, said this coincided with "the introduction of non-invasive prenatal testing", which can determine fetal sex as early as 10 weeks.
Mr Ruddick told parliament that "this is not a crackpot study".
"We should soberly assess its conclusions," he said.
A NSW Health review found 13 of 15,973 terminations of pregnancy in 2019-20 were "for the sole purpose of sex selection".
The bill would impose a maximum fine of $22,000 or five years' jail on anyone who arranged, permitted, performed or assisted in a "termination for sex selection".
If the bill passed, Dr Cohn said it could cause health professionals to "stop providing abortion altogether due to the uncertainty and risk".
"I suspect that's the real goal of the bill," she said.
Dr Cohn said those driving the bill were "clutching at any opportunity to wind back our hard-fought rights, including riling people up with misinformation".
Dr Noonan, who lives in the Hunter but works at University of Technology Sydney, said "we need to trust women".
"If women say they can't continue with a pregnancy, we don't know fully what the circumstances are," she said.
"We don't know if that person is experiencing reproductive coercion, or if there's gender-based violence."
In Dr Noonan's research, clinicians had never raised that sex-selective abortion was an issue.
"If they were saying this is a massive problem, or even a little problem, we'd engage in that conversation. But they're not," she said.
Members of the major parties are expected to have a conscience vote on the bill.
"The Greens will oppose it as we support the provision of abortion as a legal health service," Dr Cohn said.
