NSW Health said in December 2025 that new guidelines for termination of pregnancy services are expected to be published early in 2026. The guidelines have not yet been voted upon as of this writing (mid-February 2026). The intention is that hospital managers and executives would be barred from blocking abortions because of personal beliefs in public health services across New South Wales.
The policy has been under review for more than a year and lays out requirements for individuals and institutions providing or assisting with abortion care. The existing policy — and the law — allows for doctors, nurses, midwives and pharmacists to refuse to partake in abortion care, provided they help patients find services that will. But it does not explicitly state that managers, executives and administrative staff are not afforded that privilege.
A Green Party MP said that she has heard about instances of conscientious objection provisions being weaponised by department managers or hospital executives to then cause a whole department or a whole hospital not to provide a service.” The new policy directive would therefor clarify that non-clinical staff cannot use conscientious objection to deny anyone abortion care in a hospital.
An ABC investigation exposed major obstruction to abortion access across the country, but particularly in NSW, where a woman was turned away from Queanbeyan hospital on the day of her planned surgical abortion for severe life-limiting fetal malformations. The Orange Health Service then directed staff to stop providing terminations unless patients had pregnancy complications — a move the health minister intervened to reverse hours later.
It’s clear from the ABC news report that there has been a failure of public hospitals to provide sufficient abortion services, which still needs addressing. However, policy allowing nurse practitioners and endorsed midwives to prescribe medical abortion pills up to nine weeks of pregnancy was passed by the NSW parliament in 2025. A range of other new services have also been opened in different hospitals.
SOURCE: NSW guidelines proposed to prevent hospitals from refusing abortion care based on personal beliefs – ABC News, 12 December 2025.