‘Bawled my eyes out’: Abortion activist on the cost of speaking out
Special report: A newly-minted activist on the delayed fallout of telling her abortion story publicly, and what worries her about tonight’s debate.
When Tayla-Jane Jackson’s late-term abortion story first aired in 2024, she came out largely unscathed – until about eight months ago.
“I had my abortion in 2023, and until October 2025, nothing; I didn’t get any harassment, any threats, any abuse,” Jackson told InDaily.
“If anyone ever did talk about it, it was like, ‘I’m so sorry you went through that’, nothing negative or nasty.”
Since then, Jackson locked down her social media, removed images of her son from the Internet, and filed reports with SA Police and the eSafety Commissioner over hateful messages made about her because she had a late-term abortion. Even her LinkedIn, “which I haven’t used in 10 years,” was not immune.
She says the temperature of the abortion debate before parliament has ramped up since October last year, when Sarah Game introduced a bill to restrict late-term abortion.
Game’s bill failed at the time, but today a new look upper house would vote on another bill with similar terms, backed by anti-abortion activist Joanna Howe and the Australian Christian Lobby.
It would be the third attempt in less than two years to change the state’s abortion laws. Abortion was decriminalised in 2021 by the Marshall Liberal government.
Today’s bill would restrict abortion access after 24 weeks and six days, Game saying after 25 weeks, “a baby should be born and can be saved”.
If this were the law in 2023, Jackson’s abortion would have been illegal.
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Jackson was 22 weeks along when she found out she was pregnant – the pregnancy masked by the contraception she was taking to manage then-undiagnosed endometriosis and adenomyosis.
She knew she needed an abortion because she was “critically unwell”, battling anemia, endometriosis and severe mental health issues. She was already raising a six-year-old with disabilities and was homeless.
By the time she secured the legally required approvals, she was 27 weeks into her pregnancy, the third trimester.
“That’s something that makes me really nervous about all these bills, not just in South Australia, but all over the country, is that I live in Adelaide Metro, and it still took me two weeks to get my first appointment,” she said.
Her termination required a three-day stay at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, which included a twilight sedation and an injection through her stomach into the foetus. She then had to deliver a stillborn baby.
She said, “It was definitely not put in a bin in front of me”.
“It was placed in a cold morgue box… I was given choices and counselled the whole way through, and the three midwives were incredibly supportive,” she said.
“It was an emotional rollercoaster for several weeks, and it’s not like I was looking forward to it, but when I knew that it was approved, and it was going to happen, I was sort of relieved.”
Jackson’s 2024 interview with the ABC – detailing her struggles with mental health, endometriosis and homelessness – first resurfaced and was shared to anti-abortion pages around October last year, when the debate was unfolding in SA parliament.
Some of the criticism levelled at Jackson included that her problems were “solvable” and that she was “celebrating the murder of her own child”, she said.
She said one account – run by anti-abortion activist Joanna Howe – created an AI-generated baby on top of the ABC’s footage which spoke of how it wanted to be born. Howe said the video was part of a “ground-breaking series” to give the aborted foetus a voice.
“I bawled my eyes out all day,” Jackson said about the first time she saw the video.
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South Australian Annabel Bower – who had a stillborn child in 2018, considered a termination for medical reasons – agreed it was important to cut through the “hysteria” in the abortion debate.
“In our case, it was our fourth very much wanted child. We walked into a routine scan at 21 weeks to find out that our child had had a rare brain haemorrhage in utero,” she said.
“This put my life at risk and had catastrophic repercussions for his health and the likelihood of survival post birth.
"I think it’s really important to get rid of all of that hysteria around it and the misinformation, and to really spell it out for exactly what it is, and just how harrowing it is for these parents."
Deputy Premier Kyam Maher said the tone of the debate was the worst he had ever seen in his political career.
“I think many of us in parliament have been concerned about the tone and the nature of the way this debate has been conducted in the past,” Maher said.
“We’ve seen something I’ve never seen before in my time in parliament and working for parliamentarians since the start of this century, a person banned from the precincts of part of parliament.”
Anti-abortion activist Joanna Howe – who last year outspent mining giant BHP on Facebook advertising – was banned from Parliament’s legislative council by former upper house president Terry Stephens. Howe denied any wrongdoing and called the ban “an abuse of power” at the time.
InDaily understands she was still banned from the Legislative Council, but was not banned from the parliament’s House of Assembly.
When asked about how the debate over her bill was unfolding, Game told InDaily “my job at the moment is to make sure that I get the votes in the upper house”.
“In terms of engaging or looking at what’s happening online, I’m not fully aware of that right at the moment over the last few days.
“I have been absolutely occupied with dealing with the debate and concerns and support and all the rest that goes on in the parliament. In terms of how those conversations have gone, they’ve been very respectful, but certainly we haven’t always agreed.”
Jackson said she did not plan on becoming an advocate, but experiencing an online pile-on and seeing the debate play out publicly emboldened her to start speaking at pro-choice rallies and to become more involved.
“Families who have terminated for medical reasons, they don’t want to have to relive their devastating grief talking about this all the time,” she said.
“That would be horrible … if sharing my voice can be helpful at all, I will keep doing it, because I do think abortion access is so important.
"I am in such a good place right now, and I’m doing so much better because I got the health care that I needed."
Joanna Howe was contacted for comment.
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