Thank you to the women who made this happen

Anyone who has ever worked or volunteered in reproductive health knows that feeling. Here we are trying to support women making a choice for their own lives in a country where that choice is so badly restricted.

These restrictions make life hard for women and hard for their families. They make so many of us cry, and not just those of us seeking an abortion.

This is not a story about my abortion or the abortions of other individuals. It’s a story about how the system might finally be changing, and how so many women struggled over the years to make abortion safe, free and legal.

There will be names I haven't mentioned and names I don't know. But to all of you, whoever you are, thank you. The tears can stop soon.

Today the Australian Labor Party made me cry all over again when Tanya Plibersek announced public hospital systems would need to provide abortion services to qualify for federal funding.

This news is the response to decades of campaigning in Australia.

Plibersek tells me she was still in primary school when she fought for the right to play on the boys’ playground. In high school, she stood with her friends to rally for abortion rights. Now she’s the politician announcing this huge shift, which will impact every single area of every single state and territory but NSW most of all, because abortion is still in the criminal code.

“Making the decision to end a pregnancy is difficult enough for a woman without being forced to travel hundreds of kilometres or go interstate to access services, I can’t imagine how traumatic that would be,” she said.

Politicians get to campaign at the heart of policy change but so many women struggled for this in the background.

Medical director of Family Planning NSW Deborah Bateson has fought for this for 20 years. She sees women every single day seeking terminations who are faced with paying huge amounts of money.

“This is unacceptable in Australia. Every single woman must have access to her reproductive rights regardless of postcode and this news is wonderful. It addresses the inequities we see in our clinics ever day,” she says.

It’s a change that Anne Summers, in Australia to speak at the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday, has been waiting for since she published her legendary history of Australian women Damned Whores and God’s Police in 1975, which described the impact the criminalisation of abortion had on maternal deaths.

“The vital thing is to ensure women in rural and regional areas will now have access to services they don’t have now," she said. "I hope it encourages more doctors to perform these procedures because the barriers are on the supply side as well as the demand side.”

And maybe the youngest of all our campaigners, Meg Clement-Couzner, now the spokesperson for Pro-Choice NSW, got into terrible arguments with friends and family in her early teens. Then she went to university to discover there were a bunch of other people who felt just the same way she did about reproductive rights and wanted to be part of a collective movement for change.

“These proposals are fantastic," she says. “I feel so strongly about how women don’t have full control of their bodies and that won’t change until abortion is publicly funded and normalised."

Clement-Couzner says that move towards bodily autonomy should also include banning the forcible sterilisation of women with disability, as well as access to all chosen medical treatments for trans people.

So to all of you who campaigned, rallied, marched, wrote letters, shared your abortions: thank you.

There will be some way to go, some terrible things said about this campaign and about the women who fought for it, and worse things about the women who have finally developed the policies we all need.

But together we can ignore the haters and embrace the rights we should all have, no matter who we are.

Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.