A teenager faces seven years in prison after being ordered to stand trial for organising her own home abortion in the first such prosecution in Australia in over half a century.

Tegan Leach, 19, from the north Queensland city of Cairns, was committed to trial today in Cairns District Court. Her boyfriend, Sergie Brennan, 21, who has been charged with supplying drugs to procure an abortion, faces three years in jail.

The court heard that police found empty pharmaceutical blister packets alleged to have contained contraband abortion drugs obtained in Ukraine, along with a Russian doctor's instructions, during a search of the couple's Cairns home in relation to another matter in February.

Police allege that Ms Leach took the drugs, a Chinese version of the abortion pill RU486, to induce a miscarriage because she and her partner believed that they were too young to raise a child.

Prosecutor Sergeant Peter Austin told the court that Ms Leach's admission to having used the drugs to induce an abortion was sufficient for the matter to be put to trial

The case has caused controversy in Queensland, and polarised the debate on abortion in Australia, under whose Victorian-era laws it remains a crime in most states including Queensland.

So heated has the debate become that Ms Leach and her boyfriend have been forced into hiding after their home was fire-bombed and Mr Brennan's car was attacked.

RU486 was allowed into Australia just three years ago and can be administered only under medical supervision, but the laws surrounding its use are so uncertain that a number of doctors have stopped prescribing the drug altogether for fear of prosecution.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is pushing for state governments to take abortion out of the criminal codes so that doctors can work under clear rules, but pro-life groups have seized on the Leach case to push their own agenda with some describing the suggestion that abortion should be decriminalised as it is in the UK as "depraved".

Although prosecutions are extremely rare — one of the planks in Australian case law gives women the right to elective abortion when the mother's health is at risk — the Leach case has reminded doctors how vulnerable they are under the strict letter of the law.

Queensland hospitals recently suspended drug-induced abortions after the Leach case and insurance companies in the state said that they would withdraw cover from doctors who aided medical abortions. Their decision forced dozens of women over the border into New South Wales for terminations.

After doctors there, too, refused to perform abortions for fear of being prosecuted a number of women were left in limbo until the Queensland government rushed through Parliament changes to the law to clarify the legality of medical abortions.

Now, all sides will be watching the outcome of the Leach case with tremendous interest.

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