She was all over our screens one minute and gone the next. In 2007, aged 15, she fled Somalia after a rocket attack in the civil war between the government and the Islamic terrorist group al-Shabaab hit her home and killed her family. She arrived on Christmas Island in October 2013 and was sent to Nauru two days later. Then, two years later, for a few weeks in late 2015, she found herself used as a political pawn in Australia’s culture wars.

Abyan is the pseudonym used to protect the identity of the pregnant 23-year-old Somali refugee who in July 2015 claimed to have been raped and who, because abortion laws are extremely restrictive in Nauru, was evacuated to Australia from Nauru in October to terminate the pregnancy. Then, five days after leaving Nauru, she was flown back there on a secret $115,000 charter flight without having had the abortion, without her lawyer’s knowledge, and against her will, even though the previous year she had been found to be a genuine refugee. According to Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, after ‘four or five days of medical consultations’, including with doctors, Abyan had opted against termination, a claim her lawyers denied. According to a note written by Abyan, she never said she didn’t want a termination and never saw a doctor, only a nurse.¹ According to refugee advocates she had been returned against her will so as to thwart legal proceedings that would have kept her in Australia.² After she was returned to Nauru she was holed up in a makeshift shack like other asylum seekers who had been found to be refugees, and released from the detention centre in October 2015 to protect the Australian government from possible claims of illegal detention.