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Last Updated: September 18, 2007
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ABORTION

On this page: Eileen Capocchi; Jo Wainer; Yvonne Smith; Jean Taylor; Lynette Dumble
See also: Women's Liberation/Feminism;

Eileen Capocchi

- We were also very active on the abortion issue and support the right of women to choose whether to continue a pregnancy. That was a very hard, long, bitter campaign.

At one time some of our women and women from UAW stood up at a Right to Life meeting and stated they had had an abortion. If it had been pursued they could have gone to jail. There were some very brave women there. They were courageous. They just stood up and said, "I have had an abortion. Arrest me". They were just absolutely wonderful. I never had that courage. The whole campaign was courageous. The things they - the Right to Life - did to the Wainer's and the other clinics and the poor women! Right to Life did some dreadful stuff, terrible stuff.

... In our time, it was such a risky thing if you couldn't deal with a pregnancy. I was in the Women's Hospital for three weeks with what they called a missed abortion. The foetus had developed to ten weeks and then stopped, but I didn't abort. There wasn't the technology then to confirm that this had happened then so we tried to maintain the pregnancy. For two weeks I was in the abortion ward. Everything that was a miscarriage, whether spontaneous or induced, went there. It even had a padded cell. I was the healthiest person in the ward and it was horrific. It was absolutely horrific.

You would wake up in the night to find doctors and nurses around a woman who had obviously induced an abortion and was in strife - hemorrhaging and septicaemia and so forth. You would go back to sleep and the next morning when you woke up, the woman would be gone - another woman dead.

There was one woman in there who was in a terrible situation. She was young, she had two children and couldn't cope with a third. When she told her doctor how they had no money, could not cope and couldn't afford this pregnancy and couldn't cope with another child, her doctor apparently said he would send her to the Women's Hospital where she would get help. He actually sent her there because he knew they would keep her in so she couldn't induce an abortion. There was a woman in the padded cell - a migrant woman. I don't know what had happened there.

Being in there was the worst experience of my life.

Jo Wainer

When I was still at university, as part of my student activism I went along to the inaugural meeting of the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA). Abortion had come up as an issue in the mid 1960's as part of the student rebellion which had emanated from Britain and Europe.

I turned up to the meeting held, I think, in the Uniting Church in the city. There were about 400 people there. I can't recall the detail but I ended up elected secretary. I was young - wet behind the ears at one level but at another level I had years of student activism behind me. After that ALRA used to meet at my home. My parents had gone to Sydney and left their home for their daughters to live in while we completed our tertiary education, and these meetings were not a respectable thing to do - we lived opposite the Deputy Governor.

It is hard to reflect back on the need to be proper. When I was growing up in the 1950's you had to wear a hat and gloves when going in to town by tram. Your skirt had to be exactly the right length. I remember my mother down on her hands and knees with a ruler measuring my skirt length to make sure it was exactly right. Men had to wear a white shirt and a tie. They were equally constrained. They just didn't have to wear the terrible shoes we wore.

We were very middle class and a reform group. One of the things we decided to do was to brief the parliamentarians in the Victorian Parliament. Gareth Evans was a member and he drew up a model Act, which we put before the politicians. We put together a series of Fact Sheets called "A for Abortion" and we gave them to each of the politicians to use if the topic should arise and they needed some data. There wasn't much data around at the time, I have to say, but we gave them what there was.

I undertook my first public speaking then. I remember speaking to the Rotarians - quite a daunting task for a young woman, to speak to a group of disbelieving men about a topic which then was taboo. Then you couldn't use the word 'abortion' in public. I knew that, I was working for the ABC. You had to use euphemisms if you referred to it at all - which we didn't. It was absolutely subterranean female behaviour, completely unacknowledged.

Then this guy, a doctor, joined ALRA and started coming to meetings. His name was Bert Wainer. He sat and listened for a while then he said "I think we should just do a test case". We all looked at him askance and said "You can't do that, that is breaking the law". He said "I know. Then they will arrest us and we can argue it in front of a jury. Good people don't get sent to jail for those sort of things."

We were horrified. I was delegated by ALRA to go and tell him he would have to resign. He was a general practitioner in St Kilda. He had left the army just a couple of years before with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and set up a general practice in St Kilda where he cared for the poor and the sad, basically. He did what most of the G.P.'s in town did when it came to abortion, he inquired amongst his colleagues and did what they did, which was to refer the women.

It was at that time - 1969 - that the Victorian Police (under Inspector Holland) raided the doctors who did abortions and arrested them. There were about 12 doctors who provided medically qualified and very competent abortion services - all illegal at the time.

The only one who went to trial was Dr Ken Davidson, and that ended up with the Menhennitt ruling. One of the other people they charged was Dr Van Rennan, who had referred to one of the other doctors they raided. He was charged with conspiracy. Bert Wainer was outraged at that. It was doing no more than he was doing. He organized a support fund for Dr Van Rennan and he recruited me to go and knock on the doors of doctors and try to get them to contribute to the support fund. Given that abortion was not a word you could use in public, it was an incredibly difficult thing to do. I did it.

But I was sent to this radical, wild man to tell him he had to resign from ALRA if he was going to talk about illegal activities and run test cases. He just laughed. He said he would start his own organisation and asked if I would like to come out to dinner.I did and we subsequently married in 1972. Abortion dominated our lives for a long time after that.

Abortion dominated our lives for a long time after that.

... Before 1969 and the Menhennit ruling abortion was completely illegal. It was conducted clandestinely. There were twelve doctors who provided reasonably safe, reasonably competent abortions, but at a very high price. You found them through an underground network - taxi drivers, pubs, mates (it was the usually the responsibility of the man involved to find the abortion provider and to pay for the abortion. The woman just risked her body, her life and her dignity).

In addition to that there were non-medically trained abortion providers, the most famous of whom was a butcher by trade who operated on kitchen tables around Footscray. Of course, not being a doctor he didn't have access to anaesthetics so he used to stuff a rag in the woman's mouth to stop her screaming and disturbing the neighbours.

If the providers got into trouble, they couldn't call an ambulance and have the woman admitted to hospital because they would have gone to jail for fifteen years or longer, whether a doctor or not. Women died. We will never know how many as they all had body disposal systems - dump them in Port Phillip Bay, bury them in Sherbrooke forest, arrange with the local undertaker to bury two bodies in one coffin.

It was a very dangerous and totally humiliating experience. It didn't stop women from having abortions, but it was very, very bad and a lot of women died. There was a whole ward at the Royal Women's Hospital devoted to women who were there as a result of damage from abortion - they had a thirty bed ward dedicated to it. There was a special room set aside for women who were dying. Septacaemia and gangrene were the major risks in the pre-antibiotic era. When I interviewed him, the medical superintendent at the time told me that he will always remember the smell. Desperate women would self induce and he remembered a woman who came in with an umbrella sticking through her uterus.

Women did use wire coathangers, they did drink gin and have hot baths and they did jump off high dangerous places. They hurt themselves a lot.. It was the second highest cause of maternal mortality in the 1930's and 1940's in Australia - and that is only the recorded deaths.

It was a desperate business. In 1969 Mr Justice Menhennit had to give direction to the jury who were trying Dr Ken Davidson who was charged with unlawful abortion. Dr Davidson defended himself by saying he had done the abortion but it was necessary to protect the woman's life. Justice Menhennit had to direct the jury what a legal abortion was, because you only went to jail if you had done an illegal abortion. This was the law passed in 1862 in the UK - a previous century and another continent. It was desperately, desperately out of touch.

He directed the jury that it was legal to terminate a pregnancy if it was to protect a woman's life or health from dangers other than the normal dangers of pregnancy. The jury acquited him and that became the de facto law. However, to this day, the actual statute law hasn't changed. It is still in the Crimes Act, Section 54 and 55. ... In the meantime I had used some of the findings of my Masters research to make a submission to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships which was formed by Federal Parliament as a result of a move by David McKenzie to get abortion legalized.

I was able to collect and present some real data as I had access to the records of Bert's clinic, called the Fertility Control Clinic. Because abortion had been illegal before, it was the first time anybody had actually seen real data about a general population of women having abortion. ... When the partnership broke down, I left and reconstituted myself as an academic. I wanted to go to the country to do menopause. I had visions of sitting in a cottage in a forest on a mountain doing menopause, the transition from mother to crone.

When I got to Gippsland I found they had cut all the forests down, they had logged them, but I was able to find a cottage by a lake. That was as close as I could get to a cottage in the forest and I discovered that when you are an academic you have to work very hard, too. I lived in Gippsland on my own for six years while I rebuilt my life. I went through this journey of transition from mother to crone. I am still doing that, but I am almost there. In that time abortion came before the High Court and I led the Women's Electoral Lobby resistance to that from my office in Moe.

It was quite interesting. In the end it wasn't continued, so there was no outcome, but it was a case where a woman sued her doctor for not diagnosing her as pregnant in time to have a termination, after she had been to him three times saying she thought she was pregnant.

The Catholic Bishops said they had something to say and were made Friends of the Court, which means they had a right to speak, but I could see that nobody was representing the woman. I organized a barrister and a firm of solicitors who represented us 'pro bono'. I was able to call in contacts from all around the world for support. It was quite an interesting process. That was the last major intervention I have had in relation to termination of pregnancy.

Yvonne Smith

Many UAW members, including myself, took part in women's liberation consciousness raising, as well as the large public gatherings which discussed sexual liberation issues, contributing strongly to the body of evidence on abortion, marriage, the nuclear family.

The UAW was active in countering Right to Life demonstrations at clinics and hospitals and Betty Olle (Sec. UAW) established, with Ruth Schnookal of Women's Electoral Lobby, and others, The Right to Choose coalition.

Jean Taylor

Many women were looking for a sympathetic doctor so they could have an abortion and the Women's Abortion Action Campaign (WAAC) was set up in 1972 to campaign for the repeal of the anti-abortion laws and freely available contraception. Because Dr Wainer had opened his Fertility Control Clinic in Melbourne, and because of the Menhennitt ruling, at that stage women were able to get abortions at a reasonably affordable price and without fear of being arrested, but abortions were and still are illegal under the law.

We encouraged women to let us know what their experience had been when we referred them, so we could have a resource file of doctors who could do abortions or other medical procedures or consultations in a sympathetic way. In the same way we also had a file on doctors who were less than sympathetic or downright incompetent and dangerous.

We were challenging sexist attitudes and ways of looking at the world. Doctors and other professionals were often quite sexist and wouldn't give women information, so we were encouraging women to ask their doctor questions to find out what was happening about treatment.

From this women started to be involved in their own health care, in ways we hadn't previously. This led, for example, to the Women's Health Centre which opened in in Johnston Street, Collingwood in 1974 and after that closed down in 1976, Bon Hull's book, IN OUR OWN HANDS - A Women's Health Manual, was published by Hyland House in 1980.

Lynette Dumble

POPULATION CONTROL
The New Testament According to the Lyons Forum :
An Australia Bereft of Abortion Rights?
by Lynette J. Dumble
Excerpt from (Political Environments Issue #5, Fall 1997)

BACKGROUND:

Following the 1995 United Nations-convened 4th Conference on Women, it was plain that fundamentalist and population control forces were a double challenge to women's reproductive freedom, which includes the inalienable right to abortion that is lawful, safe, and affordable. In Australia, where 80,000 to 100,000 abortions are performed annually, abortion is the second most common therapeutic surgical procedure.

Medical speak has an identical translation of both "abortion", with its connotation of deliberate impropriety, and "miscarriage", with its implication of biological mishap, which defines a pregnancy termination as the "expulsion of the contents of a pregnant woman's womb at any period of gestation short of full term". "Abortion" is not however a legal term, and in Australia there are no uniform guidelines on what constitutes lawful abortion. Legislative provisions in each Australian jurisdiction make "unlawful" abortion a criminal offense, which, in theory, carries penalties of seven years to life imprisonment.

In February of 1996, following a decade in opposition, the Liberal-National Party Coalition [the Australian political equivalent of the US Republicans and UK Tories] was elected to federal government. Within a year, the Coalition plunged the nation back into the far right climate which has frequently surfaced in the two centuries following European invasion.

Amidst renewed attacks on Aboriginal land title, rising anti-migrant racism, and a war against youth to aged, unemployed, uneducated and chronically ill , , the speculated engine room of the Coalition, known as the Lyons Forum, commenced systematically to reduce women's access to their tenuous legal right to abortion.

ABORTION LAW IN AUSTRALIA:

In some states the criminal law has been codified, so that provisions grant a statutory defense to the crime of abortion. Overall, an abortion is deemed lawful when a woman obtains two medical opinions to certify that a pregnancy termination is necessary to save her life or prevent her suffering physical or mental injury. A 1995 survey of more than two thousand women attending abortion clinics in one Australian state illustrates the blind eye that the law casts on its own criteria of lawfulness; only 12 per cent of the women surveyed at multiple centers over a six week period underwent abortions that complied with the health-related legal conditions.

Recent abortion disputes in the Australian Courts prompted the claims manager for the United Medical Defense, Dr. Megan Keaney, to clarify the legality of abortion for medical practitioners. She explained that the ensuing judgments had not altered the existing law[s], and that abortion remained a statutory criminal offense. In many ways, Keaney's comment identifies the realities of Australian abortion statutes - reasonable protection for medical practitioners, but a continuing criminalization for women.

Jo Wainer, arguing for the Victorian Women's Electoral Lobby in 1996 submissions to the High Court and National Health and Medical Research Council [NHMRC], has highlighted that the criminal code offends women, and is in conflict with the well-embedded ethical principle that decisions ought to be made by those most affected.

With respect to abortion, undoubtedly those bearing the brunt of the decision-making process, both physically and psychologically, are women. Yet, within the eyes of the law, the mandatory medical certification which places abortion within the law reduces a woman to the rank of a child or the mentally infirmed, and deems her incapable of making an adult sane decision.

THE LYONS FORUM:

Formed in 1992, the Lyons Forum is made up of Coalition members from the upper [Senate] and lower [House of Representatives] levels of the Australian Parliament. Membership is largely secret, but an estimated forty to fifty members make the Lyons Forum the largest political sect in federal politics, one that represents, at a minimum, thirty, and at a maximum, forty per cent of the governing Coalition. Amongst the group's publicly known members, its first chairman, Chris Miles, is the current Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, John Howard.
While in opposition, Howard was known nationally for his anti-Asian immigration platform.

Since coming to office, he has risen to international prominence; initially because of his failure to curtail the blatant racism of another federal politician, Pauline Hanson, and her One Nation Party , and, more recently, because of his affronts to Australia's indigenous people - first, with his ten point plan which waters down, and opens avenues to extinguish, High Court-awarded Native land rights, and second, with his outright refusal to issue a national apology for the government-orchestrated genocide which authorized institutional authorities to steal Aboriginal children from their parents over four decades.

Miles himself is best known from his days in opposition when he advocated the continued criminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults in the Australian state of Tasmania. Back in 1994, when Justice Michael Kirby, now on the High Court bench, visited Tasmania to explode some of myths around homosexuality, and speak up for gay rights, Miles accompanied Kirby's opponents, who included Senator Eric Abetz and other Coalition cronies, who opposed Kirby at the public meeting with a variety of fundamentalisms and homophobic vitriol.

Senator Abetz has since succeeded Miles as chair of the Lyons Forum. He too sits cozily with the Prime Minister, and was Howard's choice to chair the highly influential Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee. Abetz stands accused of orchestrating the Senate enquiry and report which conjured support for the anti-euthanasia lobby, and which subsequently led to the enactment of a Coalition bill, masqueraded as a private member's bill, vetoing the Northern Territory's voluntary euthanasia legislation.

The private member fronting for the anti-euthanasia bill, Kevin Andrews, is identified as a core member of the Lyons Forum, as too is Howard's treasurer, Peter Costello. Professing to be about strengthening family based on Christian values, the Lyons Forum has released only one publication, "Empowering Australian Families". Issued after its own National Inquiry into Families and the Economy, the verses within the second chapter blame individualism, mass media, political correctness, and the feminist movement [my emphasis] for what the Forum views as the destruction of traditional family values in present day society.

The new testament according to the Lyons Forum claims that feminism [and the sexual revolution of the 1960s] has created a new culture, one which regards children to be a burden, and has increased the ratio of single parent families and de facto relationships, escalated the number of working women, lowered the status of marriage, and is to blame for the ease and frequency of divorce.

Australian Democrat Senator John Woodley, the outgoing president of the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship, argues that the Lyons Forum betrays its professed Christian ethos, raising not a whisper against a number of legislations passed by the Howard administration which fly in the face of Judaeo-Christian ethics. Woodley, the first ordained minister to serve on the Australian Senate, is at odds with the Lyons Forum's "narrow concerns" and "preoccupation with matters of sexuality" in relation to matters such as abortion, child care, censorship and homosexuality, and cites slashes to migrant and unemployment welfare as examples of legislation which contradict Christian values of social justice.
...

EPILOGUE:

In February 1997, anti-abortion devotee, (Senator) Harradine, played a major role in Melbourne endocrinologist John Funder's disinvitation to become the next director of Australia's peak health and research body, the NHMRC. Because of Funder's pro-RU486 position, Richard Larkins, from the University of Melbourne's department of medicine at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, was instead substituted. Before the dust had settled, Larkins proclaimed that it was time to move on.

Few, if any, feminists would agree; both Funder and Larkins have prompted feminist displeasure at various stages of their careeers, and doubts linger whether either learned from their individual experiences. By May of 1997, Larkins demonstrated that abortion reform is an unlikely priority now that he has taken the reins, as the NHMRC logo was promptly removed from an abortion report sanctioned by NHMRC's own women's health committee when under the leadership of previous director, Sydney nephrologist Judith Whitworth. Harradine denied any role in scuttling the report, but Dr. Margie Ripper, a feminist academic from the University of Adelaide contributing to the report, is quoted as saying that the study had been downgraded by political pressure and forces outsdie the NHMRC .

The NHMRC fiascoes appear outrageous examples of the Coalition bowing to the Harradine morality, that of an independent senator who attracts only 12 per cent of the vote in a single, and indeed hardly populous, state. Alternatively, the Lyons Forum may have preferred their low profile within the Coalition, as Harradine copped the public flack for imposing an anti-abortion righteousness on the entire country.

Whichever, it is equally outrageous that NHMRC policy, which affects all of the country's citizens, was made without consideration for the 51 per cent of the population who happen to be women. Both the cut to Family Planning Australia's federal funding and the Therapeutic Goods Amendment Bill contravene the 1996 Amsterdam Declaration on Abortion which calls on all governments "to advocate and defend legal, voluntary, safe and humane abortion provision to all women in need of it, as an integral part of reproductive health care." Taken together with the NHMRC controversies, these chapters paint dark prospects for abortion rights in Australia, as the nation contends with an onslaught of Lyons Forum-Harradine fundamentalism.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
With special thanks to Lynda Crowley-Smith, Lecturer in Law at James Cook University in Townsville, for her verbal and written explanations of abortion statutes in Australia at state and territory levels, and to Senator John Woodley from the Australian Democrats, and Jodie Brough from the Canberra Bureau of the Sydney Morning Herald, for sharing their research on the Lyons Forum.

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