Women's Web Women's Stories - Women's Actions
Welcome | Actions | Stories | Reviews | About us | Links | Dialogue | Things to Buy
Stories

Last Updated: November 1, 2009
Contact us: wmnsweb@iprimus.com.au

First Stories

Shorter Stories

Later Stories

Interview with Dr JO WAINER

4,000 words

I think we are in for a really tough period because I think we are at the end of an era.
...There will be a rebalancing and it is unlikely that will happen without a battle.

I have an identical twin sister and we are the last of a family of four girls.

My parents are working people from Footscray who crossed the tracks and we ended up in South Yarra. I grew up in a household which was unquestionably feminine, my father was a very gentle man and he took his responsibilities to his family very seriously.

His job was to bring in the income and manage our relationship to the outside world. My mother's job was to bring up the girls, do the cooking and sewing - she made all our clothes. She is 91 now, alive and well and living independently - if you are going to 'do' old, do it the way my mother is doing it.

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.

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.

I continued to work at the ABC and Bert continued to challenge the abortion laws (he did get to do his test cases) and to force the Victorian Government to hold an inquiry in to the relationship between police corruption and abortion, the Kaye Inquiry.

It blue the lid off abortion in Victoria. For the first time ever the media started using the word, and for eighteen months abortion was on the front page pretty well every day. No longer could Melbourne, and Victoria, pretend that this didn't happen.

It was very confronting: Melbourne sees itself as such as respectable place, but for the first time ever women told their stories and that, basically, changed the climate.

It was pretty hairy for us, we were disturbing a very lucrative industry. People were sent to kill us and we lived a cloak and dagger existence.

Eventually Bert was bankrupted. The Tax Department bankrupted him for $1,300 he had forgotten to pay in taxes. They took his land, they took his car and the goods out of his surgery. His landlady was Catholic and her Bishop rang her and told her she had to throw him out. He had nowhere to live and was staying with his sister. Her house was fire-bombed and half burnt down.

He was bankrupt and had had his first coronary, so we bolted to Queensland to recover. We settled in Caloundra, which was then a sleepy little village of 5,000 people - it is now a megalopolis. He became a country doctor and we joined the Children by Choice Association there, the lobby working to change abortion laws in Queensland.

They were a very fiery and innovative group of women. They didn't have any chance in Bjelke Peterson's time to change the law so they organized a referral service for women, so women could get abortions.

They had it so systemized they would buy bulk seats in the aircraft to fly women to Sydney and Melbourne at discount prices. They would funnel the referrals to whichever doctor was behaving the best in terms of prices and competency. They employed doctors and set a shopfront and clinic a to assess the women. They did a wonderful job.

Bert applied to be the medical superintendent of the hospital in Caloundra. The hospital had been built as part of an election promise. It had never been opened as they couldn't find a doctor to run it. Bert's experience in the army was that he ran the military hospital in Brisbane and he also ran the field army hospital - he was certainly over-qualified to run a fifteen bed country hospital.

I remember very clearly the Minister for Health and the Minister for Police having a public fight over who had the right to refuse Bert this job! So he set up a private practice.

By 1972 we realized things hadn't really changed enough for women in Melbourne. They could get abortions. It was legal through the test cases and through the Menhennit ruling that resulted from Ken Davidson's case, but it was still undignified and there was still no proper care for the women. Abortions were still being provided by the doctors from the 'backyard' network.

Peter Bayliss, who was one of the doctors from the illegal network, invited Bert to come and set up a practice that would be publicly known. Bert thought he would fly down to Melbourne, spend maybe a month doing this, prove it was possible, and return to his practice in Caloundra. I stayed in Caloundra with his eldest son.

Bert came to Melbourne and told the media what he was doing - there was no point in doing it if the women didn't know where to go, and his name was synonymous with abortion at that time. At the appointed time the media turned up - the film crews, the television - and Peter Bayliss got cold feet.

He had practiced illegally all his life: he had spent the weekend in prison and hadn't liked it a bit, and suddenly to be in the glare of the spotlight was too much for him, and he reneged on the deal.

Bert was left with a huge credibility problem. He had to deliver. What he did was to find premises in 24 hours at 106 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne, on the 3rd floor of a very run-down, dingy building that he shared with Parents Without Partners, Alcoholics Anonymous and a pornography publisher. Everything looked exactly like a backyard abortionist's place.

He put up his nameplate. That was front page on the Age. Then two things happened: he was swamped with women wanting abortions and the Medical Board tried to de-register him for advertising.

Also, as Bert didn't actually do abortions he had to find someone who did. He located another doctor, John Levin - a very competent doctor - and Peter Bayliss said he would take referrals as long as his name wasn't involved. Bert referred women to them, depending on the fees charged and he negotiated fees for women who couldn't afford the full fee.

It became clear that he couldn't just step away from this and so I left the Brisbane practice with another doctor and I drove Dirk and the dogs back to Melbourne. I worked with Bert until our daughter was born, then I stayed at home and looked after her.

We also had, by this time, two sons from his first marriage, and his sister died and left us her two children aged 12 and 13, a boy and a girl. I spent 10 years at home and did a Master of Arts.

During that time the issue of police corruption came up. People saw Bert as an unofficial ombudsman because he had taken on the coppers on the abortion issue and won: the Kaye Inquiry had sent four senior policemen to jail for corruption. He was inundated with all these stories about police abuse of power.

So, he did what nobody - I think - has ever done before or is ever likely to do again. He forced another public Inquiry - this time into police corruption and general abuse of power.

I was involved on the periphery managing the evidence but I didn't get involved in actual evidence collection. It was pretty scary and hairy stuff.

Again we were under threat.

That Inquiry sat in 1976. 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.

I worked at the clinic for a number of years. My sister's son had grown to school age, the same age as my daughter. She lived in the desert, so I said "Post him down to us". One way and another I was responsible for managing quite a lot of children. That was something I had never thought I would be involved in. I hadn't seen myself as 'doing' mother.

The universe had a lot to teach me!

After Bert died I set up, in partnership with two doctors, a women's health clinic that provided a full range of women's health services as identified by women as the seven areas identified by women in Australia as being of major concern to them, including abortion.

They were violence against women, health and sexuality, sexual stereotyping, mental health, occupational health and safety, reproductive health and health of older women. We had general practice, we had menopause, and we had contraception, day procedures, sexual health, and termination of pregnancy.

We were the only clinic, I think, in the world - and I had been all around the world with Bert looking at clinics - that provided general medical services as well as termination of pregnancy. We also had a naturopath, massage and psychotherapy, way before these things were considered acceptable. It was really good.

All the doctors providing abortions were men, except for Christine Healy who had been trained at Bert's clinic, and I wanted to provide a safe place for women. I went off and did a diploma (I call it my Diploma in Capitalism) with the Securities Institute of Australia. I had to borrow a lot of money from the bank, so I thought I had to know about money and how to speak banker's language.

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.

I did teach it at Monash and I continue to teach it to medical students. Since then I have been concentrating on women as doctors. I have been on a very long and deep journey to discover why women, in relation to abortion, are governed by laws that they had no part in framing.

That journey took me to feminism as an explanatory model, which worked for me. I have kept that as an underlying principle or framework since.

I was employed by Monash to have a look at women doctors. My brief was to look at what we could do to make rural medicine more attractive for women doctors. I did a 'loaves and fishes' act and transformed that into a whole international story about women in medicine and the culture of medicine, the construction of medical knowledge and the clinical consequences of the absence of women in doing that.

Women aren't engaged in clinical research on the things that matter to women, and they are often excluded from participation in research programs on the basis that they can get pregnant, or that they are difficult to get to, or biologically too complex - all sorts of things. Most of the evidence we have for medical practice is based on men's bodies, not women's.

This is becoming increasingly apparent and I wasn't the first to discover it, but I have been able to bring it into Monash and get it in to the curriculum.

Then I took three years off to do a Ph.D., pursuing these things in much greater depth. I am particularly interested how women became excluded from the public arena. The first question was "How come the laws have been made by other people and we have been governed by them? How did women lose the keys of the kingdom?"

So I went back and had a look at the myths and the archetypes that were available to form women's consciousness in the Western World. I was looking at the Greek myths, travelling to women's sacred sites around the world, trying to discover if there was a women's consciousness pre-patriarchy.

I found that there was. I hadn't been allowed to know this as a young woman but I know it now. I found the Amazons - they did exist. There is a tradition of warrior women such as Boadicea in Britain.

Following that story I came across the witch burnings. I had read about them in the feminist literature and I was sure that that informed the consciousness of, particularly, medical women because the story that was told amongst feminist renderings of the witch burnings was that women healers were particularly targeted. I was sure that women in medicine must experience that at some cellular level: that practicing medicine as a woman was a dangerous thing to do.

So I took the opportunity of doing the thesis to examine this story. The feminist story isn't quite right, it doesn't quite accord with the historical documents. However it is still a compelling story. Maybe 100,000 women were burned in the 200 years when it was most virulent.

Their daughters were made to watch them and to accuse their mothers and their grandmothers, so there was a breaking of trust between the generations. The daughters were made to watch their mothers burn, so that they would learn that they had to be obedient or else that would be their fate too.

Women healers were involved, but as many were protected by their status as healers as were burned as healers. Most women who were burned were the old, the indigent, women without men in their lives, those not under the control of a man - the "indigestible elements" in Mary Daly's terms.

So, I took the myth and I took the history and I took the archetypes and I took the witch burnings and I used that as the background to understanding how women engage with medicine today. I took that knowledge with me in to the interviews I did with the women and some of them could work with it and some of them couldn't, but because I have been in the culture of medicine all my life and because I am absolutely 100% on the side of women, they were generous in sharing their experiences with me.

I return to Monash in 2005 as Director of the Centre for Gender and Medicine, which is a new centre, so I can spend the rest of my academic time doing what I can to integrate women's knowledge into medicine. I am going to spend this time doing research and sharing what I know with people who are interested. I intend to be a tribal grandmother.

I intend to be one of the wise women and I will continue to spend my life in the service of the feminine. I think we are in for a really tough period because I think we are at the end of an era.

I think the Piscean age, the age of the dominance of the masculine, is coming to an end. There will be a rebalancing and it is unlikely that will happen without a battle.