It's an awe-inspiring force, the iron determination of a woman who refuses to bear a child that she knows she cannot mother. Down through the ages, no religious anathema, no legal proscription has been able to weaken the adamantine power of her refusal. The speakers in this rich and timely collection of personal testimonies make no attempt to soften the raw facts of how they have dealt with the unplanned and unwanted fruits of their bodies. They describe with jolting frankness their ignorance of physiology, the harshness of their family situation, the desperate secrecy of their search for “someone to help”, and the physical risks they were prepared to take… (From the Foreword, by Helen Garner) ©2006 Jo Wainer.
About the stories
The stories that make up most of this book were collected in response to an advertisement placed in the Melbourne Sun newspaper in 1985 by Dr Bertram Wainer. The advertisement asked women who had had illegal abortions to contact him and tell him of their experiences. He knew how important it was that women's direct experience of illegal abortion be recorded before these women died. Women responded to his request because he had risked his life to make abortion legal. Each woman told what had happened to her, knowing that his purpose was publication. Dr Wainer also approached doctors and nurses who had either provided illegal abortions, or worked in hospitals where women who had had abortions were cared for. Several of those interviews are reproduced here…
When Dr Bertram Wainer, Victoria's famous abortion reform crusader, died in 1987, the balconies of the church in which they held his memorial service were thronged with silent, grateful women.
Now that fresh assaults are being made on women's right to safe abortion, testimonies like the ones in this book are all the more urgently needed. We must never forget how things used to be…
Introduction
It is every woman's nightmare, the question every woman asks at some time. What if I am pregnant and I can't raise a child? The nightmare answer only a generation ago was “illegal abortion”, and women were right to be afraid. Afraid of the stigma, of being found out, of not being able to get an abortion and, if they did, that they would be prosecuted, that things would go wrong. To have an abortion was a criminal act, and women had no legal protection. They walked blindfolded into the unknown, often alone, their heads full of rumours of pain and suffering. They had no option.
When a woman cannot mother and she is pregnant, she will do what it takes to get an abortion, even if it means dying in the attempt. This book contains part of the untold history of our mothers and grandmothers, of their encounters with the thing that had no name, that was known only as “an illegal operation”, “tampering with the womb”, “a certain event”, “being interfered with” or “bringing the courses on”. This book records the experiences of ordinary women doing extraordinary things; particularly, it is about women's experiences of illegal abortion in Victoria, Australia.
The women in Lost are among the estimated 90,000 women per annum who had illegal and clandestine abortions in Australia until the 1970s… They take us beneath the respectable veneer of Victorian families to the real dramas of life and death, the struggle to be “good” and the role illegal abortion played in that struggle… .
Abortion was illegal before 1969 because the colony of Victoria took over the whole of the British Crimes Act when it became an independent state in 1901. Buried in that Act was the Offences Against the Persons Act, passed in 1861 in Britain to protect women from interference by unsafe practices designed to induce abortion in the preantibiotic era. The Act was not concerned about the foetus, and induced abortion was made a crime whether or not the woman was pregnant. This Act became Sections 65 and 66 of the Crimes Act (1958) Victoria. Anybody found guilty of inducing an unlawful abortion would be sentenced to jail for a term of up to 5 years. This was widely believed to mean that no abortion was lawful, with the result that abortions were carried out in secrecy and stigmatised as illegal.
The law in Victoria changed in 1969 when Justice Menhennitt was required to direct a jury hearing the case brought against Dr Kenneth Davidson who had induced an abortion. Dr Davidson defended himself, saying that while he had done the abortion, it was necessary to protect the life and health of the woman.
The jury asked the judge for direction as to what was “lawful”, given that the doctor could only be found guilty of “unlawful” abortion. The judge directed that abortion was lawful in Victoria if it were “necessary to preserve the woman from a serious danger to her life or her physical or mental health, not being merely the normal dangers of pregnancy and childbirth”. The jury acquitted Dr Davidson, and Victoria had the case-law precedent that made abortion legal, yet continues to leave doctors, nurses and women open to harassment and intimidation.
This judicial ruling remains the law in 2006. Unlawful abortion remains a crime punishable by jail, although to my knowledge no jury in the English-speaking world has convicted a doctor of unlawful abortion if they were shown to be acting in good faith.
The Menhennitt ruling arose from a series of police raids against doctors who provided illegal abortions – at least the doctors, the police and the women all believed they were illegal. These doctors were part of the multi-layered illegal abortion network that women had to negotiate when they needed access to this vital reproductive health service.
There was hierarchy to the network, based on cost and safety. The safer the service, the more money was charged; poor women bore the brunt of the dangers of illegal abortion while wealthy women bought access to safe services. At the bottom of the hierarchy were the neighbourhood abortion providers, the “Sarah Gamps” and “Vera Drakes” who may have had some medical or nursing training, and who, for a modest fee, did abortions for women in their neighbourhood with varying degrees of skill, success and danger. Others had learnt to do abortions on themselves, and then did it for other women when they could see the need. There was one of these women in most neighbourhoods.
Then there were the “backyarders”, organised abortion providers who were not medically qualified; if they were, they were not registered to practise. These were mostly men with extensive referral networks and motivated by the chance to make money. Some were reasonably competent, others were brutal and abusive. All were dangerous as they had no skills or back-up to manage if something went wrong.
The next in the hierarchy were the qualified doctors who specialised in abortion, but operated illegally and clandestinely. They had set up premises to provide this surgical service, and sought the protection of individual police officers through bribery to allow them to continue to practise. They were all men, and mostly apparently motivated by the opportunity to make a lot of money, although some worked from a strong sense of social justice and compassion. There were about twelve such doctors in Melbourne, and regional centres usually had their own covert providers. These doctors were very skilled at abortion, as they had to be, to avoid being caught. The women who found their way to these doctors were the lucky ones.
The backyarders and the qualified abortion providers had arrangements to dispose of the bodies of women who died at their hands. There was no possibility of calling an ambulance or admitting a woman to hospital if anything went wrong, and an unknown number of women died, at least weekly. In Victoria, sometimes their bodies were dumped in Port Phillip Bay, sometimes they were buried in Sherbrooke Forest. Sometimes two bodies instead of one would be committed to a pauper's grave or cremated. And sometimes they would make it to hospital, and die there.
At the top of the hierarchy were the qualified doctors who provided abortions for their own patients, and for the wives and daughters of friends, or the rich and powerful. These men were usually gynaecologists who would admit a woman to a private hospital for a “D & C” (dilatation and curettage), which is the most common surgical procedure for women. Diagnostic curettage is used for heavy bleeding of the uterus, or to diagnose disease. It is different from abortion only in that the woman is not pregnant. Many an alleged D & C has been performed on a pregnant uterus.
This was the network of abortion providers that you will read about. It is the network that was disrupted when my late husband, Dr Bertram Wainer, discovered evidence of police corruption and the protection of doctors and backyarders doing illegal abortions.
I began my work with abortion when I became the inaugural secretary of the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) in 1967. I was an undergraduate university student, learning the art of social action through my involvement with student politics. I had no idea what I was getting into when I allowed myself to be drafted for the position. I had a vague idea that women should be able to obtain the services they needed without risking the scorn of society or running the gauntlet of illegal abortion. The task of understanding the political, legal, religious, social and medical issues that were buried in that one word, abortion, has absorbed much of my intellectual and personal life ever since. ALRA developed some fact sheets to talk about abortion.
At that time nothing was known – it was hidden, invisible. There was no vocabulary, so we invented one. We drafted a model bill to present to Parliament. We met in my father's house in South Yarra. Thankfully my father, a conservative managing director of a manufacturing company, lived in Sydney…
Then a doctor joined us, Dr Bertram Wainer. He listened during the meetings, then said, “We should do a test case.” We were horrified. That would be illegal, we said. That would mean finding a doctor who was prepared to do an illegal operation and risk his liberty and his licence to practise medicine, a woman who was prepared to risk the subsequent publicity, and a hospital prepared to break the law… He laughed and said he would start his own organisation. He then invited me out to dinner.
Together we undertook the challenging work of bringing abortion out from the shadows and making it safe for women. It was a dangerous and an exhausting undertaking. We stumbled on the backyard abortion network; we uncovered police corruption; we located the professional abortionists. I wrote the speeches and Bert gave them; sometimes I did. There were no words, no images, no sentences to use that had been used before, so we developed them, drawing on what literature we could find from the UK and the United States.
Bert had been a Lieutenant Colonel in the Australian Medical Corps, commander of the military hospital in Brisbane as well as the field hospitals; he was a man's man, a soldier and a close friend of senior police in Queensland. He had great respect for the work of the police and solid belief in their integrity and competence. He was shattered when he discovered evidence, piece by piece, that something was rotten within the police force of Victoria…
When we met, Bert was a general practitioner, working in a two-doctor practice in St Kilda. He loved his work, prided himself on his diagnostic skills, and his dedication to his patients, and was deeply at home in the role of doctor…
He had no prior interest in abortion. As a medical student and intern he had been aware of wards full of women recovering or dying from illegal abortions and like most of the other doctors of his generation, he paid no particular attention. When he started his practice he contacted some colleagues and asked what he should do if a woman asked him for an abortion. He was given the names of some of the doctors who did illegal abortions, and followed his colleagues' practice of referring women there. When a woman needing an abortion came to him, he did what other doctors around him did – he referred her to a doctor who did them illegally. When the police raided those doctors and charged them, he knew that “there but for the grace of God go I” and organised a fund to support the doctor who had been charged with referring women for illegal abortion. When women were raided and asked by police about the details of their abortions Bert was horrified at the intimidation and the breach of doctor/patient confidentiality. He decided to act.
In May 1969 we placed an advertisement in the Sun, the morning newspaper run by a morally conservative management. It was headed “Abortion Abortion Abortion. If you have been contacted by police do not be afraid, be angry. Contact Dr Bertram Wainer.” The sub-editor must have had his attention diverted because that word, abortion, had not been used in newsprint before. And never before had a doctor put his name to such a thing. It opened a deluge. Journalists and unwittingly pregnant women descended on his surgery the next morning.
The women told Bert stories about backyard abortions, abusive doctors, abortions that had gone horribly wrong. We were shocked. We had no idea this shadowland existed. Bert and I worked with a few selected friends – his receptionist, the local pharmacist, some journalists and young lawyers – and began to collect evidence systematically about the real abortion story. Not the one told in Parliament, at medical conferences or from the pulpit, but the one that women endured. He raged at the injustice that women with resources could obtain safe abortions but poor women could not. He gathered information about backyard abortions, and put it to the test. His receptionist made an appointment for an abortion with one of the backyarders to test out the system. It took her great courage to keep that appointment, not knowing what would happen next. Bert rang the police and told them an illegal abortion was going to happen, then watched as the occupants of the house left hurriedly, obviously warned there might be a raid. He had stumbled on police corruption: backyard abortionists and doctors were paying for police protection.
Bert could not stand the thought of a corrupt police force. The police and the rule of law are what stands between civilised society and the brutality of might is right, anarchy or totalitarianism. A corrupt police threatens the basis of a just society. So he decided to do what he could to see that the State unearthed and expelled corruption from the police force. He wanted a public inquiry. The Government of the day, led by Premier Henry Bolte and Chief Secretary Arthur Rylah, did not. Bert won and the inquiry, headed by Mr William Kaye QC (later judge) and known as the Kaye Inquiry, was held from 1969 to 1970. Like the well-trained doctor that he was, Bert relied on evidence to persuade the Government to hold the Inquiry. He went where no one had been before, into the lives and practices of the illegal abortion providers, both qualified and unqualified, and learnt how they operated. He then systematically published his findings in the press, dodging bullets and campaigns of discreditation on the way.
Bert did do a test case; in fact, three of them. The purpose was to test how far the Menhennitt ruling extended and to demonstrate that it was safe for doctors to perform abortions for women who sought them. There [were] no arrest[s]… [However, we] were nearly knocked out by the backlash. The forces arrayed against us included the backyard abortionists, the doctors who provided abortions, the corrupt police and possibly corrupt politicians.
Bert was made bankrupt by the Australian Taxation Office for a debt of $1500. He had to leave general practice because he could not respond to a night call without fear he would be killed. The landlady who owned his surgery withdrew the lease on pressure from a Catholic bishop. The Australian Medical Association censured him. He suffered his first heart attack. He lost all his assets. With no practice, no income and no home, Bert came to live with me in my father's house. I put $30 a week into the kitty as our contribution to the cost of food and electricity, and we lived on my salary as a journalist with the ABC.
Attacks were made on our lives. Hit men were hired from South Australia and attacked him one night in the carpark of his flat in St Kilda. That was the point at which he decided he needed a gun. He taught me how to use it. We were disrupting established and very lucrative businesses, and there were people who were prepared to kill us to prevent that. I learnt to check the roof for snipers, and the exhaust pipe for gelignite, to drive with one eye on the mirror, to fire a rifle and pistol, and to command a guard dog. Most of all, I learnt to access rage when faced with fear.
I knew little about injustice, but I was on the side of the women. Together we dedicated the next fifteen years of our lives to making sure women could get what they needed in a safe and dignified environment, and that no other woman would die because abortion was illegal. In that time Bert also forced another public inquiry into police abuse of power from an equally reluctant government. This was headed by Mr Barry Beach QC (later appointed a judge) and was held in 1976. The findings of systematic abuse of power by the police remain relevant today.
We set up Australia's first openly operating abortion clinic, the Fertility Control Clinic in East Melbourne, in 1972. It sounds like such a simple thing to do, “set up an abortion clinic”, but the reality was not. We had to identify the existing illegal abortion networks, dismantle them, and then build a legal abortion service. Many others contributed to the intense political and societal work of bringing abortion out from under the silence and shadow where it had been cast by Victorian society, but Bert Wainer led the challenge. Since then, abortion has been available safely, at an affordable price, and is backed up by public hospital services. But lest we get complacent, bear this in mind: abortion remains governed by the Crimes Act. The law has not changed in Victoria, New South Wales or Queensland. South Australia and the Northern Territory decriminalised abortion in 1972, as did Western Australia in 1998, Tasmania in 2001 and the ACT in 2002.
Women of today do not have to face the fear and danger that their mothers and grandmothers faced. To read of their experiences is to honour their courage and resilience in the face of the systematic social arrangements arraigned against them. In their stories lie some of the truths of women's lives and experience of abortion that make clear the price women have been forced to pay in their determination to mother when they can, and not mother when they cannot. A society that honours its mothers and grandmothers will never ask women to pay this price again.
It was to Dr Bertram Wainer that these women came to tell their stories, because they knew he was on their side. They trusted their stories to him, and now I entrust them to you.
Available from:
E-mail: [email protected]
“No War” peace march, Sydney, Australia, 2003
