Never again: women's experiences before the '70s
By Sarah Stephen
PERTH — Denise White was the honorary secretary of the WA Association for the Legal Right to Abortion during the 1970s and early '80s and a founder of the Abortion Information Service in 1974. Dr Judy Straton is an associate professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of WA. She worked as an adviser to Cheryl Davenport during the parliamentary debate over WA's new abortion legislation. She experienced first hand the consequences of restricted abortion access as a medical student and GP during the 1960s and '70s.
Before the '70s, backyard abortions performed by unqualified people in unsanitary conditions were at the extreme end of a scale of terrifying and humiliating experiences that many hundreds of women went through each year.
"Occasionally there would be scandals in the tabloids", Judy Straton said, "a woman found dead in a hotel room after trying to induce an abortion. They weren't just young women; they were married women, women leaving behind families, children."
Qualified doctors often performed clandestine abortions, but at an enormous price. Rich women who knew where to go could get relatively safe abortions. Untrained, greedy operators — the classic image of a backyard abortionist — preyed on poorer women.
"Women would be expected to front up with the cash in hand, late at night, to strange addresses, knowing that if something happened to you, everyone involved would deny it. They were let out the back door in the dead of the night, still groggy from anaesthesia, and told not to come back if they were in trouble.
"As a medical student in the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne, I would see women brought into the emergency ward every night, bleeding from self-induced abortion, up to six or seven a night.
"I also remember a deathly pale Catholic mother of eight brought to the Royal Hobart Hospital, dying of gas gangrene from her third illegal abortion."
Doctors have final say
Well into the '70s, women were routinely refused abortions at public hospitals throughout the country. Abortions were performed under a cruel and degrading lottery system: if the doctor felt your case worthy, you might be lucky enough to get an abortion. Women were subjected to humiliating interviews, in which they had to demean themselves by claiming that they could not mentally cope with pregnancy.
Denise White, recalling her experience in the Abortion Information Service (AIS), says, "A significant number of doctors took an approach by a woman for an abortion as an opportunity to abuse them. They were given examinations that were more like experiences of rape and violation; they were shouted at, commonly told that they couldn't get an abortion. These doctors would often have the hide to expect payment for the abuse."
The WA AIS kept records of some women's experiences. The following accounts are from 1972 and 1973.
Case 1: A 19-year-old woman who suspected she was pregnant went to the public hospital. She had to wait three hours before the doctor would see her. She was asked a range of routine questions by a medical student, including what contraception she was using, and who had got her pregnant. She was told that the availability of abortion depended on the day and the doctor.
After the examination was over, the gynaecologist ripped into the young woman with a violent fury: "Why do you think you want an abortion? ... There's no need for an abortion. You're physically all right, you'd better talk to the boy, get married straight away, grow up and take some responsibility ... You're not going to get an abortion, and if you don't want to keep it you'll have to get it adopted."
Case 2: Upon being approached about an abortion referral, the doctor of a 23-year-old woman, whom she'd known for some time, told her, "If we [she and her boyfriend] were later married, we would remember that our first-born had been scraped out of my uterus into a stainless steel bucket".
The doctor to whom she was referred did not speak to her in any way as he approached the examination table. He handled her breasts very roughly. "He told one of his medical students to examine me internally, after he had done so himself. Then he re-examined me (it was very painful) and told the student to do it again. The student said he'd already done so but the doctor insisted and said he'd gone to the trouble of setting up my uterus so it was introverted instead of retroverted. He remarked that I was going to have a rotten obstetrical future anyway.
"I was shocked and appalled and in tears at what was happening to me. The doctor said, 'Are you going to marry the father?' I said, 'No', and he said, 'They're all right for food and board, but not to marry', which made me feel incensed and insulted.
"I felt outraged and degraded by the whole experience. My breasts were still terribly sore from his handling them and I feel I can't bear to let a man touch me ever again."
Abortion Information Service
The Abortion Law Repeal Association was formed in WA in 1969. Between 1969 and 1974, more than 200 men and women gave their time to work on campaign committees and/or become AIS counsellors.
White explains: "Medical students, who worked with these brutal doctors, heard on the grapevine about ALRA and the set-up of AIS, and came to tell me they were appalled and sickened at the treatment of women in hospital clinics, and asked me could they refer those who were refused to me.
"In order to help women, I asked them first to help me. They approached their own or a local doctor, asked for an abortion and then reported back to me. Thus I acquired information to help other women — which doctors were sympathetic and which weren't.
"AIS was established in 1974. Counsellors were trained, who would take women into their homes, or speak to them over the phone about where they could go if they wanted an abortion. The public launch, in September 1974, got excellent media coverage, and 67 women called the service in the first week."
Two months later, White continued, a police woman, acting as an agent provocateur, had used the services of the AIS and tried unsuccessfully to persuade the doctors to abort her without confirming her pregnancy.
"Police said to Bob Short, one of the clinic doctors, 'We understand you are doing abortions here'. 'Yes, that's right', he said. 'I've just finished one, but if you'd like to wait for five minutes, I'll be doing another and you can come and watch.' A few weeks later, the homes of nine counsellors and two doctors' surgeries were raided simultaneously by 30 members of the CIB.
"Those counsellors whose houses were raided needed to hide client records for confidentiality reasons. One woman put them under a layer of newspaper in the kitty litter tray, another over a neighbour's fence, hoping the dog would leave them alone. They didn't get hold of any counselling records, but they did seize the doctors' patient records."
AIS launched a very public campaign to raise support. "Public opinion swung very strongly in our favour. Members of parliament, the Labor Party executive, student guilds pledged their support."
Several doctors made front-page headlines when they signed a statement that they had participated in abortions.
"The West Australian wrote an editorial supporting AIS and a change in the laws. When pressed by the media, a police spokesperson said the raids were authorised because people 'didn't think this sort of information should be available to the general public'. There is the crux of it: keep it hidden, furtive, expensive and available to a select few, and authorities will allow it; make it cheap, fair and available to all women, and it becomes 'illegal'."