Abortion - A Right Or A Crime?

Forty-three years ago, a desperately ill young woman turned up at the clinic of Melbourne GP Bertram Wainer. She had endured what, in less enlightened times, was termed a "backyard abortion", i.e. her pregnancy had been terminated by somebody without the necessarily skills, probably in an unsafe environment. She had risked her life in this way because, in Victoria, abortion was a crime, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

Imagine that! A woman seeking to terminate her unwanted pregnancy had two stark choices: risk her life or go to jail. Her saviour that day, Dr Wainer, famously became a crusader for abortion rights, and, for his trouble, received death threats (from police) and survived several actual attempts on his life.

It would be nice to consign this story to the bad old days, but this week a young Queensland woman, Tegan Leach, 21, found herself in a Cairns, Queensland, court, facing the prosect of seven years in jail for procuring her own abortion, specifically taking the abortion drugs RU486 and Misoprostol. It was late 2008 and she was 19. Her partner, Sergie Brennan, 22, pleaded not guilty to a charge of supplying the drugs, which he had obtained from his sister in the Ukraine. It was the first time in Queensland's history that anybody had been charged with procuring an abortion. It took the jury less than an hour to find the couple not guilty.

As foetal medicine expert Nicholas Fisk told Cairns District Court on Wednesday, RU486 has been safely prescribed to millions of women across the world and is the most common abortion method in Britain. In this case, however, unless a doctor decreed that the pregnancy would pose a threat to Leach's life or her physical or mental health, her use of the drug was illegal.

Fearing prosecution, many hospitals and doctors in Queensland are now refusing to perform abortions, even where a pregnancy is a consequence of sexual assault.

As marie claire reported in our August issue, Australia's abortion laws are an unmitigated mess: abortions are legal in Victoria and the ACT, conditionally available in South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, and conditionally available (but still considered a crime) in New South Wales.

More clearly defined is public opinion on the issue. Just as anti-choice activists targeted Dr Wainer in the sixties (though "pro-life", some were willing to kill him), their 21st century counterparts have reportedly thrown flaming missiles at Leach and Brennan's home.

For their part, pro-choice advocates gathered outside the Cairns courthouse this week to offer support to the couple and call for the decriminalisation of abortion in Queensland. And for those who couldn't be there, the activist group Get Up! posted on their website a national petition for choice. To add your name, go to http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/my_choice_is_no_crime.