By Tracy Sorensen
The Sydney Women's Abortion Action Campaign was formed in August 1972 at the height of the "second wave" of the women's liberation movement. A few months before, the anti-abortion laws in the criminal code had been liberalised by the Levine ruling. Soon, women would no longer need to "know someone who knew someone who knew a doctor" willing to perform an abortion.
In an interview with Green Left, Margaret Kirkby, who joined WAAC in 1978, recounted some of the memorable events, achievements and challenges of the last 20 years, and the work that remains to be done.
In 1972, the guilt, secrecy and danger that had surrounded many women's experience of abortion looked set to become things of the past. Police officers, slow to catch on, were being informed they could no longer expect protection money from service providers. Women's movement activists were planning a new type of health service in feminist clinics.
Abortion campaigners were also watching the international scene with interest: in the US, for example, Roe v. Wade was about to provide a constitutional guarantee for a woman's right to choose.
In its 20th anniversary year, WAAC faces a vastly different situation. As the group prepares a celebratory dinner and an oral "herstory" project, so little fuss surrounds the procedure (unless there is a Right to Life picket on the footpath outside the clinic) that many would be surprised to hear that clauses outlawing abortion still exist in the Crimes Act.
On the down side, Roe v. Wade is all but dead, and women's right to choose abortion is being challenged by the new regimes in eastern Europe. Last year, the latest in a series of private member's bills seeking to prohibit or restrict abortion made a brief appearance in the NSW parliament.
Twenty years on, WAAC is still defending something many younger women have grown up assuming is theirs: the right to decide what to do with one's own body.
Why was WAAC founded? According to Tina Harsanyi, who was active in the group at the time, the intention was not simply to ensure that women could have abortions safely and legally, as long as it was done quietly, but to "politically entrench the right to choose".
In this, WAAC's attitude was different from that of many of the service providers (some motivated mostly by money, others more interested in the well-being of women) with whom the group was meeting: "They didn't want to rock the boat politically". WAAC activists did.
Early WAAC achievements included the 1972 launch of the newspaper Right to Choose (which has appeared continuously since, now in magazine format) and, in 1975, the country's first national conference to discuss contraception and abortion.
WAAC hosted a tour by French feminist lawyer Giselle Halimi, who had defended a young woman forced through the courts for seeking an abortion (the "Bobigny Affair"). Halimi's present to WAAC activists was very French: a bottle of Chanel No 5 perfume!
Other projects included a series of pamphlets in community languages explaining clearly "Why, How, Where and When" a woman might choose abortion.
In 1976, WAAC defended doctors at the government-funded Liverpool Women's Health Centre, who were taken to court for performing an abortion on a 14-year-old who did not have her parents' consent.
"When the Liverpool centre opened in 1975, they did perform abortions", said Kirkby. "But as a result of that case, the government threatened to cut off the centre's funding. To avert that threat, the centre agreed not to perform abortions. That made people turn their attention to the establishment of feminist abortion clinics." The first such clinic in NSW was set up in Homebush in July 1977.
In 1979, WAAC found itself in a new campaign, this time provoked by a move to withdraw Medicare coverage for abortions (the Lusher motion).
"A former WAAC activist who has looked through the mainstream newspaper stories from the time says the level of debate around the abortion issue got to be quite sophisticated", said Kirkby. "A lot of the arguments that had been restricted to feminist magazines and newsletters did get a fair bit of airplay, in a reasonable way, not in a negative way."
Meanwhile, the international discussion over women's reproductive rights was broadening to encompass issues such as forced sterilisation, the policies of drug companies and new reproductive technologies. WAAC kept abreast of the issues through an international network of contacts, articles in Right to Choose and participation in conferences and discussions.
The election of the Greiner Liberal government in 1988 paved the way for a new round of attacks on abortion, the most serious of which was the first draft of Fred Nile's Unborn Child Protection Bill.
Every time there is such an attack, said Kirkby, WAAC is able to draw on contacts built up over the years, while younger women, motivated by the current debates, are drawn to the group. Between attacks, there is time to reflect on ongoing problems and longer term strategies.
One ongoing problem, says Kirkby, is the lowly status of abortion in medical schools. With about 40,000 abortions performed every year in NSW, it is hardly a rare procedure. "Yet where doctors are being trained, they're not exposed to seeing one being done."
How seriously should feminists view the current shortage of doctors willing to perform abortions? Has the "moral right" won some ground?
"It's not only just now that it's been hard to get doctors to do abortions", said Kirkby. "I'd say the crisis at the moment is one that happens every now and then. It will be overcome. One or two clinics might not have enough doctors to operate for a few weeks, so will be getting an appointment a few weeks later at another clinic.
"It's putting those women to a lot of inconvenience. I don't see that that has changed significantly from years ago, but it certainly does cause bottlenecks."
A difference in approach sometimes emerges between political activists and service providers (although many have a foot in both camps). The political activists, said Kirkby, can sometimes go "off on a tangent, not being realistic", while the service providers can lose touch with political developments. What is needed, she said, is continuous liaison between the two.
Why has WAAC now decided to raise the possibility of a new campaign to repeal the abortion laws? According to Kirkby, it has always been WAAC's policy; whether or not to campaign around the issue has been a matter of judging the political situation. A private member's bill was prepared in the late '70s but not put because it was considered there would not be enough support.
But the year 2000 is not far off, says Kirkby, and it would be "totally anachronistic" to go into the new century with the laws still on the books.
"The existence of those sections of the Crimes Act certainly does make the whole legal situation that little bit more uncertain every time there's one of these attacks on abortion.
"The mere existence of it in the Crimes Act is definitely something that adds to the power of the anti-abortionists. The sections of the Crimes Act relating to homosexuality have been repealed. Why can't the sections regarding abortion also be repealed?"