This will be a personal and episodic view of the (unfinished) fight for reproductive rights in New South Wales, and particularly the struggle of women within the Labor Party in that most Catholic of states.
My first memory of abortion as an issue is probably around 1969. I was a member of the women’s liberation movement (WLM) which was just beginning to gain ground in Sydney. Apart from endless consciousness-raising sessions at women’s liberation house at 67 Glebe Point Road, our other important activity was around abortion. This was before the crucial ‘Heatherbrae’ case of 1971 (also known as the Levine ruling) which provided for safer and semi-legal abortions in New South Wales but still retained abortion as a crime within the New South Wales Crimes Act 1900 – the situation that remains until this day.
In a flurry of blue overalls, severe haircuts and excellent earrings (we never opposed interesting jewellery) we would march down Broadway to the CBD or gather at Martin Place or the Archibald Fountain and march on some strategic target. Our voices were raised in chants which were confident and, in retrospect, hopeful: ‘Free abortion on demand.’
As I remember, we were not consciously using the term ‘a woman’s right to choose’ at that early stage. We became more aware of the importance of terminology when our opponents started to use the term ‘pro-life’ instead of what we called them: ‘anti-abortion’. So we became ‘pro-choicers’ – a good and fitting terminology.
As Women’s Lib, we were an inchoate but large and rowdy grouping. We had a respectful relationship with the older abortion campaigners such as Biddy Gilling and Julia Freedbury (and later the Women’s Electoral Lobby feminists) but we felt that more vocal and direct-action activity had to take place. My memories of this time are enthusiastic and chaotic marches led by Sue Bellamy, Joyce Stevens, Jozefa Sobski, and other fearsome leaders of the WLM.
We followed with great interest the heroic activity of Bertram and Jo Wainer in Victoria and of course were supportive of the legal war being waged by left-wing lawyers such as Jimmy Staples in New South Wales, but we believed the issue could and should be won in the streets (it was the seventies after all). The formation of WAAC (Women’s Abortion Action Campaign) in 1972 and the establishment of the Leichhardt Women’s Health Centre strengthened our forces immeasurably.
Although I never had any personal involvement with abortion, the books and films of the period often dealt with the issue – always tragically. I remember the sense of foreboding you would feel in the cinema as the heroine went off to some back lane with a wad of cash. It always made me shiver with anxiety.
By 1971 I had become peripherally involved with the Labor Party, which had a large and active Women’s Conference that was involved with abortion as a priority issue.
Our problem in the Labor Party was that it was a very Catholic party in a very Catholic state. The leader of the Catholics was Johno Johnson, (my Labor predecessor as President of the New South Wales Legislative Council) who wore the tiny silver feet badge of the anti-abortionists proudly on his lapel for all the time I knew him.
The reasons for this religious imbalance can be traced back to the Labor Party split of the fifties when Cardinal Gilroy of New South Wales encouraged the Catholics to stay in the party and fight while his counterpart in Victoria, Archbishop Mannix, urged the Catholics to split from the party and form the DLP.
New South Wales is the most Catholic state (24.1 per cent Catholics) because of the patterns of early settlement – Irish convicts in the east and Protestant settlers in the west and south (South Australia is 17.9 per cent Catholic), compounded by later post-war immigration to New South Wales from Catholic communities in Europe and the Middle East. Interestingly, New South Wales is the most religious state generally with 65.3 per cent nominating a religion in the 2016 census as opposed to 60 per cent in Australia.
So the women abortion activists in the Labor Party, mainly but not exclusively from the Left faction, were hugely frowned on. It is one of the main reasons that the Right Wing of the party was eventually successful in abolishing the Women’s Conference in 1986. They believed that shutting down the formal structure for women would shut down the fight for women’s rights, and to some degree they were successful.
It was during this period in the late seventies and early eighties that a ludicrous situation developed. A big women’s rights rally was planned in the city and the Labor women activists decided to march under the Labor Women’s Conference banner. The party officers called it a ‘pro-abortion rally’ and made it known that any Labor woman who took part would be expelled from the party. This may sound like overreach and it certainly was but it was at a time when the fight between the Right and the Left was at its height. The old Right was fond of ‘proscribing’ organisations that Labor Party members were forbidden from joining or being involved with such as resident action groups or in this case abortion activists.
The order forbidding us to march began to attract press coverage and there were tense discussions among us as to what to do. I can remember Kate Butler, Chris Kibble, Pam Allan, Ann Symonds and Sandra Wall being part of these discussions.
Eventually we hit on the perfect media stunt of marching with our heads in paper bags behind a banner proclaiming ‘36 Faceless Women’ – a pun on the famous Alan Reid quip about the ALP National Executive being ‘36 Faceless Men’.
If I did not have a press photograph of the occasion I would not have been able to convince later generations of ALP women that we had to resort to such tactics. I proudly point myself out as the fourth paper bag from the right.
Such was the media coverage of the protest that expulsions did not occur. Anyway, how could they prove who it was inside each paper bag? The argument at the Administrative Committee would have been hilarious.
The campaign dragged on. In 1991 I ended up in the New South Wales Parliament where the fight to decriminalise abortion took a more formal but just as heated form.
Shortly after my election, the Call to Australia Party MLC (Member of the Legislative Council), the Reverend Fred Nile, a long-time morals and anti-abortion campaigner, introduced two bills to the parliament: the Unborn Child Protection Bill 1991 and the Procurement of Miscarriage Limitation Bill 1991.
By 12 September that year the bills were actually being debated in the Legislative Council. At that stage it was the most feminised chamber in Australia. We were exactly one-third of the 45-member Council.
During a long and extraordinary speech by Fred’s colleague (his wife Elaine Nile), the women in the chamber became restless.
Eventually action was taken. The Liberal Party matriarch, Beryl Evans, started to round up the troops. We all liked Beryl. She was an old-fashioned bluestocking who had served in some military capacity during the Second World War. We always used to tell people that she had been a bomber pilot – it suited her ‘born to rule’ persona. Beryl persuaded thirteen of the fifteen women in the chamber to stage a walkout. We represented all parties and factions except Fred Nile’s. There were women from the Liberals, Nationals, Democrats and the Right and Left of the Labor Party. Only one woman remained in the House with Elaine Nile. It was a stunning feat of organisation.
We stormed out of the chamber and returned to our offices. After about ten minutes I decided that the media should be told that the walkout had been organised by Beryl. I went down to the press gallery and said to the journos: ‘you probably should know that the walkout was actually organised by Beryl Evans.’ ‘What walkout?’ was their response. Thirteen of fifteen women in the chamber had staged a coordinated walkout and the (mostly) male press corps had not noticed!
They were pretty excited about the event and persuaded us to re-stage our walkout. We stormed down the exterior stairs and were duly photographed in the bright light of day. All thirteen of us. We always laughed about the fact that we had to do it twice before we were noticed.
Beryl was obviously chuffed with her achievement because she sent us photocopies of the letters of thanks and congratulations she had received.
Sometimes I am asked during debates about women’s representation in parliament, whether ‘women’s issues’ actually exist. I always list abortion, guns and swimming pool fences as quite specific issues where women cross party lines in temporary sisterhood.
Another interesting debate happened inside the party when we decided to oppose Fred Nile’s Public Health (Conscientious Objection) Bill 1991 and a brace of similar bills such as the Nurses (Conscientious Objection) Bill 1991. These bills would have allowed workers in public hospitals to refuse services involving legal terminations. The ALP leadership had decided that these were public policy bills and as such not an ‘abortion’ bill which would have attracted a conscience vote within the party. Bob Carr and Health spokesman Andrew Refshauge managed to get our very Catholic caucus to support this view – even Johno Johnson.
Bob Carr commented to Ann Symonds and me later when we were unhappy about some other decision: ‘how can you expect me to get Johno to toe the line on stuff he opposes if you won’t toe the line on stuff you oppose?’ He was right, and those words often came back to me during our endless tussles over ‘law and order’ and drug policy.
Strangely, there was quite a lot of co-operation between the party leaderships to avoid raising the abortion issue in Parliament at this stage. Both sides realised that there was no guarantee which side would win, so an uneasy truce existed between the pro and anti sides. Also, the Labor leadership was loath to have the divisions within the party on the issue exacerbated and publicised.
All of this surreptitious co-operation of course excluded Fred Nile whose whole reason for being in Parliament was to oppose abortion and homosexuality. Sometimes this informal and unspoken arrangement led to hilarious outcomes.
On 23 November 1995, I was fulfilling my obedient backbencher role and had risen to congratulate DanceSport Australia on being chosen as an exhibition sport for the Sydney 2000 Olympics. These ‘stocking fillers’ normally take three minutes and we get a few pointers sent to us from the powers that be to work with. I had come to the end of my three-minute speech when I was handed a note: ‘Fred’s wanting to bring his abortion bill on before lunch, keep talking.’ Thus began the most incompetent filibuster in Legislative Council history. We knew that if I could talk for about twenty minutes until the lunch break then other business would take precedence after that.
The main problem with these occasional filibusters is that you have to stick to the given subject. Also, and this was uppermost in my mind, everything you say is meticulously recorded by Hansard for posterity. I have a real dislike of making long, boring speeches or of sounding like a goose. I staggered on blurting out inane observations. At last some comrades realised what was happening and started interjecting. What bliss. You can riff off a good interjection for some minutes. Ann asked me about Tonya Harding, and Michael Egan called out about line dancing. So I was able to ruminate about line dancing and correct-line dancing. Someone else mentioned Fred Astaire – so I was able to riff on the feminist joke about Ginger Rogers doing everything he did, except backwards and in high heels. And so it went on. Even Fred, realising his bill was doomed, got into the spirit of the thing and started to call out about the need for the contestants to wear ‘neck to ankle gear’. I have never had the guts to google ‘DanceSport Australia’ and check my speech but it’s lying there somewhere as part of the great Fred Nile abortion war of attrition.
So why is abortion still there in the New South Wales Crimes Act? Fifty years after we first started our public demonstrations and 120 years since it was included in the Act?
I realise, when I talk to young women about our abortion marches of fifty years ago, that it’s exactly like older women talking to me as a young student about the Suffragettes and their struggle for the vote – except that the Suffragettes won the vote much quicker than we have won legal abortions. Did we really think that it would take another fifty years before we would succeed?
Twice, Ann Symonds and I went through the process of straw polling the MPs and MLCs in the New South Wales Parliament. There is no point putting up a decriminalisation bill unless you know it can win. Otherwise you run the risk that the majority group can make things worse, as has been threatened in other states. Each time we started the straw poll we stopped before we had gone very far. It was too obvious; we didn’t have the numbers. The preponderance of Catholics in the ALP has certainly fallen over the years but it has been supplemented by a proportional rise in Catholics and fundamentalist or Pentecostal adherents in the Coalition.
Cross your fingers for the 2019 election but I hope the women of the new New South Wales Parliament know how to do a good straw poll.
With Queensland’s historic Termination of Pregnancy Bill 2018 having just been passed it now leaves only New South Wales with abortion still listed as a crime.
The Stop Press announcement on 23 October 2018 that a New South Wales Labor government would move to decriminalise abortion if elected has left me gobsmacked. Perhaps our efforts were not in vain after all.