Book: Lost: Illegal Abortion Stories
Authors: Melissa Sweet
Journal: BMJ (2006)

On 9 January 1968 detectives found Mollie Jamieson at the shop where she worked in Melbourne, Australia, and told her bluntly that her 21 year old daughter, Carolyn, was dead. Mollie and her husband were then interrogated for hours over what they knew of their daughter's illegal abortion. But it was the first they knew of it. Such was the shame surrounding abortion that Carolyn had been unable to tell her parents of the real reason she was going away on “holiday.”




Figure 1



Ed Jo Wainer

Melbourne University Publishing, $24.95, pp 224 ISBN 0 522 85231 9 www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/

Rating: ★★★★




Carolyn was the last woman known to have died from illegal abortion in Victoria before a 1969 judicial ruling that abortion was lawful if necessary to protect a woman from serious danger to life or health. Her death also had another important effect—it horrified a former military doctor, Bertram Wainer, so much that he gave up his general practice in Melbourne to push for abortion law reform.

Wainer's partner in this high profile and dangerous campaign was Jo Richardson, a university student activist whom he met through the Abortion Law Reform Association, and who later became his wife. Together they set up Australia's first openly operating abortion clinic in 1972.

In 1985 Mollie Jamieson was one of hundreds of women who responded to an advertisement placed by Dr Wainer in a Melbourne newspaper asking for people's stories of abortion. “The next generation must know what it was like for women,” the advertisement said.

Two years later, Dr Wainer died. For almost 20 years, Jo Wainer carried with her the yellowing transcripts of the interviews that had emerged from people who responded to the advertisement. Finally, she felt the time was right to publish them in Lost: Illegal Abortion Stories, a slim book that packs a powerful emotional punch.

Jo Wainer, now director of the Centre for Gender and Medicine at Monash University, says the publication is timely given that abortion remains the subject of much political and public debate and is still governed by the Crimes Act in New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland.

Earlier this year, the Australian Parliament voted against allowing the federal health minister, Tony Abbott—a Catholic opposed to abortion—to maintain control over approval for mifepristone or RU 486, separate to the regulatory process for other drugs. Jo Wainer is angry that Mr Abbott now plans to set up special counselling services for women contemplating abortion, which she says risks breaching their privacy. “It is an absolute nonsense,” she says. “Counselling about reproductive matters should be done by GPs.”

Jo called the book Lost because she believes the voices of women affected by abortion have too often been left out of policy and political debates. “As a result we've had very poor public policy,” she says.

The book is compelling because of the rawness of the women's voices, and provides a fascinating medical history, including interviews with hospital staff from the days when whole wards were filled with women slowly dying from sepsis after abortions that had gone wrong. The book is also a gripping social history, illuminating the difficulties that many women faced in the days before sex education and contraception.

Lost also describes the opposition—from corrupt police and illegal abortionists—to the Wainers' crusade. Jo Wainer describes how her husband taught her to use a gun. “We were disrupting established and very lucrative businesses, and there were people who were prepared to kill us to prevent that,” she writes.