A pro-abortion march in Wellington, 1973. Photo: Keith Stewart private collection
Before abortion was decriminalised in the late 1970s, generations of New Zealand women had to risk their own lives to terminate a pregnancy.
Some took pills and potions from back-street chemists, others threw themselves down staircases, took rugged horse rides, drank gin in the bath and inserted coat hangers into their vaginas.
Until the 1970s, about 20 women a year died as a result of abortions gone wrong, historian Jock Phillips tells RNZ's Nine to Noon, and this difficult aspect of Aotearoa's history deserves to be better understood.
Before the arrival of the pill in 1961, New Zealanders were quite ignorant about contraception, Phillips says.
Coitus interruptus, or withdrawal, was the main method and condoms were unreliable.
Anovlar 21, the first contraceptive pill available for prescription in New Zealand. Photo: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
When the NZ Medical Association ruled that the pill should be prescribed only to married women, [https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/insight/audio/2583242/insight-the-history-of-feminism feminist voices rose to demand bodily autonomy and sexual freedom, Phillips says.
Fears that sex-crazed New Zealand was "going to rack and ruin" were what fuelled the local anti-abortion movement at the time just as much as concern for the rights of the unborn child, Phillips says.
Listen: "You would go the doctors and be greeted with horror and disapproval" - Carol* talks about getting pregnant as a teen in 1967 after being refused the pill
"When you read the parliamentary debates of the '70s a suspicion of sexuality, a desire to push the clock back away from sexual freedom was a very large part."
While you would guess that arguments against abortion were primarily about the sanctity of life, action groups like The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child were more worried about young Kiwis going wild, he says.
"They were very concerned about what they regarded as young people's, you know, enjoyment of sex.
"It was sort of a punitive moralistic attitude."
Members of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child at parliament with a petition in 1975. From left to right: Marilyn Pryor, Dr Jack Bergin, Dr Diana Mason (national president) and Des Dalgety. Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library / Courtesy of Mobil New Zealand
In May 1974, amidst controversy, New Zealand's first abortion clinic - the Auckland Medical Aid Centre - was opened by GP Rex Hunton in Remuera.
As more women obtained effective abortions there, the procedure seemed to "come into the light in a safe way", Phillips says. Yet at the same time, opposition was ramping up from people like Labour MP, surgeon and staunch Catholic Gerard Wall.
In 1975, the National government launched an inquiry into the ethics of abortion. Two years later, when the Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act was passed, Phillips says getting a legal abortion in New Zealand once again became almost impossible.
Listen: "Women's lives, here in a so-called democracy, were just not able to be lived in the way that we wanted" - Judy*, a volunteer at SOS's Dunedin branch
"The only grounds on which women could have an abortion was if their mental health was endangered, and there was no other way of treating that mental problem."
To safely terminate a pregnancy in the late '70s, possibly thousands of New Zealand women flew to Sydney and Melbourne via the Sisters Overseas Service - so well-known at the time that "gone to Australia" became a popular euphemism.
A pro-abortion demonstration on Manners Street, Wellington in June 1976. Photo: Ref: EP/1976/2253/30A-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23115081
In New Zealand, abortion remained the only medical procedure in the NZ Crimes Act until 2020, but from 1978, abortions were permitted on the grounds of saving the mother's life and mental and physical health.
In 1979, the Auckland Medical Aid Centre reopened and other abortion clinics began popping up in our main centres, until by the early '80s, a safe, legal abortion was not too difficult to obtain.
Before that time, generations of Kiwi women making the difficult decision to end a pregnancy felt "marginalised and criminalised" by their own country, National MP Amy Adams told RNZ after abortion was removed from the NZ Crimes Act five years ago.
"I have seen the delays, the difficulties, the struggles, the judgement and the abuse because of our law and that is not okay."
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