Abortion has long been a political hot potato

part because antibiotics reduced deaths from blood
poisoning.
Abortion panic: 1920s–1930s
After the First World War abortion became a public issue,
debated by politicians, doctors and women’s groups, and in
newspaper columns. Nationally known doctors, including
Frederic Truby King of the Plunket Society and Doris
Gordon of the Obstetrical Society, argued that abortion
(along with birth control) was to blame for a falling birth
rate and the possibility of ‘racial decline’ (the loss of
European population dominance).

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abortions would ‘extinguish [New
Zealand’s] white people’.
In 1936 the government set up a committee to consider the
high rate of death caused by back-street abortions. The
committee’s report focused on the falling birth rate, and was
strongly against abortion. However, panic about the birth
rate and abortion was overtaken by war and then by a baby boom.
Footnotes
Quoted in Jacqueline Matthews, ‘Hyde, Robin.’ Dictionary of
New Zealand Biography,
http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4h41/1
 (last
accessed 11 March 2011).
 Back
Doris C. Gordon and Francis Bennett, Gentlemen of the Jury.
New Plymouth: Thomas Avery, 1937, p. 18.
 Back
Who and how
Who had abortions
Both married and single women sought abortions. Historians have suggested that in
the 1920s and 1930s, married women would try to self-abort, while single women
were more likely to go to an abortionist.
Who provided abortions
Those providing abortions were sometimes skilled: a maternity nurse, a doctor or a
chemist. But many had no medical training – money could be made from desperate
women, who, regarded as accomplices to a crime, would not go to the police.
Back-street operators were often spoken of as dirty, incompetent and unsafe.
Despite this, many illegal abortions were successful. A great deal of money could be
made, and word of mouth would not have favoured those whose patients remained
pregnant, or ended up in hospital or dead.
Cost
The cost of abortion depended on who was involved, the methods used, and how
much a woman could pay. The range was wide. In the mid-1930s, Annie Aves
carried out 183 abortions and earned £2,232 in 18 months, averaging £12 for each
abortion (around $1,400 in 2018 terms). In the early 1940s an abortion carried out
by a doctor could cost as much as £100 (around $8,600 in 2018 terms).
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Home and back-street methods
Many women desperate to end a pregnancy would first try to do so at home.
Attempts to induce miscarriage included vigorous and excessive exercise, jumping
off tables, falling down stairs, taking hot baths while drinking half a bottle of gin,
and taking laxatives.
In an attempt to physically dislodge the foetus, some women would insert knitting
needles, crochet hooks, sharpened pencils or blunted meat skewers into their womb.
Another method was injecting fluids (iodine, glycerine or disinfectant) into the
uterus using catheters and syringes. Other methods were also used by abortionists,
including metallic poisons, quinine, ergot or one of the pills marketed as ‘regulators‘.
Dangers
The methods were often ineffective and many of them were dangerous. Large
amounts of metallic poisons or quinine could kill the woman, and ergot could cause
gangrene and mental disturbance. Objects inserted into the uterus could tear it and
other internal organs. Pumping air into the womb could cause blocked blood vessels.
Surgical abortions
The methods used by doctors varied, but the most common from the 19th century
was dilation and curettage. This involved opening the cervix (neck of the womb) and
scraping out the contents. Doctors were also known to use saline infusions (which
provoked a painful labour) and Caesarean sections.
Opposition and support from the 1960s
Activism gets going
In the decades following the Second World War, when the 
Pākehā
birth rate was
high, beliefs about sex, birth control and mothering were shifting, including
amongst doctors. It became slightly easier to get an abortion.
The number of abortions performed in public hospitals jumped from less than 70 in
1965 to more than 300 in 1970. When court decisions in 1969 and 1970 made it
easier to get abortions in Australia, some New Zealand women travelled across the
Tasman for the operation.
Fearing that similar decisions would be made by a New Zealand court, and aware of
the increase in hospital abortions, those opposed to abortion began to organise. So
did those in favour.

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Sisterhood split 
Feeling about abortion ran so high
that women with opposing views
were sometimes unable to work
together. There was a walk-out
from the 1973 Women’s
Convention when a resolution
supporting abortion on demand
was passed. Those opposed to
abortion left the National
Organisation for Women. 
SPUC
The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) led the opposition to
abortion in the 1970s. Set up in 1970, SPUC was well-funded and had a large and
active membership. The Catholic Church was SPUC’s most important source of
members and money. In the 1970s SPUC also attracted a number of high-profile
members, including Ruth Kirk, wife of Prime Minister Norman Kirk. It claimed that
more than 30 members of Parliament were members.
Members of SPUC and their sympathisers regularly picketed abortion clinics (the
first of which opened in Auckland in 1974), praying, singing and telling women
going in not to kill their babies. Occasionally protesters would follow a woman home
and tell her family that she had had an abortion.
Anti-abortion feminists
Opposition by some feminists to abortion caused furious
debate within the women’s liberation movement. Anti-
abortion feminists formed a group, Feminists for Life, which
argued that women who became pregnant should be
supported with maternity leave and childcare.
ALRANZ and WONAAC
The Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand
(ALRANZ) was started in 1971. It had male and female
members, and argued that abortion was a decision for a
woman and her doctor. The more radical Women’s National Abortion Action
Campaign (WONAAC) split from ALRANZ in 1973. A women-only group, it argued
that abortion was a woman’s right and her decision alone.
There were also many short-lived groups, like the Auckland Anti-Hospitals
Amendment Bill Committee, which supported the Auckland Medical Aid Centre, an
abortion clinic, and the Backstreet Theatre group, which toured New Zealand in
1976.
REPEAL
REPEAL was formed after Parliament pushed the Contraception, Sterilisation, and
Abortion Act through in 1977. The act significantly restricted access to abortion.
Opinion polls and submissions prior to the act being passed suggested it was out of
step with public feeling on the issue. In three months REPEAL collected 319,000
signatures on a petition seeking repeal of the act. Parliamentary reluctance to
reconsider what was a bitterly divisive issue meant the petition was not formally
presented to the house.

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Under the carpet 
By the late 1970s some people just
wanted an end to the controversy.
At a 1978 National Party
conference one of those attending
pleaded: ‘We’ve all had a guts-full
of the issue. Let’s get it under the
carpet.’
Parliament and churches
Some members of Parliament supported women’s right to
abortion, notably Mary Batchelor, George Gair, Whetū
Tirikātene-Sullivan and Marilyn Waring. The Catholic
Church was consistent in its strong opposition to abortion,
but the stance of other churches shifted over time. In the
1970s the Anglican, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian
churches all took a relatively liberal psition on abortion.
This liberalisation was the source of ongoing dissension
within the churches.
Footnotes
Erich Geiringer, Spuc ’em all!: abortion politics, 1978.
Waiura: A. Taylor, 1978, p. 18.
 Back
Controversy: 1974 to 1980s
In 1974 access to abortion became easier when New Zealand’s first abortion clinic
opened. There was fierce support for women’s right to abortion and equally intense
opposition. People took sides, using arson, harassment and abuse, court cases,
police raids, street marches and pickets, acts of Parliament and vigils.
Rate
The number of known abortions climbed rapidly through the 1970s and 1980s. In
1971 the rate per woman was 0.02. By 1986 it was 0.30.
First abortion clinic
The Auckland Medical Aid Centre (AMAC) opened in 1974, providing abortions in
the first trimester (1–14 weeks) of pregnancy. After referral by their own doctor,
women were assessed by a doctor at the centre, provided with counselling and, if
approved, had the operation. Once a woman reached AMAC, the process took two
days; later it would take only one. It was a private clinic, and women had to pay $80
in 1974 (around $830 in 2018 terms).
In its first year AMAC provided 2,288 women with abortions; the following year this
rose to 4,005. In part, this very rapid rise was a result of a clamp-down in Australia
on New Zealand women’s access to Australian government-subsidised abortions.
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Big-bellied blokes
Labour MP Mary Batchelor was
the only member of Parliament to
oppose the Hospitals Amendment
Act 1974. ‘There are 83 men and
four women voting on this bill’,
she said, ‘and the men will never
have to carry anything heavier in
their bellies than a good meal.’
A new method
AMAC introduced the use of vacuum aspiration (sucking out the womb’s contents).
The very low rate of infection and damage to the uterus made this method a