In the 1970s, it was known as SOS, the Sisters’ Overseas Service – the midweek flight to Sydney or Melbourne often taken by girls and women seeking an induced abortion of the kind unobtainable, on almost any grounds, in New Zealand. Its notoriety was such that you hesitated to say you were going to Aussie in case you were suspected of being “up the duff”. And even if you were, and even if you knew at a glance the fellow travellers making the same trip for the same reason, you said nothing. Up until the late 70s, few people talked freely about abortion.
One who did, though, was Margaret Sparrow, the doctor whose dedication to family planning and whose work at the Student Health Service led her to champion the “pro-choice” stance on abortion and almost every other means of fertility control, from vasectomies to the morning-after pill. Now, just after her retirement at 70 and the publication of statistics in the 2004 Report of the Abortion Supervisory Committee showing the first appreciable drop in New Zealand’s abortion rate for decades, she reflects on the changes in attitudes and access to abortion that she has seen during her 40 years’ work in the field of sexual health.
“Enormous. You couldn’t talk about it – it was unmentionable, even among medical colleagues. In training we had just one lecture on contraception and the only lecture we had on abortion was in medical jurisprudence.”
Hardly surprisingly, then, that New Zealand’s rates of teenage pregnancy and solo motherhood were among the highest in the world at the time. So what did women do?
“We did our own abortions. We tried jumping, skipping and falling down stairs; gin and hot baths. We drank De Witts pills, which turned our urine blue, but didn’t do much else. Every town had an underground network of people you could go to. Many chemists had their own mixtures of herbal abortifacients. And, for those who could afford to pay, some specialists did diagnostic D&Cs in hospitals.”
And some women died from backstreet abortions. “Yes. Antibiotics stopped a lot of the septic abortions – that was a big change. But there were deaths from haemorrhaging.”
It was some comfort to be able to send patients to safe clinics in Australia, but Sparrow remembers feeling “more like a travel agent than a doctor, because you would have to tell them how much the fares would cost, which clinics to go to and where to take a taxi”. The Australian clinics had been set up to test the law, which was similar to our own – abortion was illegal. The doctors were duly charged, but their acquittals established the legality of abortions in order to preserve mental health.
In May 1974, the Auckland Medical Aid Centre was set up to invite a similar test case, hoping for the same result. They got it.
“Then the ‘antis’ took it to the Appeal Court, which upheld the acquittal. That was when they realised that they couldn’t rely on the courts to interpret the law the way they wanted it to be interpreted, so they went for legislation.”
The ensuing public argument led ultimately to the cumbersome Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act of 1977, which satisfied neither side. Although the handful of women MPs voted pro-choice, the “wise men in Parliament decided that women could not make decisions about such important matters and they set up this system of having certifying consultants to decide whether or not you could have an abortion. It was very strict then.”
Subsequent changes have had a profound effect both on family planning and the relationship between client and health practitioner.
“For a start, women don’t need a doctor to tell them they’re pregnant – they can do their own pregnancy test immediately. We used to have to wait until they were at least 14 days overdue and then even longer while confirmation tests were carried out on rabbits and toads. We have access to the emergency contraception pill and an abortion pill and good-quality condoms. HIV/AIDS caused the biggest change in the 80s and gave us a chance to promote condoms, which had never been very popular in New Zealand because they were so unreliable – by the time they had taken months to be shipped here, they had partly perished.”
The abortion rate remains high, however. Though 300 fewer abortions were performed last year than the year before, there were still 12,266 more than in 1980.
“I think the reason is that, although people have freer access to sex, they also have freer access to drugs and alcohol at a younger age, and that always involves more risk-taking. And we still do not have the preventive education, freely available services and honesty about sexual relationships that they have in the Netherlands, for example. Their general rate of abortion is less than half New Zealand’s. It’s a complex issue.”
Anecdotally, it has been suggested that last year’s drop can be attributed to the fall in the number of Asian students. Sparrow concedes that it’s possible, since many Asian girls are inadequately prepared for living here. “They also don’t do girl talk the way New Zealand girls do, so they have no idea where to go for help. And some have very ingrained attitudes to not taking the pill, so they use very unsafe methods.”
Whatever the reasons, behind the latest statistics we get a glimpse of the real-life situations surrounding each abortion: the 38 women aged over 45 and the 88 girls aged 12-14 who were having their first one; the 65 women with seven or more children and the three with more than 10; the 9366 who used no contraception, the 5464 who unavailingly used condoms and the 2584 who got pregnant on the pill.
The circumstances are many and varied, which is why Sparrow insists that abortion be treated as a health issue, not a criminal issue – which is what it remains to this day. Although she rejoices that New Zealand women now have viable choices in terminating unwanted pregnancies, she still regards it as an imposition that they have to “jump through the hoops” imposed by the law.
Her last day of work was like any other at Family Planning – preventing unwanted pregnancies. She performed five vasectomies, a procedure she pioneered in New Zealand; altogether she has done around 7000.