A History of the 'Unfortunate Experiment' at National Women's Hospital by Linda Bryder

Author:Linda Bryder [Bryder, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869404963
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Feminists and the Doctors of National Women’s

The earliest platform for the women’s liberation movement was the right to abortion. Under the Crimes Act 1908 and its successor the Crimes Act 1961, which applied until the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act 1977, abortion was illegal unless the woman’s life was in danger. Two prominent medical professionals at National Women’s Hospital were core figures in opposing the liberalisation of the abortion laws. Sir William Liley, professor at the Postgraduate School of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and world-famous for having conducted the first intra-uterine blood transfusion, was founder president of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) in 1970, and Dr Pat Dunn, a long-standing senior consultant at the hospital, was a co-founder. In 1970 the Dominion quoted Dunn as saying that ‘it was necessary to quash the idea that a woman had the right to do what she liked with her own body’.19

Associate Professor Herb Green was not, as Coney and Bunkle claimed in their 1987 Metro article, a member of SPUC. However, he was opposed to abortion and published a three-part article in the New Zealand Nursing Journal in 1970 entitled ‘The Foetus Began to Cry’. In this series he reviewed the social, ethical and legal issues relating to abortion and concluded that whether to abort the fetus or not was generally a social or ethical decision that should not be left to the medical profession: ‘Not by the wildest stretch of the imagination can this be regarded as a medical problem. To put physicians into the position of deciding who shall live and who shall die, as has the UK Act, must and will ultimately be regarded as one of the supreme follies of this age of technology.’ He referred to Liley’s acclaimed research: ‘By permitting such research at National Women’s Hospital and publicly acclaiming its chief architect, New Zealand has declared that the unborn foetus has the right to receive treatment in the interests of its life and health.’ In his opinion, ‘Social problems cannot be cured by surgery and all the enthusiastic abortionists in the world can but scratch vainly at the surface of a problem of which the only solution is better standards of living.’20 A colleague described Green as a ‘conservative socialist’, with left-wing political views while at the same time being socially conservative.21 In the early 1970s, Green fell foul of the feminists such as Sandra Coney who worked as a counsellor at a private abortion clinic, the Auckland Medical Aid Centre (AMAC), when he expressed concern about cases of pelvic infection arriving at National Women’s Hospital from this clinic. In 1974 he made a sworn statement about the poor conditions there, which was later used to help close the clinic.22

Another target of the new women’s health movement was Professor Dennis Bonham, described by feminist and independent midwife Joan Donley as ‘the emperor [who] moulds the thinking of obstetrics and gynaecology in New Zealand’.23 English-born and trained, Dennis Bonham had arrived at National

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