Police action in Western Australia ends in the nation's most liberal--and controversial--abortion laws

By LISA CLAUSEN

he arrived at the emergency desk of Perth's King Edward Hospital one night last February--a frightened woman in her early 20s, barely able to speak English and suffering from a serious internal infection. Doctors soon discovered the cause: the woman, single and 19 weeks pregnant, had crudely attempted to abort her own fetus. Says Dr. Harry Cohen, the hospital's head of gynecology: "We had to finish the job for her." The day before, Cohen had announced that, for legal reasons, the hospital would stop performing abortions. The panicked young woman, he says, "thought there was no way out."

Her desperate act came just days after Western Australian police charged Dr. Victor Chan and anesthetist Dr. Hoh Peng Lee on Feb. 10 with procuring an abortion--the first such charges laid in the state in almost 30 years. Although widely available, abortion was illegal in W.A., and the charges threw the community into turmoil. On May 21, after months of debate, the W.A. parliament voted to allow abortion on demand, giving the state the most liberal abortion laws in the country. A group of jubilant M.P.s, including the legislation's architect, Labor M.P. Cheryl Davenport, toasted the Acts Amendment (Abortion) Act 1998 with champagne after an 11-hour Parliamentary session to pass the law ended at 3:28 a.m. "I feel very proud to have been part of history," says Davenport. Others were appalled. Said anti-abortion activist Richard Egan: "The state has now sanctioned those killings of innocent human beings."

The new law means a woman's consent is the sole criterion for an abortion--except for pregnancies over 20 weeks, where two doctors must also agree that the woman or fetus has a severe medical condition justifying termination. A $A50,000 fine for unlawful abortions replaces the 14-year maximum jail term possible under the previous laws. Says Cohen, part of a pro-reform lobby made up of 16 peak medical groups: "It legitimizes what we have been doing for 25 years." Since 1913 abortions had been technically allowed in W.A. only when a woman's life was in danger. Nevertheless, about 8,500 are performed there each year--only about 1% of them, according to Cohen, strictly legal. Doctors around Australia had relied on key legal rulings in 1969 and 1971 that abortion was lawful in some cases. Still, says John Charters, director of the Zera Medical Centre, one of Perth's two abortion clinics: "I expected that someone was going to be charged."

The arrest of Chan and Lee focused attention on the exact status of W.A.'s and Australia's abortion laws. Davenport quickly introduced a bill to decriminalize abortion. While M.P.s agonized over the bill, an amended version of which was finally passed by 24 votes to nine, a public battle raged. Pro-choice groups sent 2,500 postcards to Premier Richard Court, who opposed the bill. Anti-abortion protesters displayed bloodied surgical gloves at a press conference, Pope John Paul II condemned the planned reforms, and Egan released harrowing surgical details of 24 abortions, adding emotional fuel to an already heated debate.

Western Australia now joins a small group of countries--the U.S., Sweden and the Netherlands--whose abortion laws are the most liberal in the world. "My God, it's terrible," says Norma McCorvey, director of an anti-abortion ministry in Dallas, Texas. In 1973, under the pseudonym Roe, McCorvey took the fight to end her pregnancy to the U.S. Supreme Court; her case, Roe v. Wade, saw abortions made legal on request throughout the U.S., but McCorvey now opposes the procedure. "Once a woman has had an abortion," she says, "she is never the same again." The international trend, however, is toward more liberal laws. In all, 10 European Union countries offer abortion on request. Says Tony Kerridge, of the London-based reproductive health organization Marie Stopes International: "The time is right to push for liberalization."

Other Australian pro-choice groups share that optimism. Says Margaret Reynolds, a federal Labor Senator from Queensland: "This is the first time in Australia that a parliament has seriously debated abortion and dealt with the issue in a realistic way." Tasmanian Family Planning director Paul Duncombe says many women there travel interstate for abortions: "The community in Tasmania is ready to have the debate." But signs of public support for change don't sway opponents. Says Margaret Tighe, head of Right to Life Australia: "The fact that there is at this stage a majority opinion in favor of abortion on demand doesn't make it right."

The protests will continue, but so too will abortions, says Kerridge: "Whether it's illegal or legal, abortions will happen." With National Perinatal Statistics Unit figures released last week showing that half of all Australian teenage pregnancies are terminated, it is not an issue about to disappear.

--With Reporting by Susan Horsburgh /Sydney