THIRD ABORTION PLANNED

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32035, 9 July 1969, Page 17

THIRD ABORTION PLANNED

(N.Z.P.A. Staff Correspondent) SYDNEY, July 8. “Abortion is ugly and a social evil but, unfortunately, a tragic necessity,” says Dr Bertram Wainer, aged 40, the Melbourne family doctor who has staked his reputation and his career on a battle to force changes in Australia’s abortion laws.

Dr Wainer, who has admitted performing two abortions to test the law, and has declared his intention of doing a third, is back in Melbourne after a week in Sydney publicising his campaign for abortion law reform.

The doctor’s plan for change is simple, yet far-reaching. He doesn’t want Britain’s liberalised legislation adopted in

Australia; he wants to go much further. “I say: Let’s have the whole cake now,” he says. “I would like to see in the Crimes Act, which prohibits all abortions performed ‘unlawfully,’ the words ‘excluding abortions performed by medical practitioners.’ “Where the law applies to medical practitioners, I would like to see it completely abolished, with, instead, the woman having the right to ask, and the doctor having the right to refuse.” Dr Wainer says that anything less is hypocritical and farcical, because prohibitive legislation has never stamped out anything. The two abortions the doctor performed recently were o t a young woman showing suicidal tendencies because of her pregnancy, and on a 47-year-old mother of nine children, on the ground of economic difficulties. The Victorian AttorneyGeneral (Mr George Reid) has stated publicly that the first abortion did not contravene

State law; the Melbourne police are investigating the circumstances of the second. Dr Wainer’s third abortion will be performed “in a week or two” on a woman, aged 23, who wants to attend a university but will not be able to continue her studies if she has her child. The abortion, according to Dr Wainer, will be on the ground of reasonable request, and will be his last

“I am a family doctor and 1 want to get back to work,” he said. “I am neglecting my practice and am paying out hundreds of dollars a week to get locums to run my practice.”

A gentle, quietly-spoken man with deep convictions, Dr Wainer was born in Glasgow just after the death of his father who was also a doctor. He lived his early life in a crowded slum and left school early for a series of “knock-about” jobs. Then he buckled down to a long grind of night study to qualify as a doctor. Later, after he came to Australia,

his cap-and-gowned figure was used in an Australian Immigration Department poster to attract British doctors to Australia. His concern about abortion goes back to his own student days, when he witnessed the painful deaths of young women after “backyard” abprtions. In Australia, he initiated a trust fund for the defence of a doctor charged in connection with an abortion.

Later he joined the Abortion Law Reform Association —he describes such associations now as “very cautious” —and, as time went on, he became more and more involved in abortion problems. Eventually he decided that there was only one thing left for him to do—some abortions.

Dr Wainer thinks that many doctors in Victoria will be performing necessary abortions, irrespective of the law, within six months. “I don’t enjoy abortions, but someone had to blaze this trail,” he says.