“Was I brave or stupid?” Rosemary Kyburz has mostly bitter memories of 1980, the year she became the villain of anti-abortionists in Queensland. They filled her mailbox with vile messages, used sanitary pads and polaroid pictures of penises. Someone shot her dog.
“They shot a rifle over my fence and got him in the back legs,” Kyburz, a former Liberal MP, told Guardian Australia. “He lived, I took him straight to the vet. There are some very fanatical people about abortion, they’re poisonous in that way. Righteous people will never change.”
On Tuesday, laws will go before the Queensland parliament to repeal the 119-year-old section of the criminal code that makes abortion an offence. The state has debated the termination of pregnancy, again and again, for almost 50 years. For pro-choice campaigners, this week is the culmination of a long and often bitter fight.
The first brick
In 1973, bricks started flying through the windows of the Women’s Centre at Red Hill in Brisbane, where the group Children by Choice was offering all-options counselling and referring women to abortion clinics in Sydney.
“The attacks gave publicity to the work they were doing,” Beryl Holmes wrote in an account of the group’s formation. “Through these and other stories, Queensland women learned that they had a choice.”
The first Brisbane clinic, at Greenslopes in the city’s south, started seeing women in the late 1970s. By the turn of the decade, the Bjelke-Petersen government was discussing ways to “end abortion on demand” and bolster the 1899 criminal code to shut the clinic down.
In 1980, Kyburz leaked details of proposed new laws – to ban abortion in all circumstances except where a woman’s death was imminent – to the ABC. Doctors, nurses, social workers and friends would all face long jail terms. She said it was “the most frightening piece of fascist legislation I have ever seen in my life”.
The League of Rights, a group thought to be backed by the US-based John Birch Society, printed a newsletter with pictures of foetuses and distributed it in Kyburz’s electorate of Salisbury. Des Frawley, the MP for Caboolture, carried the hatchet in parliament.
“Her outbursts have been those of a bitter, angry, frustrated woman who has shown herself to be emotionally unstable,” Frawley said.
And: “Most of the women who are against this bill are just man-hating women. Most of them cannot even get a man.”
The Pregnancy Termination Control Bill passed its first reading. A month later, after the second reading debate, 19 government MPs, including four ministers, crossed the floor and voted it down.
“I am [proud] yes, definitely,” Kyburz said. “Their fear tactics didn’t have any effect on me, I was quite determined. I have very bitter memories of how nasty it got.”
Clinics raided
On 20 May 1985, the Queensland police launched Operation Lost Cause. More than 50 officers coordinated raids at two known abortion clinics, in Brisbane and Townsville, and seized 47,000 patient files.
“The raids followed several months of secret investigation and planning by specially selected police officers,” the then police assistant commissioner, Bill McArthur, told Brisbane’s afternoon newspaper, the Telegraph.
Peter Bayliss, the surgeon who ran the Greenslopes clinic, was later arrested and charged under the criminal code. He was found not guilty at a trial the following year.
The judge, Fred Maguire, ruled during the case that abortion was effectively legal if performed to prevent serious danger to a woman’s health.
Anne Warner was a shadow minister at the time and a supporter of choice. She recalls great relief at the Maguire ruling and said the case triggered another nasty debate.
“The sort of material that came through my letterbox was just nauseating. It’s mind-boggling how offensive they get.”
Warner said she discussed abortion with the new premier, Wayne Goss, when Labor won government in 1989.
“There was a lot of fear at the time ... I spoke with the usual players and basically they were very scared of the idea of opening up the debate after we’d had such an intense period in the ’80s. We were also scared that if we opened up debate in the wee small hours of the morning someone would move an amendment that would restrict abortion.
“I think the feeling at the time was that anybody that touched it would go down. If you tried to tighten the law, you’d go down. If you remove the law, you’d go down.
“[At one point] I got a phone call from the premier saying ‘don’t scare the horses’. We’d been out of government for 30 years, change would have to happen slowly and systematically”.
‘There are no villains, there are just women’
Warner and others say they never imagined the pace of reform would be quite so slow. Jackie Trad was at university in the early 1990s, and has been campaigning to decriminalise abortion throughout her political career.
Trad, the deputy premier and treasurer, is Labor’s progressive figurehead, an influential figure within government. She is also the latest villain for conservative outrage.
“I think Queensland is a different place to what it was when Joh Bjelke-Petersen was ordering police raids,” Trad said.
“Fundamentally I know that the majority of Queenslanders recognise that these laws, drafted in 1899 when women didn’t have the vote ... they bear no resemblance to what women experience.
“The nastiness we’ve seen from the anti-choice campaign is typical and it’s about creating villains in this debate. There are no villains, there are just women, thousands and thousands of women each year who have had to make really difficult choices.
“I am incredibly saddened by how desperate and vicious the anti-choice campaign has been.”
Earlier this year, the Liberal National party MP Mark Robinson, a conservative Christian and former pastor, called Trad “Jihad Jackie” on Twitter.
“It’s just outside the realms of life,” Trad said. “It’s just weird, crazy stuff. And racist stuff. Calling me a jihadist because I believe a woman should have the right to choose. He really does epitomise the nastiness and the craziness of the anti-choice campaign.”
Debate on the abortion decriminalisation bill will begin on Tuesday and may last until Thursday. Most indications are the new laws will pass narrowly.
Kyburz said she hoped Queensland would this week “come out of the chrysalis” of Bjelke-Petersen’s ultra-conservative vision for the state. It would be a victory for all those “unstable women”, who for decades had protested and campaigned and refused to be bullied.
