History
Abortion was criminalised in New Zealand by the UK Offences against the Person Act 1861, adopted in New Zealand in 1866. The 1893 Criminal Code Act made the punishments for illegal abortion a maximum of seven years imprisonment for the women and life for the doctor. Illegal abortions continued to occur, however, and it was generally understood that abortions performed in good faith to protect the life of the woman or her mental or physical health would not lead to prosecution. The 1936 Committee of Enquiry headed by D.G. McMilland reported that one in five pregnancies in New Zealand resulted in an induced abortion. Some pregnant women died, were injured or infected, or abused by practitioners of illegal abortion. In the 1940s, the discovery of antibiotics made infection less likely, which also meant some doctors were more likely to assist.
Public debate increased following the legalisation of abortion in Britain in 1967 and in South Australia in 1969. The legalisation of abortion in Australia enabled New Zealand women who could afford to travel to have abortions in Australia. After a Royal Commission on New Zealand abortion law, Parliament passed the Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977. The law caused much confusion over the demarcation of certain restrictions as to when an abortion would be legal, and led to a series of amendments that were passed in the following year to clarify the Parliament's intentions.
Read more about this topic: Abortion In New Zealand
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)