Family Planning and Abortion Activism
In the late forties, Alice Bush also became involved with the New Zealand Family Planning Association, helping to provide respectability to an organisation that still proved controversial, given its role in publicising and distributing contraception. She served on its board (1947) and chaired its medical advisory committee (1960), before serving as liaison with the New Zealand Medical Association and clearing the way for clinic work with doctors before New Zealand approved use and distribution of the contraceptive pill (1961). Her role is chronicled in Helen Smythe's recent history of the Family Planning Association,Alice Bush's biographer, Faye Hercock, also noted that she was concerned about the rise in backstreet abortions and displayed considerable impatience with the conservatism of her male colleagues in her later years when it came to access to safe, legal and affordable abortion in New Zealand. Over time, Alice gradually radicalised her position and became one of the founders of the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand. At the time she died, in 1974, the private Auckland Medical Aid Centre had just opened, providing a free-standing dedicated abortion clinic for the first time in New Zealand.
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