Backroom Troubles

He started to point things out in the room. He had paintings and mirrors with great gilt frames and the walls were just covered in things, stuff he had accumulated and he was...showing us, saying how much they all cost, and at this stage I'd just given him 100 pounds cash. And I remember thinking 'you know it's girls like me who have given him all this money to buy these things on the wall' and I thought 'they're all little foetuses stuck up there...how do you live like that?

– Margaret MeGregor recalls her experience immediately after having a 'procedure' with a clandestine abortionist

By the 1970s there were claims that up to 3000 women were being admitted to hospital each year as a result of unsafe, illegal abortions. Two or three would die.

– The narrator

Abortion had recently been legalised in Australia and young women would regularly come to the clinic pleading for Sparrow to help them. At first she turned them away, as was the law, but soon Sparrow changed her mind and began booking airfares and helping women secure safe abortions overseas. She also introduced the morning-after pill and was one of the first doctors to prescribe it in New Zealand. Two years later, she trained with Family Planning and began campaigning for safe, legal abortion in New Zealand. She became the president of the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand — a role she would hold for more than 30 years. In 1977, Sparrow was devastated when Parliament ignored her lobbying and passed the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act, which states abortion is a crime in New Zealand, unless two consultants agree it is necessary for a mother's mental or physical health.

– Excerpt from an article about abortion advocate Margaret Sparrow, The NZ Herald, 17 September 2018

I talked to God and prayed about it...I was a christian at the time. And I said to God "this is something I can't handle, I'd rather die than go through all that again"...

– Narration from a married woman with three small children facing an unwanted fourth pregnancy

My father, I remember him saying to me "you mustn't ever lead a man on", not saying exactly what that meant, except obviously keep all your clothes on, I think, because once you got a man excited they couldn't control themselves.

– Kathleen Brash on the sketchy sex advice she received as a teenager in the 1960s

We were so ignorant, really so ignorant. It's appalling to think that people were brought up as ignorant as we were.

– Beverley Revill recalls her woeful lack of sex education growing up in a Catholic household in the 1950s

This lady reassured me, telling me what a poor little thing I was. I was 18 and a half at the time. She said she could help me but I wasn't to tell anyone or she'd go to prison.

– Narration from a 1960s teenager seeking an abortion from Flo Radcliffe, the so-called 'abortion queen of New Zealand'