Population Services International (Australasia) was an Australian based subsidiary of Population Services International. PSI Australasia operated as a not-for-profit corporation, continuously registered in Australia from mid-1973 to 1992, with the mission of providing contraception and abortion services.
Founding PSI Australasia’s founding Director was the Australian physician Geoffrey Davis, who in the 1960s had provided discreet early-stage pregnancy termination services from clinics he operated in the Sydney suburbs of Potts Point and Arncliffe. In 1971, abortion was partially legalised in New South Wales, following court rulings in the states of Victoria (R v Davidson, 1969) and New South Wales (R v Wald, 1971).R v Wald (1971) 3 25. Confirmed in . Those rulings permitted abortion when a medical practitioner determined in good faith that failure to terminate a pregnancy posed a risk to a woman’s life or her physical or mental health.
After working in London in the late-1960s, Davis was hired as a Director of the PSI parent corporation in 1971. He was best known for his work the following year in Bangladesh, where he led an international team invited in by the Bangladeshi government to perform an estimated 200,000 abortions on women and girls who had systematically been raped by Pakistani soldiers during Bangladesh's 1971 war of national liberation.
By 1974, when Davis assumed the direction of PSI Australasia under the title PSI Project Director - Southeast Asia and Oceania, he had accumulated extensive experience in terminating first-trimester pregnancies via menstrual extraction (aka vacuum aspiration). He was also using a technique for speedily terminating second-trimester pregnancies that he had developed in Britain and deployed on an “industrial scale” in 1972 in Bangladesh.
An anesthetist by training, the Australian Medical Association reportedly would not allow Davis to publicize his association with PSI when the clinics were opened in Sydney and continued to identify himself as Director, International International Abortion and Training Centre. During the period that Davis served as director of PSI Australasia, he would come to be known, in particular by detractors, as the "abortion king" of Sydney.
PSI Clinics The first PSI clinics to open were in the Sydney inner suburbs of Potts Point and Arncliffe, the same neighborhoods where Davis had practiced privately in the 1960s. The Potts Point clinic served as the headquarters of PSI Australasia.
The new PSI clinics operated within the context of increasingly high demand from women across Australia and New Zealand for safe and legal abortion. Davis planned to meet the high-demand market opportunity with the quick-turnaround pregnancy termination procedures he had developed, delivering easily accessible, "high through-put" services, both by appointment or for walk-in clientele'... accepted for same-day treatment".
The Potts Point clinic opened at 25-27 Challis Avenue in March 1975"Job Diary", in ABORTION OUR BODIES THEIR POWER, pamphlet on abortion services and reproductive rights in Australia, 1977 (PDF), pp. 10-11. Retrieved 10 December 2023. and mainly provided first-trimester abortions. The experience for women patients, as later described by Davis, included an optional interview, a medical exam "and theatre time would usually be three minutes... within 15 minutes of entering the theatre, most are back in the dressing room recovered from the anesthetic."
The second and larger clinic opened soon thereafter at 45-47 Forest Road in Arncliffe, in premises directly across the street and rented from the Rosslyn private hospital at 30 Forest Road, and was “equipped to deal with later-stage abortions". Adjacent to the clinic was a PSI-owned and operated pathology laboratory. The association with Rosslyn hospital was convenient for complications that might arise in the more difficult later-stage procedures, which could result in hospitalization.
From the outset, Davis hired feminists to staff both PSI clinics in an effort to offset his negative image within the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in Sydney over what were seen as his “controversial” views on fertility control. He made a point of appearing at events supported by the women’s movement, including the April 1975 opening of the Liverpool Women’s Health Centre,"Tribune negatives including opening of Liverpool Womens Health Centre, 1975", ON 160/Item 0004, 1975, Manuscripts, oral history and pictures catalogue, State Library, New South Wales. Consulted 10 December 2023. and was approved to deliver a paper in June 1975 at the first National Conference on Abortion and Contraception at Sydney University, sponsored by the Women's Abortion Action Campaign - apparently after substantial internal debate among the organizers of the event. He also attempted to persuade PSI's lead counselor and WLM activist Margaret Hooks to distribute PSI promotional materials while attending the UN-sponsored first international World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975, but was rebuffed.
The services offered by the new PSI clinics differed in two substantial ways from services being delivered by existing abortion clinics, including its main competitor, Preterm Foundation. PSI offered much later-stage abortions, beyond the Preterm limitation of nine weeks' gestation, and PSI abortions were performed under general anesthetic, rather than the then-customary local anesthetic.
The system Davis had devised was intended to deliver “a technically perfect procedure in minimum time. The reason for speed was to shorten the period of anesthesia.”
1975 Preterm fire In the early morning of April 7, 1975, a fire broke out on the ground floor of the premises housing Preterm Foundation. The fire burned for 4-5 hours, gutting the entire building, destroying the clinic and all its equipment. The police arson squad investigated and various possible causes were cited in the press, including accidental or spontaneous combustion of refuse in the warehouse on the ground floor of the building. Police never established a definitive cause of the fire.
But Preterm director Dorothy Nolan later indicated "darker suspicions", telling the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper that a doctor "who had run a lucrative abortion business in Arncliffe" had been making repeated threatening phone calls to her home. The only abortion clinic legally operating in Arncliffe at the time was run by PSI. Nolan said she always believed the unnamed doctor paid to have a fire set at her clinic because Preterm had been undercutting his business. "There was a strong suspicion but we never had proof," Nolan said.
Feminists working at the PSI clinics at the time later said that the "burning down and destruction of Preterm’s premises and equipment on April 7, 1975, enabled Davis’ newly formed PSI to capture a large portion of the market." The PSI workers singled out Davis, producing a copy of a letter he wrote on 6th March 1975 to superiors at PSI headquarters in North Carolina, referencing "warming ourselves round the burning Reichstag" and proclaiming: "This week we crushed St. Annes [sic]; next week - Preterm." They also noted Davis was said to have been “one of the first on the scene” on the morning of the Preterm fire.
1976 PSI staff resignations In December 1976, after more than a year of staff confrontations with Davis and PSI management over questionable medical and counseling practices, PSI's profit-oriented “assembly line" treatment of patients, poor working conditions and arbitrary sackings of staff members, six feminist staffers from the Arncliffe and Potts Point clinics resigned from PSI in protest: Rosemary Elliott, Margaret Hooks, Kris Melmouth, Lyn Syme, Margaret Taylor M.D. and Elizabeth Waddy.
Vowing to expose the conditions at PSI and to work toward creating a feminist-controlled alternative through joining up with the feminist Control Abortion Referral Service collective, the former PSI staffers proceeded to lobby members of Parliament, gave media interviews and produced, published and distributed a pamphlet that was highly critical of PSI, titled ABORTION: OUR BODIES, THEIR POWER. On May 7, 1977 former PSI staff turned Control collective members Margaret Hooks and Rosemary Elliott gave evidence on conditions at PSI clinics to a public hearing on abortion held by the Standing Committee on Education and Health of the Legislative Assembly of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Joined by pro-abortion activist and Control collective member Lynne Hutton-Williams, in June 1977 the former PSI staffers submitted confidential testimony outlining conditions and practices at PSI clinics to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships.
In their testimony to the Royal Commission, the staffers who had resigned included a litany of complaints about conditions at PSI clinics, including: inadequate and cramped physical conditions for patients, long wait periods, no pelvic exams prior to abortions, lax sanitation and sterilization of equipment, absence of medical doctors on premises during patient recovery, inexperienced doctors on duty, lack of choice between local vs general anaesthetic, performance of two-stage second-trimester abortions in a single session, withholding of information from patients on complications such as a torn or perforated uterus, insufficient counseling and derogatory comments and deprecatory treatment of patients by medical staff."COMPLAINTS," in Hooks, Margaret; et al. (1977-06-06), SUBMISSION TO ROYAL COMMISSION ON HUMAN RELATIONS ON QUALITY OF ABORTION SERVICES. Canberra, Australia, June 1977, pp. 2-13 (PDF). Retrieved 15 December 2023.
1977-78 ACT parliamentary debate
Faced with the intention of Preterm Foundation to open a non-profit abortion clinic the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), PSI had begun planning in 1976 to open its own clinic in the ACT. At the same time, it was planning to open a clinic in Melbourne and had registered in Brisbane to perform those abortions legally permissible under the law in Queensland.
On 21 January 1977, it applied to the Commonwealth Employment Service to begin interviewing potential employees to staff the Phillip Medical Centre in the Canberra suburb of Phillip. It was estimated that the Phillip clinic would perform between 140-150 abortions per week.
Interviews were concluded by late-March and the employees were set to be hired, but the launch was put on hold after hostile legislators in the Australia Parliament heard testimony that PSI had not revealed that the Phillip center would provide abortion services. PSI was warned on two occasions by Health Minister Ralph Hunt not to proceed with establishment of the clinic until after the ACT Legislative committee on Health & Education could inquire into the matter. The ACT Legislative Assembly subsequently approved temporary legislation to ban for three months abortions in the ACT at any facility other than Canberra’s two public hospitals, while the ACT Health & Education was preparing its report.
During the parliamentary debate, Davis and other PSI board members were accused of "profiteering" from PSI's abortion business in Australia and a web of interconnected medical business and property holdings were denounced by hostile members of Parliament. The details of those business and property holdings were also in the possession of the six PSI staff who resigned in protest in December 1976 and were subsequently published in the pamphlet ABORTION: OUR BODIES, THEIR POWER.ABORTION: OUR BODIES, THEIR POWER, 1977, pp. 4-5, retrieved 14 December 2023.
Davis promised that PSI would make a detailed submission to the ACT Legislative committee and amid ongoing debate in Parliament, during which hostile members of Parliament accused Davis of having been responsible for an abortion clinic in the United Kingdom that was closed by the UK government, a claim Davis said was untrue.