Dr Jo Wainer. Photo supplied
Dr Jo Wainer has spent the past 30 years working to include and improve gender understanding in the medical curriculum and to understand how medical practice in rural areas can work for female doctors. But she is perhaps best known for her work, beginning in the 1960s, to legalise abortion. She will be sharing her story at the 2026 ANMF Australian Nurses and Midwives Conference.
‘It was a tumultuous time, the 1960s.’
Jo Wainer is setting the scene for what would become her life’s work.
‘There was a lot of student activity and challenges to what were really quite oppressive social norms,’ she continues. ‘Some of it was related to the Vietnam war, but a lot of it was driven by women saying: “We’re fully human; we get to decide our own destinies, and we’re no longer the handmaidens of the patriarchal project.” It was revolutionary.’
As a student activist in the mid-60s, Jo began taking part in anti-war and anti-hanging demonstrations. She turned up to a meeting attended by ‘several people who went on to make a big name for themselves’ – including former foreign minister Gareth Evans – and left it having been elected the first secretary of the Abortion Law Reform Association.
Abortion, at the time, was not just illegal. ‘It wasn’t talked about,’ Jo says. ‘It was all very subterranean and hidden, and Melbourne society pretended it didn’t happen. I worked for ABC television, my first job out of university. And we were not allowed to use the word abortion.’
Abortion was illegal due to laws that paradoxically were meant to protect women. ‘In the days prior to antibiotics, backstreet abortion was incredibly dangerous,’ Jo explains. ‘So the law was designed to protect women’s health but it had the adverse effect of criminalising doctors who were prepared to do abortions.’
Illegal abortion: the four options
For women who needed an abortion, however, there were options.
The safest were private gynaecologists who provided abortions in private hospitals under the guise of a D&C (dilation and curettage); only the wealthiest women could afford these.
The next safest were a handful of doctors who set up their own facilities, illegally, but who were allowed to practice because they paid off the police. ‘Those doctors provided competent care on the whole,’ Jo says, ‘but their primary motive was to make a lot of money.’
In addition to doctors, there were semi-trained people who provided abortions. ‘Almost every suburb had its own abortion provider. Bendigo Lil, for example, began providing abortions because she’d done 16 on herself, and other women started asking her for help.’
For women who couldn’t access a doctor or other provider, the last remaining option was to try to induce an abortion themselves. Methods used included drinking gin in a hot bath, jumping from heights, inserting coat hangers or other objects through the cervix if they could find it.
‘One of the worst cases was a woman with an umbrella sticking out of her uterus!’
The Royal Women’s Hospital had a 30-bed ward ‘set aside for women requiring care as a result of backyard abortions,’ Jo recalls. ‘They also had a special ward adjacent to that for women who were dying. The medical superintendent at the time told me that one of the worst cases he saw was a woman with an umbrella sticking out of her uterus!’
The police would be called to the women who were dying, Jo explains, because if you could get a dying deposition that was convincing evidence in a criminal trial. ‘While the woman’s dying, she doesn’t have family around her; she has a police officer standing over her, saying: tell us who did it.’
We don’t have any reliable data on how many women died as a result of illegal abortions. There are 875 coronial inquests on record, but that is likely the tip of the iceberg as all the providers had body-disposal mechanisms. ‘In those days, women just disappeared,’ Jo says. ‘Nobody knew what happened to them. Stories were made up to accommodate this within families. It was unbearably shameful and awful.’
Legal abortion: worth the risk
Through her work with the Abortion Law Reform Association, Jo met – and later married – a general practitioner and former Lt Colonel in the Army named Bertram Wainer. He didn’t provide abortions but was galvanised to fight for change after witnessing ‘the grief and the injustice’ of it all.
Together, he and Jo dedicated nearly two decades to the cause, putting themselves in great danger. There were many incidents of violence. Multiple attempts were made on Bert’s life. ‘But he knew how to fight; he’d learnt that as a child in the Glasgow slums, and was also a trained soldier. So he was a hard man to kill.’
But they also had their family to think about. Bert’s children from his first marriage were tormented at school. He had to give up general practice, ‘because in those days doctors did house calls and if he got a call at three in the morning to visit a patient, it was very likely to be a setup.’ He was bankrupted. His land and assets were seized. Bert’s sister’s home was firebombed when he was staying there. They learned to look for snipers before stepping out the front door.
‘Women are dying, and that’s why we have to keep going.’
‘Every now and again we would have a conversation about whether it was worth it,’ Jo says. And every time, the answer would be: ‘women are dying, and that’s why we have to keep going.’
The threats weren’t ideologically motivated; they were rooted in corruption. ‘The doctors [who provided abortions] were making a lot of money,’ Jo explains. ‘The police were making a lot of money from the doctors. They’d been on a good wicket, and suddenly they were facing public exposure, and worse. They were not happy.’
In the end it was a heart attack, not hit men, that killed Bert. It was 1987. It would take another two decades of campaigning by Jo and others – including former Australian Nursing Federation Federal Secretary Marilyn Beaumont – before Victoria finally decriminalised abortion in 2008.
Starring Jeremy Sims, William McInnes and Susie Porter, Dangerous Remedy is based on the the life and work of Bertram and Jo Wainer. Watch now on ABC iView.
The National Film and Sound Archive maintains copies of Abortion, Corruption and Cops: The Bertram Wainer Story. Archival extracts can be viewed via Australian Screen.
Mitigating medical misogyny
It was a great moment, Jo reflects. But her work didn’t stop. A social scientist by training, she had long been interested in the experiences of women in rural practice, and how gender impacted, and was impacted by, medicine –specifically, how women have been excluded from the scientific inquiry that is the bedrock of medical practice.
‘It’s just extraordinary how deeply embedded it is. When I was at Monash [in the 1990s and 2000s], there were still lecturers saying “oh god, are they letting women into medicine now?!” I knew a junior doctor who challenged one of the senior doctors on a presentation, and he said “Well, what do you want us to do? Segregate out all the minorities?” She had to point out that women are not a minority.’
To address this, Jo helped develop curriculum for undergraduate medical students at Monash University on gender and medicine.
‘It’s one thing to have abortion legal; it’s another to have it available.’
With abortion legal and women’s health on state and national agendas, Jo’s message for Victoria’s nurses and midwives is simple: ‘nurse practitioners and endorsed midwives are now able to prescribe mifepristone. It’s one thing to have abortion legal; it’s another to have it available. The more nurses and midwives who take on that responsibility, the better it will be for women. Also, when you see bad things happening, think what you can do about it. And support other women who are trying to do something.’
