(Eds note: Peter Michael covered the Queensland abortion trial for the Courier-Mail)
It was like a morning after pill. That’s what Tegan said. That’s how they do birth control in Russia.
Except by the time she took them – five tiny pills over 48 hours – she estimated herself to be about five weeks pregnant. “I woke up with a period the next day. And other than that I was fine,’’ she told police brightly, in explanation.
It begs that hoary chestnut: When does life start? When sperm meets egg? When there is a heartbeat? When newborn child emerges from womb and opens eyes and lungs to the world? It does not matter. Not in this case.
Tegan Leach, 19, of Cairns, a shop assistant at a video store in December 2008, had done what most women who suspect they are pregnant do.
She took a urinary test. It came back positive.
She went to a doctor. He agreed she was probably about three weeks pregnant. He wanted a blood test to confirm.
But that was enough. She’d had enough of strangers sticking their nose into her private bits.
She did not turn open the criminal statutes of a law passed in 1899, based on a British law of 1861, from a time when women had few if any rights and the idea of a safe termination was medically unknown.
No. She did what up to 70,000 women in Australia do every year.
She turned to boyfriend Sergie Brennan, now 23. They agreed to abort. Together they told their parents. Both had sisters who’d been through a suction curette and told them, if a little bluntly, “it gets sucked out and scraped out’’.
Tegan, a slim, elegant, fragile blonde, paled at the thought. She was against an invasive surgical procedure from the start.
Helpfully, Sergie’s sister living in Ukraine offered another option. She could pick up some pills, pop them in the post, and the matter could be handled discreetly and at home.
Elsewhere in the world, you see, including Ukraine, North America, Sweden, Japan, and the United Kingdom, the abortion pills – misoprostol and RU486 – are freely available.
Not in Australia where use is heavily regulated. Not in Queensland where abortion is still illegal unless the woman’s life or physical and mental health is at risk.
Tegan, supported by her mum and boyfriend of two years, took the imported pills and put the empty blister packets onto the “junk shelf’’ of the built-in wardrobe in the back bedroom.
How she must wish she’d thrown them into a bin.
But how could she have possibly known she was about to become the unwitting poster girl of the pro-choice lobby in a landmark abortion case – the first in Queensland’s 111-year-old criminal law history - that has polarised debate and divided opinion across the globe?
And how could she suspect that benign comment that she “felt fine’’ – the apparent lack of a “noxious’’ or harmful side effect - would ultimately become her defence, save her from a seven-year jail term, and end a nightmare two-year legal drama?
For more than a month those empty blister packets sat on that shelf until police executed a search warrant and raided the Mt Sheridan home in February 1, 2009.
Police have been tight-lipped about why they stormed the rented three-bedroom home with its elaborate CCTV security cameras on the front and back doors and the ever-rotating stock of car hulks in the backyard.
Neighbours hinted at unconfirmed reports of frequent and numerous visitors and a possible drug or property related crime raid.
Nevertheless, what Queensland Police did walk out of the house with were those empty blister packs and the mean-spiritedness to prosecute the pair as the state’s first over a home abortion.
Watching the decent, loving, young couple throughout the trial, it was impossible to shake the feeling they should never have been put in the dock.
They’d tried to deal with a very private and personal matter – an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy - as discreetly as they and their family knew how only to be hung out in full public view.
The Crown prosecutor derided it as “a lifestyle choice’’.
Luckily for the couple, the 8 woman and four man jury accepted the defence and judge’s directions as to whether the WHO listed essential medicine – misoprostol and RU486 – was noxious to Ms Leach, as defined under the statute. This was regardless of whether she was pregnant or not, or the impact on any alleged foetus.
She was fine, remember.
So. Time’s come. Time to stop the hand-wringing. Stop making criminals out of kids.
Time has come to bite the bullet, put it to a conscience vote, and terminate the state’s archaic 111-year-old anti-abortion law.
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