The Racket

How Abortion Became Legal In Australia

Gideon Haigh
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The Racket

Published

1 September 2008

ISBN

9780522859126

Ebook File Size

406KB

Imprint

Melbourne University Press

The Racket

How Abortion Became Legal In Australia

Gideon Haigh

A generation ago in Australia, abortion was a crime. It was also the basis of one of the country's most lucrative and longest-lasting criminal rackets.

The Racket describes the rise and fall of an extraordinary web of influence, which culminated in the landmark ruling that made abortion legal, and a public inquiry that humiliated a powerful government and a glamorous police force. With forensic skill and psychological subtlety, Gideon Haigh brings to life a story of corruption in high places and human suffering in low, of murder, suicide, courtroom drama, political machinations, and of the abortionists themselves: among them a multi-millionaire philanthropist, a communist bush poet, a timid aesthete and a bankrupt slaughterman.

It is the story, too, of Bertram Wainer, abortion's crash-through-or-crash campaigner, and the moral issue he bequeathed which still divides Australians.

A generation ago in Australia, abortion was a crime. It was also the basis of one of the country's most lucrative and longest-lasting criminal rackets.

The Racket describes the rise and fall of an extraordinary web of influence, which culminated in the landmark ruling that made abortion legal, and a public inquiry that humiliated a powerful government and a glamorous police force. With forensic skill and psychological subtlety, Gideon Haigh brings to life a story of corruption in high places and human suffering in low, of murder, suicide, courtroom drama, political machinations, and of the abortionists themselves: among them a multi-millionaire philanthropist, a communist bush poet, a timid aesthete and a bankrupt slaughterman.

It is the story, too, of Bertram Wainer, abortion's crash-through-or-crash campaigner, and the moral issue he bequeathed which still divides Australians.

Gideon Haigh

Gideon Haigh

Gideon Haigh has published more than fifty books and contributed to more than a hundred newspapers and magazines in a decades-long journalism career. His cricket books include The Cricket War, The Summer Game and On Warne, and he has written on subjects from abortion, asbestos and architecture to incest and HV Evatt. The Office: A Hardworking History won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and Certain Admissions won a Ned Kelly Prize…

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