Free Public Lecture: 👉The Biography of an Abortion Law: Continuity and reform in Britain and Australia. Delivered by Dr Sally Sheldon FAcSS.
📅Thursday 13 Feb, 5.30pm-7.30pm
📍Level 1, Flinders @ Victoria Square
More info & RSVP via eventbrite here: https://bit.ly/2TML77U
This lecture focuses on the legislation that inspired SA’s abortion law. The British Abortion Act 1967 was born at the height of the sexual revolution as one plank in a raft of liberalising legislation. It has been lauded as one of the finest, most humane and far-sighted pieces of legislation of the twentieth century; and lambasted as a transgression against the very basis of our mortal existence and symptomatic of all that has gone wrong with Britain.
Fifty years on, the Abortion Act has achieved a venerable status as one of the oldest pieces of statute law to govern an area of modern medical practice, surviving dozens of attacks in Parliament and inspiring reform in other jurisdictions. However, while its text has endured largely without alteration, its legal and broader cultural meanings have evolved considerably through a process of sustained negotiation and contestation in the courts, in clinics, on the streets, and in the media. This lecture offers some reflections on that process. It concludes with some brief thoughts on what Britain might now learn from South Australia.