timothya
Posts: 280
Joined: April 2013
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It was with some personal interest that I read David Tyler’s paean to Professor John Rendle-Short over at UD.
Over a long and distinguished career in medicine, Rendle-Short had a large and positive impact in humanising the treatment of women and newborn infants in the Queensland hospital system, and also in the diagnosis and treatment of childhood diseases. Unfortunately, he was also prey to religious narrow-mindedness.
I spent my youth in Brisbane, Queensland, and well remember John Rendle-Short as a public figure.
The early 1980s were a (relatively) turbulent period in Queensland politics. The state government was led by Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, popularly known as “The Flying Peanut”, but in truth one of the most callous and corrupt players in Queensland’s sad political history. His government relied for its majority on a gerrymander that weighted a country vote at three times the value of a city vote.
Abetted by an outstandingly corrupt police force leadership, Bjelke-Petersen attempted to close down the Greenslopes Clinic – virtually the only place in Brisbane where a woman could receive a voluntary, legal abortion. It was a vicious and cynical manoeuvre to shore up his increasingly shaky conservative support base.
A vigorous counter-campaign organised by women’s organisations, left-wing groups and some church bodies led ultimately to extraordinarily large-scale street demonstrations against his proposed law (extraordinary in my experience, anyway). To the great satisfaction of the abortion rights movement and right-thinking people everywhere, Bjelke-Petersen was forced to abandon his attempt to mandate back-alley abortions and unwanted pregnancies.
Professor Rendle-Short played a fairly prominent role in supporting the state government’s actions, and repeatedly appeared in the media at the time arguing in favour of removing legal access by women in Queensland to abortion. So, it is interesting to discover that he had changed his tune in twenty years.
From “Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America”, Leslie J. Reagan, University of California Press, 20 Jun 2010:
| Quote | | John Rendle-Short of the University of Queensland, Australia, observed that the decision to end a pregnancy due to rubella ‘is a matter for the parents to decide in the light of their religious beliefs’. As reported in ‘Measles Threat to Unborn,’ Science News Letter 86 (September 26, 1964):194. |
I wonder how many latter-day anti-abortion fundamentalists would subscribe publicly to Rendle-Short’s moderately humane view in 1964 that a pregnant woman, faced with the potential consequences of a rubella infection, should be able to decide to have an abortion?
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Queensland Arcana
Bjelke-Petersen did not invent the Queensland gerrymander - he inherited it from an equally corrupt preceding government of the opposite political stripe (well not so opposite actually).
For those with an interest in provincial Antipodian shenanigans of the time, google any or all of:
Terry Lewis (police officer)
Don "Shady" Lane
Frank Bischof
Russell Hinze
"The Hillbilly Dictator"
Rona Joyner
Bagman Jack Herbert
Fitzgerald Inquiry
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"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." Anatole France
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