‘Finally’: After 50 years of abortion work, one recent reform means a lot to Dr Chan

This story is part of the November 4 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

It wasn’t unusual for Dr Victor Chan to arrive at work and be called a murderer at the beginning of his career in the 1970s. “Killer!” the protesters gathered on the street outside his Perth clinic would sometimes yell.

The police were regular visitors, too. Even two decades in, the same three officers usually responded to complaints about him. They seemed much less bothered than the people outside. They’d have a cup of coffee with him and chat about crime in the local area. Then, the doctor recalls, they’d say,  “‘We’ve done our bit. Okay, goodbye. See you in a few months.’”

It had been going on like this for years, but one January morning in 1998, Chan didn’t recognise the two officers in the waiting room. This time, there was no coffee or casual conversation. They wanted to ask him about an abortion he’d performed. The patient’s young son had told his primary school teacher that his dead baby brother was in the fridge at home, and the teacher had made a complaint.

He had given the Maori woman the remains of her foetus in a specimen jar when she’d asked to take it home for a traditional burial. Now, police were telling him he’d need to come to the station for an interview. Chan wasn’t concerned – all those cups of coffee had never amounted to any action against him. He didn’t bother calling a lawyer, he says, because “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

Chan answered questions at the station and went home for the day. “I didn’t think anything of it,” he says.

By 1998, abortion had become available across the country after earlier legal rulings had determined that the procedure could be performed to preserve a woman’s physical or mental health. But abortion was still enshrined in the criminal laws of not only Western Australia but all Australian states and territories.

A few weeks after his questioning, Chan received a phone call from police – he and his anaesthetist were to be charged with procuring an abortion. The penalty for performing an illegal abortion in WA in 1998 was up to 14 years in prison. “They said, ‘You are to appear in court.’ I said, ‘Oh, shit.’ I thought, ‘Right, the law is going to be tested.’ ”

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Twenty-five years later, on a warm Thursday morning in October, the occasional car drives past a red-brick building on a quiet suburban Perth street. Two small signs attached to the fence around it say “surveillance cameras are in use”. Gum trees and a flowering bottlebrush shade the entrance. The only clues that this is a medical clinic are a couple of signs in the car park out the back, reserving spaces for doctors. “Dr Victor Chan” is among them.

Inside, behind the front counter, a man with silvery grey hair and slightly stooped shoulders speaks with the receptionist. Wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt, grey trousers and glasses, 78-year-old Chan does not look like a revolutionary.

But when he was charged with performing an illegal abortion in 1998, he became an instant cause célèbre. His arrest kicked off a chain of events that would lead to WA becoming the first state to decriminalise abortion in most circumstances, creating some of the most liberal laws in the country at the time.

But it took until September this year – another quarter of a century – before its parliament would vote to remove abortion entirely from the criminal code, the last state to do so.

From a time when memories of women dying from “backyard” abortions were still fresh, to dealing with a police raid and running an almost-daily gauntlet of protesters, Chan has witnessed dramatic transformations in Australian laws and attitudes. For most of his career, he’s tried to lay low and has rarely spoken to the media. But now, after performing an estimated 80,000 abortions over 50 years, he’s ready to talk.

Medicine has long been a career people strive for. But you don’t hear anyone say they want to become an abortion provider when they grow up. Chan had his sights set on medicine from an early age, stumbling by chance into the field that would shape his life. Raised in Singapore, he was a sickly child who made frequent trips to the doctor.

“It used to fascinate me,” he says. “When I was 12, I had meningitis. They thought I had 24 hours to live, but I survived. I thought I would do the same and try to help others.”

Dr Chan (right) with then-colleague Dr Bob Short outside their Perth clinic in the 1980s. He remembers protesters entering the waiting room, “preaching to the patients”.Credit: Courtesy of Dr Victor Chan

In 1965, at the age of 19, he moved to Perth to study medicine, one of only four international students in his class of 50. After graduating, he worked in a Perth hospital for 18 months before getting a job at a general practice clinic. “When I joined the practice, I didn’t know anything about abortion – never seen one, had no intention of doing abortion, had no intention of running a clinic. All I wanted to do was general practice,” he says during an interview in his office, where his framed medical degree hangs on the wall.

It was only after he started working at the GP clinic that one of the partners, an older South African called Bob Short, revealed he’d secretly been performing abortions since the late 1960s. He’d seen women suffer the devastating impacts of “backyard” abortions in his home country and offered to teach Chan the procedure.

It was 1973, and the legal status of abortion was yet to be tested in WA. But Chan, who’d been raised Catholic and was still a believer, wasn’t fazed. He’d overheard his mother and her friends discussing abortion and says it carried little stigma in Singapore. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he says. “They were freely talked about in those days in Singapore when I was a kid.”

Abortion had never been mentioned during Chan’s studies, but the older doctor began teaching him how to perform a dilation and curettage procedure, also known as a D and C. Before long, he was performing the procedure under Short’s supervision. After six months at the clinic, he became a partner there.

Back then, Chan says, some gynaecologists were known to carry out the procedure in hospitals, often recording it as a miscarriage, and women would leave money under the pillow. But there was still the fear of women dying from sepsis after “backyard” abortions.

Short wanted to provide a safe, affordable service separate from the hospital system. “It was his idea,” Chan says. “I was just in the background helping out. You could call me the silent partner.“

Legal rulings in Victoria in 1969 and in NSW in 1971 had established that doctors could perform abortion if it was necessary to protect a woman’s physical or mental health. Short and Chan consulted lawyers and discussed the legal risks with doctors in other states, such as Bertram Wainer, a veteran campaigner who survived several attempts on his life as he challenged anti-abortion laws and uncovered corruption involving doctors and police in Victoria. Wainer opened Australia’s first clinic to offer abortion in Melbourne in 1972. “We thought … ‘We’ll do one in WA, we’ll test the waters,’ ” Chan says.

Abortion law reform campaigner Dr Bertram Wainer, surrounded by protesters outside his East Melbourne Fertility Control Clinic in 1976.Credit: Justin McManus

At first, they only performed a couple of procedures a week for patients from their GP clinic. But in 1974, the Abortion Information Service, a phone line that women could call to find out where they could access safe abortion, was established. The service was advertised in the media with the motto: If you’re late, come early.

As word spread that the two doctors performed abortions, they began seeing more women. Chan can’t remember the exact amount but thinks they charged about $20 for the procedure. If women couldn’t afford the fee, they operated for free.

Before performing an abortion, they’d send each patient to another doctor down the road, who would write a letter saying that the woman was suicidal and her life would be at risk without the procedure. Short and Chan hoped this would provide them with some legal protection.

Their first encounter with police came in late 1974 when officers arrived on the clinic’s doorstep. “They said, ‘We’ve got a complaint you’re doing illegal abortions,’ ” Chan recalls. “They took all our notes.” A few weeks later, police returned the files, telling the doctors, “There’s nothing we can do.”

Chan saw women from all parts of society – young single women, mothers who said they couldn’t afford another baby, women in abusive relationships. “They’d come and say, ‘I’m pregnant, I don’t want to be pregnant.’ At the end of the procedure, if you look at their faces, how relieved they are. That is in itself rewarding.”

Occasionally, he’d receive phone calls from ships docked in Fremantle. He recalls a young Russian woman who didn’t have enough money to pay but insisted he keep her gold-plated fob watch.

As demand for their services continued to grow, the two doctors decided to focus solely on abortions in the late 1970s. Short bought a vacant plot of land, and together they opened a purpose-built clinic in 1980. They put up a sign, “Nanyana Medical Group”, but Chan says the council ordered them to take it down because it was “too big”.

Even still, it wasn’t long before anti-abortion protesters began arriving. Chan remembers two “very vocal, very radical” American brothers who, he says, “taught Australians how to protest”. Some days, he says, the brothers would come into the waiting room, “preaching to the patients”. They’d only leave after he phoned the police. Then, he says, the brothers stopped coming and “left it to the locals”. “We got them almost every day … They used to come at about eight in the morning ’til five in the evening.”

“When I joined the practice, I didn’t know anything about abortion … All I wanted to do was general practice,” recalls Chan, who has performed about 80,000 procedures.Credit: Tony McDonough

There were times when patients’ partners would get into punch-ups in the clinic car park with protesters who were trying to stop women from entering the clinic. Staff would admit patients via the back door. “It’s bad enough, such a hard decision to make, then to be told by protesters, ‘Don’t kill your baby, we can save you’ … A lot of people used to come in crying,” Chan says.

He refused to engage with anti-abortion activists. “They’d say, ‘Don’t do it, can we talk to you?’ I always said, ‘Look here, we can talk ’til we’re blue in the face. You have your point of view, I’ve got my point of view, so what’s the point of talking?’ ”

The ranks of the protesters would swell on the last Saturday of every month, but Easter attracted the biggest crowds. Priests would lead prayers outside the surgery. At Christmas, cards would arrive in the mail with messages that read, “God still loves you.”

“I just chucked them in the bin,” Chan says, waving his hand as if shooing away an annoying fly.

The protesters seemingly had little effect on him. “After a while, you get used to it because they’re there all the time,” he says. But providing abortion services has been dangerous. In Melbourne, Bertram Wainer was shot at and beaten, and his sister’s home was firebombed. In 2001, Steven Rogers, a security guard at the clinic which Wainer established, was murdered by an anti-abortion protester.

In the US, four doctors have been murdered since 1993. Since 1977, there have been 11 murders, 42 bombings, 200 arson attacks and 531 assaults directed at patients, providers and volunteers in the US, according to figures released by the National Abortion Federation.

Looking back now, Chan is surprised he never received death threats. Instead, his biggest worry came that day police came knocking 25 years after he performed his first abortion.

By the time Chan was arrested in 1998, he was running the clinic on his own; Short, his practice partner, had died six years earlier. Raising his eyebrows and looking to the ceiling as if channelling his old mentor, he says it was Short he first thought of when he was charged with illegal abortion in relation to the Maori woman.

Short had always agreed to speak with the media and had predicted a time would come when they’d have to test the law. Chan, on the other hand, had sought to avoid the spotlight. “I couldn’t be bothered with any politics, I just did my job,” he says.

But now his photograph was in the newspapers, and he was facing the possibility of a trial and prison sentence. His daughter, Lisa Chan, was then 23 years old. She and her two siblings had grown up fully aware of what their father did for a living. “It wasn’t anything controversial [for me], it was just what he did for patients,” she says.

Even though she knew the legal situation, his arrest came as a bit of a shock. “We just didn’t think it would ever happen,” she says. “He just kept saying, ‘It’s going to be okay.’ ”

But Chan’s mother was concerned for her son. A practising Catholic who went to church every Sunday, she had always supported him and his work. For her, abortion was a “non-issue”, he says. “She was worried, but she said, ‘I’m praying for you, it’s fine. God will listen to me.’ ”

Chan wasn’t so convinced, but he did find a saviour of sorts. Cheryl Davenport was then an opposition state Labor member and a member of the Association for the Legal Right to Abortion. She’d spoken about the need to reform abortion laws in her maiden speech to parliament almost a decade earlier, and was drafting possible changes to legislation to ensure doctors and their patients could not be sent to prison. “When the doctors were charged, we were ready to go,” Davenport, now 76, tells Good Weekend. She began furiously lobbying MPs to support her private member’s bill.

Chan’s arrest sent shockwaves through the state’s medical community. Other doctors stopped performing abortions immediately, according to Dr Scott Blackwell, the then-president of the Australian Medical Association’s WA branch.

Ex-state parliamentarian Cheryl Davenport says she is “incredibly grateful” for Chan’s courage in helping Western Australian women.Credit: Tony McDonough

“Things just ground to a halt,” he says. “It became reasonably desperate for those who suddenly found themselves in a position where they really wanted to have an abortion and couldn’t access one.”

The consequences emerged with alarming clarity. A week or two after Chan’s arrest, Blackwell says, women began arriving at hospital emergency departments showing signs of septic abortion, “the result of what in those days were called backyard abortions, done by unqualified people”.

Blackwell met with the state premier, the health minister, and the attorney-general. “It really became very evident that the only way through this was … to get some legislation through really quickly,” he says.

Davenport became aware of the urgency first-hand when she received a phone call from a distressed woman. The caller said she had been raped and discovered she was pregnant. She couldn’t find a doctor who would perform an abortion in WA and couldn’t afford to travel interstate. Davenport phoned Chan. “He said, ‘Send her in at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, and I’ll do it.’ ” Adding that Chan not only took the risk but also did the procedure for free, she says: “I’ve always been incredibly grateful for the courage he’s shown over the years for WA women.″

While parliamentarians debated Davenport’s bill, Chan fronted up for his first court hearing, his lawyer escorting him into a Perth courthouse through a back door. After the judge adjourned the case for two weeks, Chan’s lawyer told him he needed to leave by the main entrance. When Chan emerged on the courthouse steps, he was greeted by cheering supporters. “I felt like I was Michael Jackson,” he says, beaming.

Davenport, who was in the crowd outside the court, recalls anti-abortion protesters and a media scrum chasing Chan down the street. But Chan himself only seems to remember the outpouring of support. Coupled with the knowledge that the political wheels were turning, he felt certain he wouldn’t be going to prison.

Rallying outside Chan’s court appearance in early 1998.Credit: BARRY BAKER

Three months after Chan was charged, following what Davenport describes as an acrimonious parliamentary debate during which death threats were made to her office by phone, a conscience vote was held.

MPs chose in favour of making abortion legal up to 20 weeks; after that, a government-appointed panel of doctors had to approve the procedure. The 14-year maximum prison sentence for doctors was replaced with a $50,000 fine for unlawful abortions, and the seven-year prison term for women was abolished. But abortion remained in the criminal code: the result of compromises Davenport says had to be made to ensure the bill was passed.

The charges against Chan and his anaesthetist colleague were dropped a couple of months later. “I said, ‘Great, now I can practise in peace,’ ” Chan says. ” ‘No one hassling me except the protesters – and them I can handle.’ ”

Protesters continued to show up until 2021, when WA banned picketing within 150 metres of abortion clinics, becoming the last state to introduce safe access zones. Earlier this year, Chan and Davenport sat together in the public gallery when the proposed legislation to remove abortion from the criminal code was introduced to parliament.

MPs voted in favour of these changes in September, bringing WA into line with other states and territories. (Victoria had done so in 2008, NSW in 2019.) “I was elated,” says Chan, “because we worked for this for years and years and so finally, we put this thing about abortion law to rest.”

Adrianne Walters, associate legal director of the Human Rights Law Centre, described the moment as “a historic win for reproductive rights nationally”. “There remains much to be done to ensure that every person can access abortion care regardless of where they live or how much money they have. But it is a huge relief to know that abortion will be treated as healthcare in laws across the country, with the focus rightly being on the health, dignity and autonomy of patients.″

Chan attending court in 1998.Credit: BARRY BAKER

Under the new law, women will no longer need a doctor’s referral or be required to have mandatory counselling. Late-term abortions will require the approval of two doctors after 23 weeks, compared to 20 weeks under the previous legislation.

But Chan remains adamant that access to abortion needs to be increased. While abortions using medication have become widely available, he says his clinic is today one of only two in Perth to provide surgical abortions outside the hospital system.

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Showing me around the clinic on a recent morning, Chan points out the operating theatre and recovery rooms. He explains that most patients spend about two hours here, and many have contraceptive devices inserted. About 60 surgical first-term abortions are now performed here every week, as well as 10 medical abortions.

As nurses in purple uniforms guide women down the corridor, Chan describes how abortion care has changed over the years, such as how the introduction of ultrasounds has made the procedure much easier to perform.

Those who have known him for years describe him as a pioneer who puts patients first. “He wasn’t a guy who went into this to make bundles of money, he went into this to provide a good service,” says Blackwell, the former AMA state president.

Ask Chan what he thinks of developments in the US, where abortion has been banned or restricted in nearly two dozen states following last year’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and he’s blunt: “The US, they’re mad ... They’re an enigma,” he says. “It will never happen in Australia because we are a different type of people altogether from the Americans.”

Dr Alida Lancee, one of the clinic’s three doctors, has had her own share of headlines. A long-time campaigner for voluntary assisted dying laws, she was investigated for murder in 2016 after admitting in media interviews to giving a lethal injection to an elderly woman who was suffering from emphysema. The WA parliament passed a voluntary assisted dying law in 2019 and, Lancee says, no further action was taken.

As a GP, she referred patients to Chan for about a decade before joining his clinic in 2017. “At the end of the day, it was by accident that he became the hero of the campaign. He didn’t shy away from that. He said, ‘I know what I’m doing is right.’ ”

“If I don’t come here every morning, I think I’ll feel lost.”

Victor Chan

Chan still comes into the clinic for a few hours every morning, six days a week, to see patients for medical abortions and consult with the other doctors. He stopped performing surgical procedures on a regular basis this year but still steps in every now and then if the other doctors are unavailable. “I can still do it, but I thought, ‘Let the young ones do the work,’ ” he says.

He rarely went on holiday before he married his third wife, but she convinced him to go travelling. He also takes guitar lessons and helps babysit his grandchildren, but is still on call for patients 24 hours a day. “If I don’t come here every morning, I think I’ll feel lost.”

But he’s not one for sentimentality. He never kept newspaper stories or photographs about his case, but he shows me four scrapbooks compiled by his former practice partner, Short. They’re bulging with articles about abortion in Australia and around the world, legal rulings, and papers from medical journals dating back to the early 1970s.

There are also handwritten notes from grateful patients thanking the doctors and nurses for their care, as well as a few letters from anti-abortion activists. An unsigned note scrawled on the back of an envelope reads, “Perhaps you were meant to work in a butcher shop,” and urges the doctors to “think of your place in eternity.” Chan can’t remember the last time he received a letter like that.

After half a century of working in women’s healthcare, he still can’t understand why abortion ever created such controversy. “Doing abortion is just a health issue,” he says. “I just wanted to get on with it.″

Now that picketing is banned around clinics, patients sometimes call from outside, wondering if they’re at the right address. Finding the place was never a problem when protesters were waving placards on the street. But Chan has no plans to put up a sign. He still prefers to remain, in his words, “low-key”.

“The thing is,” he says, “we’re here to help women, not to upset people, so we don’t want to be too radical.”

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