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The Racket: How Abortion Became Legal In Australia
The Racket: How Abortion Became Legal In Australia
The Racket: How Abortion Became Legal In Australia
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The Racket: How Abortion Became Legal In Australia

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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.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 1, 2008
ISBN9780522859126
The Racket: How Abortion Became Legal In Australia
Author

Gideon Haigh

Gideon Haigh has been a journalist since 1984, written forty-two books, edited seven others, and contributed to more than a hundred newspapers and magazines. He works for The Australian and The Times.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An excellent and well-researched account of the history of abortion in Australia. The author focuses on Victoria as the precedent-setting Menhennitt ruling was made in the Victorian Supreme Court in 1969. The extent of police corruption did not surprise me as much as the medical corruption; as Haigh says: "Illegality served not the ends of morality but the needs of greed".

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The Racket - Gideon Haigh

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