A history of abortion is told by a writer with close ties to the sexual abuse community of Centrepoint I have long been a supporter of a woman’s right to choose. I’ve even had the dubious honour of being taken to the Press Council by anti-abortion group Right to Life who (unsuccessfully) complained about an opinion column I wrote on the subject. I suppose I’m something of a sitting duck to review a new book on abortion in New Zealand, and so here we are.
I’ve never had an abortion myself, but my recent experience of pregnancy and birth has strengthened my already deeply held beliefs about the importance of safe, legal and easily accessible abortion. Coincidentally, I found myself at the same address as the Epsom Day Unit (the inconspicuously named Auckland abortion clinic) a few days before I began writing this review. I was in the building to seek treatment for a birth injury I sustained during my (much-wanted) daughter’s traumatic arrival.
Giving birth is inherently dangerous and carries numerous risks. Motherhood is hard. No one should ever be forced into either.
Unwanted pregnancies are and always have been an unfortunate fact of life, and the history of abortion in New Zealand provides tragic reminders of just why termination of pregnancy must always remain safe and legal. Felicity Goodyear-Smith’s new self-published book, From Crime to Care: The History of Abortion in Aotearoa New Zealand traces that treacherous road, from herbal abortifacients and backstreet abortionists through to the removal of abortion from the Crimes Act in 2020 and beyond.
The book documents legal changes, pro and anti-abortion activist groups and the establishment of safe and professional abortion services in New Zealand. It also discusses the country’s first abortion clinic, the Auckland Medical Aid Centre (AMAC), at length. Goodyear-Smith was involved in the clinic during its early days, and regarded its founder Dr Rex Hunton as a mentor.
Arguably, much of the ground covered in From Crime to Care has been published before, and work by Dame Margaret Sparrow, Professor Barbara Brookes, Sandra Coney and Alison McCulloch should be acknowledged particularly in this space. As well, the book has an obvious blindspot in that it presents very little information about Māori involvement with the issue of abortion. It claims to cover precolonial history but dedicates less than two pages to the subject.
There’s also a baffling and largely irrelevant tangent about George Herbert Green, the obstetrician and gynaecologist at the centre of the Cartwright Inquiry of the 1980s. Green performed an experiment upon women at Auckland National Women’s Hospital without informing them, in which he opted for a conservative “wait-and-see” approach after identifying cervical carcinoma in situ. Some of his patients went on to die as a result of medical inaction. Goodyear-Smith writes that Green was before his time, and draws attention to a British researcher who has called for a “Herb Green Prize” to be awarded annually.
Goodyear-Smith’s take on Green and the Cartwright Inquiry should encourage readers to carefully and critically appraise what they’re reading.
Goodyear-Smith’s first book dealt with "a pressing problem in our society – false allegations of sexual abuse"
But what stood out most to me about Goodyear-Smith’s book is the in-depth discussion of the Auckland Medical Aid Centre, its internal politics and curious association with Centrepoint, the “therapeutic” commune that produced a slew of convictions for child sex crimes and the manufacture of illegal drugs.
And so it’s here that we’re forced to take an unexpected sojourn away from the topic of abortion. You’ll see why in a moment.
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Here is a collection of facts about author Felicity Goodyear-Smith: She is an esteemed professor and medical doctor. She worked as a certifying consultant until the 2020 New Zealand law change rendered the role redundant, and as such has been involved in providing abortion services for decades.
Her father-in-law Bert Potter founded Centrepoint. Potter was an unrepentant paedophile, and unsurprisingly, was convicted of child sex offences, along with drug crimes.Goodyear-Smith is married to Bert Potter’s son John Potter, who also has convictions for child sex offences stemming from his time at Centrepoint.
Goodyear-Smith is a general practitioner, and was the doctor at the Centrepoint commune between the years of 1989-1992. Between 1988 and 1992, she and her husband lived in a mobile home on land owned by Centrepoint, next to the house where her father-in-law Bert lived until his imprisonment in 1990 – close enough, as Tim Hume noted in a 2010 article in the Sunday Star Times, to draw electricity from Bert’s house.
John Potter went to prison for historic sex offences in 1993. Also in 1993, Goodyear-Smith’s first book was published. It is entitled First Do No Harm: The Sexual Abuse Industry. It dealt with "a pressing problem in our society – false allegations of sexual abuse.” Goodyear-Smith wrote, “Sexual abuse workers usually operate under the assumption that all sexual activity between adults and children is inevitably harmful. This is not actually supported by the limited sociological and psychological evidence available."
In 1994, she founded the now-defunct Casualties of Sexual Allegations (COSA), a group supporting men accused of sexual assault. An archive of COSA materials is at the time of writing still housed on her husband John Potter’s "masculinist" website, menz.org.nz.
In the time between then and now, Felicity Goodyear-Smith has enjoyed an illustrious career. She was even commissioned in the mid-2000s by ACC to research sexual abuse counselling, producing a report that has had far-reaching and controversial impacts on the ways that such counselling services can be accessed through ACC. She is currently the Goodfellow Postgrad Professor of General Practice and Primary Healthcare at the University of Auckland.
Okay. Back to the subject of abortion, and a review of From Crime to Care. So what, exactly, does a disgraced sex cult have to do with the country’s first abortion clinic?
In 1984, the Auckland Medical Aid Trust (AMAT), which owned and operated the Auckland Medical Aid Centre, gained a group of new trustees. Among them were Dr Keith McKenzie, who already worked at AMAC as a certifying consultant and Susanne Brighouse (then Susanne Mendelssohn). Dave Mendelssohn, Susanne’s then-husband, took over the accounts.
All three were Centrepoint members. Within a decade, Keith McKenzie and Dave Mendelssohn would go on to be convicted of child sex offences, and Susanne Brighouse would be convicted of perjury.
Goodyear-Smith quotes a trustee Pat Haslam who describes Centrepoint as “a lovely place where people were looked after”. Which is not how you’d expect a place where multiple children were sexually abused to be depicted
It’s important to point out that Goodyear-Smith informs readers that these new trustees were Centrepoint members. It’s equally important to point out that Goodyear-Smith does not mention the child sex convictions nor the perjury.
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Which is quite the point. While From Crime to Care is a reasonable enough account of how abortion services developed in New Zealand, it runs into trouble in its treatment of Centrepoint. Goodyear-Smith includes, for example, a quote from former AMAC trustee Pat Haslam who describes Centrepoint as “a lovely place where people were looked after”. Which is not how you’d expect a place where multiple children were sexually abused to be depicted. Knowing what happened at Centrepoint, you have to ask why such a description would be published at all.
The criminal history of Centrepoint is not acknowledged in From Crime to Care, and there is little in the way of criticism of the commune. Concerns about Centrepoint’s involvement in AMAC are not new, and as such I would expect them to be discussed thoroughly and unflinchingly in an unbiased account of the history of AMAC.
In 1988, Sandra Coney wrote a 10-page investigative feature in The Listener about the problematic association between Centrepoint and the Auckland Medical Aid Trust. The differences between Coney’s and Goodyear-Smith’s accounts of what was going on at AMAC are stark.
Goodyear-Smith describes a challenging environment at the Trust in the 1980s, and characterises internal struggles as tensions growing between “different factions and ideological differences”. She describes a situation in which the “radical feminist” counsellors wanted to form a collective, at odds with the Trust’s traditional governance structure.
She mentions Coney’s Listener piece, describing it as a “10-page expose” which probed “issues with part-time counsellors’ conditions of service, who were treated as casual workers, expressed concerns about the changes to the service and questioned where the money was going.” Goodyear-Smith leaves some of these concerns hanging in the ether. This reader couldn’t help but wonder where indeed the money was going.
Coney’s account presents – in excruciating detail – a raft of allegations. There were concerns about the treatment of workers, and questions about financial practices. For example, when the Centrepoint trustees took over, the clinic began employing a large number of Centrepoint members as staff without advertising externally. Other staff were let go. As all commune members signed over their worldly possessions and earnings to the commune, any wages earned by members would go directly into Centrepoint coffers.
Other eyebrow-raising financial events also took place during the Centrepoint years, including what Keith McKenzie described in response to written questions from Coney (he refused to be interviewed in person) as “a substantial loan” made to Centrepoint from AMAC. This loan seemingly occurred around the time when AMAC premises were sold for a substantial profit, and shortly before Centrepoint purchased a goat farm.
Speaking of the goat farm… Another alarming allegation contained in Coney’s report speaks of a Trust nurse being instructed to put equipment used to transfer goat embryos on the farm through the abortion clinic’s autoclave (surgical equipment steriliser). This practice appears to have been commonplace over the course of a year.
Centrepoint also moved its revenue-generating Auckland city base to AMAC premises, meaning the abortion clinic was used as the location for Centrepoint events such as “vitality” groups on Thursdays, and regular massage and sexuality workshops. Coney reported that nurses were forced to clean up after sessions. Workers told of unpleasant experiences such as finding used tubes of lubricant after some events.
In an article for the community's magazine in 1990, Goodyear-Smith wrote that "Centrepoint is where I spend much of my non-doctoring time, and where so many of my social contacts, friends and family live"
It’s unclear the exact length of time that Centrepoint remained involved in AMAC, as Goodyear-Smith doesn’t document the trajectory of the Centrepoint relationship beyond the 1980s. There's no mention of whether Centrepoint was still involved with AMAC during the criminal court cases against Centrepoint members in the early 1990s. A recent search of the Charities register revealed that the identity of the AMAT trustees is not publicly available. An email to the trust requesting more information went unanswered.
Goodyear-Smith is quick to distance herself from Centrepoint, and writes in the introduction of From Crime to Care, “The involvement of Centrepoint Community members in the Auckland Medical Aid Trust from 1984 had little impact on me… I have never been a member or a resident, and I had little knowledge about their finances, including the issues relating to the AMAT assets.”
Whatever the scope of Goodyear-Smith’s involvement with Centrepoint it’s worth noting that in an article for the community's magazine in 1990, Goodyear-Smith wrote that "Centrepoint is where I spend much of my non-doctoring time, and where so many of my social contacts, friends and family live".
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While it is unremarkable that a former certifying consultant might write on the subject of abortion, uncomfortable ethical questions arise given the connections of the author with Centrepoint commune, and the commune’s involvement in AMAC. It’s an opinion I’m not alone in holding.
When Goodyear-Smith set out to write From Crime to Care she invited a number of people to be interviewed, sending out a participant information sheet on University of Auckland letterhead. At the bottom of that information sheet, there is a paragraph all in capitals: “APPROVED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND HUMAN PARTICIPANTS ETHICS COMMITTEE” and details of who to contact about ethical issues.
One person I spoke with who was asked to be a participant but declined due to ethical concerns made contact with the University of Auckland to express their view that it would be troubling for Goodyear-Smith to write about AMAC given her historic association with Centrepoint. The response from the university was that it had spoken to Goodyear-Smith and was satisfied that the project should continue.
And continue it did, eventually landing on my desk. It’s been quite an assignment. Who knew a review of a book about abortion would take me down a rabbit hole where I’d find paedophiles, “vitality” sessions and a curious loan between an abortion clinic and a commune?
So what, exactly, do I make of From Crime to Care: The History of Abortion in Aotearoa New Zealand? It’s certainly not the history of abortion in New Zealand, and I would be alarmed if it became a kind of textbook for anyone studying or interested in abortion in New Zealand. From Crime to Care, the History of Abortion in Aotearoa New Zealand by Felicity Goodyear-Smith (Verity Press, $39.95) is available in selected bookstores, or on Kindle.
