The limits of "choice": abortion and entrepreneurialism

At the Cairns District Court in October 2010 a young couple was found not guilty of all charges relating to the importation and use of the abortion drug RU486. Police had charged Tegan Leach and her partner Sergei Brennan under sections of the Queensland Criminal Code concerning the procuring of miscarriage. It was alleged Brennan had arranged for a relative in the Ukraine to supply him tablets of the drug mifolian (a Chinese version of RU486) which he provided to Leach, who ingested them, procuring an abortion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 2010). Since 2006, Australian doctors have used RU486 selectively for the purpose of medical abortion, but its legality had not been tested prior to the 2010 trial, known as ‘the Cairns Case’. Leach was the first woman to be tried in Queensland for procuring her own miscarriage, and possibly the first woman to face such a charge in Australia. Although the Cairns Case resulted in all charges being overturned, the legal status of RU486 remains arguably unclear. Most significantly, the case produced, rather than clarified, a number of questions about the social and legal status of self-abortion in the age of relatively ‘safe’ and accessible drugs like RU486.¹