Population Services International (Australasia) Ltd was an Australia-based subsidiary of the North Carolina, USA-based Population Services International. PSI Australasia operated as a not-for-profit corporation, continuously registered in Australia from mid-1973 to 1992,^[1] with the mission of providing contraception and abortion services.

Founding

PSI Australasia’s founding Director was the Australian physician Geoffrey Davis, who in the 1960s had provided discreet early-stage pregnancy termination services from clinics he operated in the Sydney suburbs of Potts Point and Arncliffe.^[2][3] Abortion was partially legalised in New South Wales, following court rulings in the states of Victoria (1969) and New South Wales (1971) that permitted abortion when a medical practitioner determined that failure to terminate a pregnancy posed a risk to a woman’s life or her physical or mental health.^[4][5].

After working in London in the late-1960s, Davis was hired as a Director of the PSI parent corporation in 1971.^[6] He was best known for his work the following year in Bangladesh,^[7][8][9] where he lead an international team performing an estimated 200,000 abortions^[10] on Bangladeshi women and girls systematically raped by Pakistani soldiers during Bangladesh's 1971 war of national liberation.

By 1974, when Davis assumed the direction of PSI Australasia in 1974 under the title PSI Project Director - Southeast Asia and Oceania,^[6] he had accumulated extensive experience in terminating first-trimester pregnancies via menstrual extraction (aka vacuum aspiration).^[3] He was also using a technique for speedily terminating second-trimester pregnancies that he had developed in Britain^[7] and deployed on an “industrial scale”^[11] in 1972 in Bangladesh.

An anesthetist by training, the Australian Medical Association reportedly would not allow Davis to publicize his association with PSI when the clinics were opened in Sydney.^[12]

PSI Clinics

The first PSI clinics to open were in the Sydney inner suburbs of Potts Point and Arncliffe,^[12] the same neighborhoods where Davis had practiced privately in the 1960s. The Potts Point clinic served as the headquarters of PSI Australasia.^[13]

The new PSI clinics operated within the context of increasingly high demand from women across Australia^[14] and New Zealand^[15] for safe and legal abortion. Davis planned to meet the high-demand market opportunity with the quick-turnaround pregnancy termination procedures he had developed, delivering easily accessible, "high through-put"^[16] services, both by appointment or for "'walk-in clientele'... accepted for same-day treatment".^[16]

The Potts Point clinic on Challis Avenue opened in early 1975 and mainly provided first-trimester abortions. The experience for women patients, as later described by Davis, included an optional interview, a medical exam "and theatre time would usually be three minutes... within 15 minutes of entering the theatre, most are back in the dressing room recovered from the anesthetic."^[16]

The second and larger clinic opened on Foster Road in Arncliffe^[14] soon thereafter in premises rented from and adjacent to the Rosslyn private hospital^[17] and was “equipped to deal with later-stage abortions".^[16] The association with Rosslyn hospital was convenient for complications that might arise in the more difficult later-stage procedures, which could result in hospitalization.

The services offered by the new PSI clinics differed in two substantial ways from services being delivered by existing abortion clinics, including its main competitor Preterm. PSI offered much later-stage abortions, beyond the Preterm limitation of nine weeks' gestation, and PSI abortions were performed under general anesthetic, rather than the then-customary local anesthetic.^[14]

The system Davis had devised was intended to deliver “a technically perfect procedure in minimum time. The reason for speed was to shorten the period of anesthesia.”^[16]

References