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Salient. Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol 41 No. 6. April 3 1978

[Introduction]

The Women's Abortion Rights Conference was held in Auckland over the weekend of March 18—19 at the university. It was attended by 183 women who presented a variety of views. However the overall tone of the conference was set in the opening speech given by Kay McVey from the organising committee.

Ms. McVey emphasised the importance of two demands: a) Abortion is a woman's right to choose, and b) There must be total repeal of anti-abortion laws. In doing this, she stressed that the abortion campaign must be concentrated around "A woman's right to choose". It must not be sidetracked to peripheral demands as happened last year when the parliamentary debaters became enmeshed in a debate over the number of doctors involved in each amendment, i.e., two under Gair's amendment, three under Birch's amendment and four under the McLay amendment.

Ms McVey then moved onto discussion of the various methods which the campaign could use. In this she came down heavily for the use of mass protests and demonstrations, using the example of the SIS protests. In order to mobilise the largest number of people possible, as many different groups and individuals as possible would have to be united.

The first day of the conference was devoted mainly to workshops and the second to an open plenary. The workshops were divided into action proposal workshops and area workshops. All proposals made in the former were taken to the open plenary the next day.

The area workshops were arranged so that each woman would attend a workshop in which she felt a particular interest and take part in discussion on abortion action specifically within this area. A few of the workshops were Women in Trade Unions, Campus women, Solo Mothers, lesbian women.

In the Women In Trade Unions workshop, much emphasis was placed on the importance of involving women in their unions and on the importance of trade union support for the abortion campaign. Ways in which this could be done would be be circulating articles on abortion to the trade union papers; carrying out more extensive leafletting at factories to involve working class women and men; using the Working Women's Council which could coordinate the abortion campaign within the trade unions; actively working for repeal decisions in individual unions and support for a woman's right to choose.