Partisan Defence Committee

Drop the Charges Against Leach and Brennan!

We reprint below a Partisan Defence Committee (PDC) protest letter sent to the Queensland Attorney-General and Director of Public Prosecutions on 20 August. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian, legal and social defence organisation which champions cases and causes in the interests of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.

We protest the prosecution of two young people under draconian 19th century anti-abortion provisions of the Queensland Criminal Code. It is an outrageous assault on the rights of women and all working people. Tegan Leach, 19 years old, and her boyfriend Sergie Brennan, 21, were charged in April, dragged before the courts, and face committal proceedings on 3 September. The first woman to face such a charge in over 50 years, Leach could be jailed for seven years if convicted under Section 225 for inducing abortion by reportedly taking misoprostol, and Brennan faces a possible 14 years imprisonment under Section 226 for assisting her, plus an additional 3 years for allegedly supplying the medicine. We demand the state harassment and persecution of Leach and Brennan end immediately. Drop all the charges now!

Misoprostol and RU486 are abortion drugs widely used around the world and for decades in Europe, providing a safer and much cheaper alternative to surgical abortion. Restrictions on their use in Australia serve the purpose of further oppressing young and working-class women and their partners as well as poor, immigrant and Aboriginal women.

In 2006, Federal parliament overturned a 1996 deal brokered between the then Howard government and Catholic anti-abortion campaigner and former senator Brian Harradine, whereby access to RU486 required direct written permission from the health minister. Despite this decision severe restrictions on the importation and use of RU486 were retained. However abortion clinics, using drugs somewhat less effective than RU486, have been able to provide medical abortion safely for significant numbers of women across the country. Now the charging of Leach and Brennan has sent a chilling message to all would-be patients and abortion practitioners, a number of whom have stopped performing medical abortions in Queensland, out of fear of prosecution.

That reactionary anti-abortion laws can still be invoked in most states, not least in Queensland, only emboldens anti-woman bigots who act to terrorise abortion patients and clinic staff. The police prosecution of this couple, now forced to move house by violent threats and an arson attack, takes place under the Bligh Labor government, despite reaffirmation by the Queensland branch of the Labor Party at its June conference of its policy to remove abortion from the Criminal Code. We demand: Drop all the charges against Tegan Leach and Sergie Brennan now!