Bertram Wainer

[instrumental music] That's Dr. Joe Weiner, a professor in women's health and member of the Order of Australia and lifelong committed feminist.

She's a long-term advocate for women's abortion rights and one of the principal people who worked on the contentious 1968 campaign, alongside her husband, Bertram Weiner, to force the law's hand and enable safe abortion.

Their lives were irreversibly changed to bring out of the shadows the horrific and gruesome underground industry of illegal abortion.

That campaign ran between 1968 and 1973.

They would bury them in Sherbrooke Forest, and these are just the places that I know about.

And it...

Do you know what, what grieves me now and was driving us then is that these are families where children had no mother, where husbands had lost their wife, where parents had lost their daughters.

These women's lives were so meaningful and so many of them were mothers, and they died and their children were motherless, and it didn't have to be like that, and it doesn't have to be like that, and it must never be like that again.