The right to choose
It’s been a little more than a year since Aotearoa legalised abortion, something Sue Orr says took far too long. In her new book, the author explores a decision so many women have had to make in the shadows, writes Sharon Stephenson.
In a downtown Wellington apartment with the kind of high ceilings interior magazines tell us we’re supposed to aspire to, Sue Orr is getting angry. It’s an anger directed at the 40-plus years it took for New Zealand to decriminalise abortions. ‘‘I’m astonished that up until last year, women had to go through a charade about their mental health in order to make a choice about their own bodies,’’ says Orr. ‘‘And that it took so long for women to stop being classified as criminals for doing so.’’
The author is, of course, referring to the Abortion Legislation Act 2020, which makes it easier for women to end an unwanted pregnancy and removes the need for women to prove they’re mentally fragile. It also allows abortion to be treated as a health issue, not a criminal act.
It’s a topic Orr knows a bit about: her latest novel, Loop Tracks, tells the story of Charlie, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who finds herself pregnant after her first sexual experience, which may or may not be rape. The timing couldn’t be worse: it’s 1978 and
Auckland’s only abortion clinic has been closed down by protesters. Her working class parents somehow scrape together the money for a flight to Australia so their only child can have a termination.
But when the flight is delayed on the runway for six hours, Charlie chooses to get off the plane, sparking a series of events that skewers not only her life, but also the lives of those around her.
I meet Orr at the fourth-floor apartment she shares with her husband, Reserve Bank Governor, Adrian Orr.
It’s a home filled with art and so many books the couple could open their own book store, should writing and overseeing the nation’s monetary policy not work out.
That’s unlikely: Orr’s second novel is a cracker. It’s a follow-up to her 2015 novel The Party Line, which emerged from her PhD in creative writing. Set loosely in the Paeroa/ Thames area so familiar to Orr from her childhood, her first novel was a coming-ofage story about two teenage girls.
Before that there were two awardwinning short-story collections and the