Geoffrey Davis (doctor)

Davis was the only son of Lancelot E. Davis, a radio engineer, and Mavis D. Rutter. He was raised in the Sydney suburb of Strathfield[2] and attended the private Anglican-run Trinity Grammar School for boys, graduating in 1950.[3]

From 1951 to 1957, Davis was a student in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Sydney.[3] In 1958, he received his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degrees from Sydney University, serving that year as a Junior Resident Medical Officer at Sydney Hospital and the following year as a Senior Resident Medical Officer at the same hospital.[3]

After working as a research fellow from 1960-62 in the Kanematsu Institute at Sydney Hospital, Davis moved into general practice from 1962-68 at local Sydney surgeries.[3] During those years, he ran two clinics in the Sydney suburbs of Potts Point and Arncliffe,[4][5][6] where he carried out discreet pregnancy terminations until the 1971 legalization in New South Wales of abortion in cases where a physician believes a pregnancy has put a woman's life or physical or mental health at risk.

In 1969, he moved to London, where biographical notes prepared by his son, William, say he first "Assisted in Practice" and then from 1971 worked in medical "Practice in Harley Street",[3] which was then a street teeming with medical surgeries, many of which offered abortion services. Though Davis was originally an anesthetist, in London he was becoming increasingly known for his work with late-term abortions and became a Director of the International Abortion Research and Training Centre.[6]

It was during this period that he developed what he would later term "a technique for terminating advanced pregnancy".[7] In 1971, he was hired as Director of North Carolina-based Population Services International,[3] an international not-for-profit provider of contraception and abortion services, with a focus on the developing world.

Davis is best known for his work in performing late-term abortions in Bangladesh, during the nationwide emergency following Bangladesh's war for national liberation in 1971, in the course of which the Pakistani military and local collaborator militia groups captured, then brutally raped and impregnated as many as 400,000 Bangladeshi women and girls.[8] More conservative estimates placed the total number of rapes at 200,000.[9]

Due to cultural and religious beliefs, the girls and women were considered defiled, most were unable to return home to their villages, where they were shunned at best; or worse, killed by their husbands or families.[10] As many as 200,000 newborns were given up for adoption to North Americana and European families, but widespread venereal infection hampered adoption efforts.[8] With disease and malnutrition rampant in the wake of the war, abortion was seen as the least worst solution to the problem by the Bangladeshi government.

Having had years of prior experience in Sydney terminating first-trimester pregnancies through vacuum aspiration,[5] and having also developed while in London an expeditious technique for terminating second-trimester pregnancies,[8][7] Davis was recruited while still serving as a PSI Director by a consortium of international agencies to work alongside pioneering U.S. obstetrician Leonard Laufe with the government-run Bangladesh Women’s Rehabilitation Program, performing abortions at a staggering rate over a six month period. The Bangladeshi government program was sponsored by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), US Agency for International Development (USAID), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the World Health Organization (WHO).[11]

In conjunction with Laufe, Davis set up "industrial scale"[12] procedures of abortion beginning in March 1972. First-trimester abortions were carried out using a "device" that performed "the evacuation of uterine contents"[13] (menstrual extraction, aka vacuum aspiration), and advanced pregnancies were terminated using a technique to sever the umbilical cord to speed up fetal extraction, which Davis had developed in London.[8] Davis told an interviewer later that they performed on average 100 abortions per day[7] during the six months he was in Bangladesh. Between them, he said they carried out 95 percent of terminations that had resulted from the mass rapes.[14] He also traveled for months in remote areas to carry out terminations.[15]

Davis later noted that because of the controversial nature of his task, none of the NGOs that recruited him wanted to be publicly identified as behind the program.[7] In virtually all press dispatches in which he was cited at the time and thereafter, he was identified as a Director of the London-based International Abortion Research and Training Centre.[8]

Following subsequent stints with PSI in Tunisia and India,[3] in 1974 Davis was named PSI's Project Director for Southeast Asia and Oceania,[3] and assumed the direction of PSI Australasia Ltd. Davis held that position for a decade, when he became Director of PSI Australia, from 1984 until his retirement in 1988. The organization initially opened two clinics in the inner Sydney suburbs of Potts Point and Arncliffe, where Davis previously had operated clinics providing abortion services during the 1960s, prior to partial legalization of abortion in New South Wales in 1971. The Potts Point clinic became headquarters of PSI Australasia Ltd.

In 1959, Lancelot Davis reportedly paid £4,500 for a sprawling 50-room, 13,000-square-meter[16] Victorian-era mansion in Sydney's Annandale district known as The Abbey, and gave it to Geoffrey Davis, then age 26, as a gift for the son's having graduated from medical school.

That same year, Davis married his first of three wives,[17] Daune Mary Clark Delano[18] and moved into one of 12 flats in the subdivided compound with his new wife and her two children.[19][20] Over the years, the Abbey was claimed by various members of the Davis family and others to be haunted.[1][21]

A participant in the bohemian-libertarian Sydney Push movement, Davis enjoyed a lavish lifestyle at The Abbey. He "frequently hosted wild parties in the 1960s and '70s"[20] and it was said that "during the acid-dropping, folk singing 1970s, ghost hunters would brave the night with ectoplasmic machines."[22]

A testament to Davis's expensive tastes was his collection of vintage luxury automobiles, which included a 1929 Mercedes-Benz 38/250SS, worth $100,000 when he purchased it from a maharaja's collection in 1977, as well as "a 1938 Hispano-Suiza, a 1933 Delage 28S, a 1954 Ferrari Monza and a couple of modern Maseratis."[23]

After retirement, Davis continued to live at The Abbey, accompanied by several of his children, stepchildren and grandchildren occupying various wings of the property.[1] Following Davis's death, The Abbey was sold by the family at auction for $4.9 million Australian dollars.[16]

Davis died on 3 October 2008 in Australia.[17][3][24]