Dr Celia Nolan – a doctor who helped change women’s lives

WHEN Dr Celia Nolan arrived in Coffs Harbour in 1980, the city was growing rapidly, with young families pouring into new housing developments, but Celia says the healthcare available to women had not kept pace.

“Proper female care was not available to these women,” she recalls.

“Local women who needed an abortion had to travel to Sydney or Brisbane.”

Four decades later, the Coffs Harbour Women’s Health Centre is celebrating its 40th anniversary, having grown from the grassroots willpower of local women who wanted better health services in their community.

Celia was one of those women – bringing to Coffs not only her medical expertise, but decades of experience fighting for women’s access to contraception, sexual health education and safe abortion.

Now 96 and living with daughter Julia overlooking Park Beach, Celia has little interest in looking back sentimentally.

Her philosophy remains as uncompromising as ever.

“Without justice there is no equality,” she says.

“Women have an inalienable right to their own bodies and reproductive choices.”

It was a philosophy forged early in her medical career.

Celia was only 16 when she began her medical degree. She graduated in 1953, one of just 37 women among 211 graduates.

“They had nothing about birth control in our lectures,” she recalls.

Her career changed direction when she became involved in establishing a modern Family Planning Association in Sydney, helping establish clinics and delivering sex education to schools, universities, television audiences and communities across NSW.

She even travelled to Bourke with the assistance of the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

At one point, she was agony aunt – Dr Dorothy – for The Australian Women’s Weekly, answering questions from women aged in their teens to their 80s.

Then came the defining chapter of her career.

In 1974, Celia – then known professionally as Dr Dorothy Nolan – became clinical director of Preterm, established in Sydney to provide women with safe abortion and sympathetic counselling without forcing them to “shop around” for a doctor.

It was controversial from the beginning.

Preterm attracted large protests from anti-abortion activists and, in 1975, its premises were destroyed by fire. Celia later spoke of threats and her belief that opponents of the clinic were responsible, although the suspected arson was never proved.

This did not deter Celia however, the principle was simple: women deserved safe medical care and the ability to make decisions about their own bodies.

In 1980, after raising their three children, Celia and husband Brian decided to settle in Coffs Harbour. It’s no surprise that Celia brought with her a determination for improving the health services for local women.

She quickly became involved with the local Women’s Electoral Lobby and other women working to improve services. Together, they researched local women’s needs, advocated for better services and built the foundations of what became the Coffs Harbour Women’s Health Centre, which opened in 1986.

Her own GP practice on Park Beach Road soon evolved into a women’s family health service.

Women could come through the doors for cervical screening, breast checks, contraception and family-planning education – services that were not routinely available through Coffs GPs at the time.

It was important, Celia says, that women could access the service simply by “walking up to the doors” – and whether they were married or not.

“Even obtaining the ‘Morning After Pill’ was difficult. You couldn’t just walk into a pharmacy and ask for what you needed,” she says.

Her advocacy extended beyond her medical practice.

She was involved in the local women’s refuge and became the only doctor available at one point to treat women and children there. She worked with schools, police, social workers, hospital staff and counsellors around sexual assault and women’s health, while also serving as a regional member of the NSW Premier’s Women’s Advisory Group.

Celia’s leadership, medical knowledge and relentless energy were an important part of this movement of local women in the 1980s determined to improve women’s health services.

Her work was recognised when she was named Coffs Harbour Citizen of the Year in 1983 and awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 1985 for services to medicine and the community.

Today, women in Coffs Harbour have access to reproductive healthcare that would have seemed almost unimaginable when Celia arrived. Medical abortion is available locally, including through GPs and dedicated services, while surgical abortion is also available.

For Celia, that progress is not simply a matter of medical advancement.

It is about justice.

Her daughter Julia is immensely proud of what her mother achieved, particularly because it produced tangible change for women.

“Many of her patients described her as kind, but from my mother’s viewpoint, what she did was simply good medical care,” Julia says.

And perhaps that is the best way to understand a woman who has spent a lifetime pushing open doors for others. She wasn’t looking for gratitude.

She believed women had a right to walk through those doors in the first place.

By Leigh WATSON