Geoffrey Lancelot Rutter Davis (1933–2008) was an Australian medical doctor, who rose to prominence in Sydney in the 1970s as a leading provider of contraception and abortion services.
He was raised in the Sydney suburb of Strathfield[2] and attended the private Anglican-run Trinity Grammar School for boys, graduating in 1950.
[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.
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.
[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.
Preterm director Dorothy Nolan indicated "darker suspicions", later telling the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper that a doctor "who had run a lucrative abortion business in Arncliffe" had been making repeated threatening phone calls to her home.
[31] In a June 1977 during a closed-door meeting in Canberra of the Royal Commission on Human Relationships, the women submitted confidential testimony outlining conditions and practices at PSI clinics.
[33][34] The details of those business and property holdings were also in the possession of the six PSI staff who resigned in protest in December 1976 and were subsequently published in the pamphlet ABORTION: OUR BODIES, THEIR POWER.
Complaining of severe abdominal pains, she into shock and was given a blood transfusion, before being rushed to the Royal Hospital, where a partial hysterectomy was performed and remnants of a 4.3 cm foetal head left by Davis in her cervix had to be removed.
That same year, Davis married his first of three wives,[42] Daune Mary Clark Delano[43] and moved into one of 12 flats in the subdivided compound with his new wife and her two children.
He "frequently hosted wild parties in the 1960s and 1970s"[45] and it was said that "during the acid-dropping, folk singing 1970s, ghost hunters would brave the night with ectoplasmic machines.
"[48] After retirement, Davis continued to live at The Abbey, accompanied by several of his children, stepchildren and grandchildren occupying various wings of the property.