The 1967 abortion act was a major breakthrough for women. By the twentieth anniversary of its coming into effect, some three million will have had legal abortions. Those twenty years have seen many attempts of the anti-abortion lobby to curb, and of the women's movement to fight for, a woman's right to control her own fertility. The Alton bill and the campaign against it have once more brought the issue to the fore. LEONORA LLOYD argues that the struggle for a woman's right of control over her own body involves much more than defending the '67 act. Like other legislative advances of the sixties, such as on homosexuality, it was seriously flawed.
DAVID STEEL'S bill, introduced in 1966, received the royal assent on October 27 1967, coming into effect six months later. The delay was in order to give the NHS more time to gear up for the expected demand for newly legal abortions. This the NHS singularly failed to do.
In April 1966 the Family Planning Association's conference on abortion totally underestimated the demand there would be for legal abortion. It was estimated that there were some 80,000-100,000 illegal abortions, based on surveys, numbers of women who died or suffered other bad effects, and police prosecutions.
In fact, numbers of deaths had been dropping steadily, for a variety of reasons. It had been possible for some time to get legal abortions. A Doctor Bourne performed an abortion in 1938 on a fourteen year old victim of multiple rape and the subsequent court case decided that 'danger to life' included severe mental and physical harm to the woman. This meant that doctors performing abortions in good faith, usually after getting the opinions of two psychiatrists, were safe from prosecution. As the moral climate changed, more abortions were performed in this way.
In addition, 'D and Cs' (scraping the womb, usually to relieve menstrual problems) became a euphemism under which semi-legal abortions were done, often privately. Other women escaped to the more liberal countries, such as Sweden and Switzerland, for abortions, but this was only for the wealthy.
For the poor, Friday, pay day, continued to be the day that gynaecologists cleared the ward of all those who could be sent home in anticipation of the flood of those who did-it-themselves or went around the corner to the neighbourhood abortionist. Improved treatment of sepsis meant that deaths from illegal abortion dropped before 1968, even in these cases. Death rates in countries like Sweden dropped faster still.
The FPA conference believed that there would still be a considerable number of illegal abortions under any change in the law that they could envisage. One speaker estimated that only 25,000 of the supposed 100,000 would be carried out in hospitals post-legalisation. Chief amongst the reasons for his pessimism was the anti-abortion attitudes of doctors and nurses. He also estimated that the chances of dying from an abortion were twice those of dying from childbirth. Another speaker saw concern about safety as the major reason for 'control of abortion'.
It should be remembered that, until fairly recently, abortion liberalisation rarely came about as the result of popular agitation — it has been pressure from medical personnel and others concerned about the toll on women's health who have been in the forefront of change. Although working class women's organisations took up the issue in this country, they never succeeded in taking it into the broader labour movement. It was not until already-secured rights were under threat that women became involved in the issue in large numbers.
This explains why the act took the form it did. It did not repeal the section of the 1861 offences against the person act, making abortion illegal. It created exceptions to that act, leaving the decision in the hands of not one, but two, doctors.
The doctors had to give 'grounds' for granting an abortion, and these reflected what were seen as the major porblems confronting women seeking them. First came health, and abortion was allowed when it would be more dangerous to continue the pregnancy. What happened, in fact, was that with the tremendous increase in legal abortion, and with the development of new techniques, doctors increased their skills to the point where abortion was almost always going to be safer than continuing a pregnancy to term.
Anti-abortionists manage both to seek to magnify the dangers of legal abortion, and to argue that this clause allows 'abortion on demand', especially when coupled with the requirement in the act for the doctor to take into account the present and foreseeable conditions of the woman — the well-known so-called 'social clause'.
Other grounds for abortion include the current or foreseeable effect on any other children the mother may have now or in the future (for example, where a child is handicapped and another child would overburden the mother); or where there is a risk of the child being born handicapped. The grounds do not, for example, specify abortion after rape, perhaps because it was assumed that pregnancy in that situation would affect the woman's mental health enough to be covered already; but what of the case of the woman who is strong enough to cope with the rape, but still does not want to carry a rapist's child?
Overall, the act turned out to be paternalistic — women who needed abortions were seen as essentially unable to make important decisions in their own interests, proved by the fact that they had managed to 'get themselves' pregnant in the first place. It is perhaps significant that, in practice, the most often cited ground is the mental health of the woman, with 'depression' the single most used diagnosis. We have not moved very far from the pre-1967 days when a woman with an unwanted pregnancy was viewed as mentally unable to cope with her situation. Certainly that is enough to make anyone depressed!
As well as these inherent flaws, the act, as history has shown, was wide open for amendment and attacks. There had been a lot of argument during its passage, for example, about how seriously ill the woman had to be and how high the risk of malformation of the fetus. These sort of debates were repeated each time an attempt was made to amend the bill. Even more important, there was no provision in the act for health authorities to be obliged to provide facilities.
When the act came into operation on April 27 1968 the hospitals soon became overwhelmed. Charities, run by those who had worked for years to get the act, and private clinics, run by those with rather less pure motives, soon came into being, the latter especially being a target of media abuse.
Until June 1975, when the first National Abortion Campaign (NAC) demonstration was held, public discussion of abortion was very low key. Even so, a poll conducted by the anti-abortionists as part of their lead-up to the James White bill in February 1975, showed that those supporting abortion on demand (thirteen per cent) were greater than those who opposed it entirely (nine per cent), with the majority supporting abortion in a wide variety of cases (with handicap the highest, as it still remains, alongside rape).
The existence of NAC, born of the women's movement, changed the terms of the debate, because for the first time the issue was taken squarely into the labour movement. Union after union adopted pro-'67 act policy or a woman's right to choose, culminating in the TUC accepting abortion rights in 1977, when they were written into a revised version of its 'aims for women at work'.
The first mass campaign organised by NAC was against a bill proposed by Glasgow Labour MP James White. By the time of the William Benyon bill, in 1976, NAC's aims had gone far beyond the '67 act, as its shortcomings became clear. An umbrella, united front campaign was therefore set up, specifically to fight the Benyon bill, and this tactic was repeated, with even greater success, with the campaign against Corrie. Recently, NAC has been instrumental in setting up the campaign to fight the latest attack — Alton's bill.
What benefits has the act brought women? Why are we working so hard to defend such a flawed act against this latest attack?
By the twentieth anniversary of the act some three million women will have had an abortion. With few deaths and a low rate of illness, this represents a huge gain for women's health.
Women have above all gained from being able to plan their lives. The insistence that we have the right of control over our own bodies has had repercussions for those fighting for freedom to express their own sexuality and for women wanting more control over the process of giving birth.
For young women, the availability of abortion has had most effect. Far fewer 'shotgun' marriages or 'seven month babies' now occur. Women no longer feel compelled to marry because they are pregnant. They can now make a choice between abortion, or keeping the baby or adoption.
Legal abortion is not the same thing as sexual equality or freedom for women. But it is a necessary prerequisite. Women do not use abortion as a form of contraception and the increased use of contraception does not prevent abortion, far from it. Once women accept the idea that they can control their fertility, if their contraception lets them down, they are far readier to turn to abortion as a back up.
It is this feeling of wanting to maintain control that is behind the massive responses from women each time the right to abortion is attacked. What has become taken for granted becomes threatened. Anti-abortionists know that women will not stop having abortions — the question is, will those abortions be safe and legal, or will they be illegal? Women know that legal abortion is worth fighting for.