135 See BPAS We Trust Women campaign at www.wetrustwomen.org.uk/. 74 For some interesting (including some apocryphal) examples, see Law Commission Legal Curiosities: Fact or Fable?, available at www.lawcom.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Legal_Oddities.pdf. It takes seriously the insight that written norms are rooted in the past, enshrining a certain set of historically contingent values and practices, yet that as linguistic structures that can impact on the world only through acts of interpretation they are simultaneously constantly evolving. Reflections on the 1967 Abortion Act; The myth of safe, legal and rare 4 Editorial Let the Act act (Medical News Tribune, 13 February 1970) 14. A biography of the Abortion Act can also offer a window onto a range of significant changes across time.Footnote 156 First, the broad meaning given to the requirement that an abortion be performed by a registered medical practitioner reflected technological developments that had moved abortion out of the operating theatre, making it a far safer, technically less demanding procedure.Footnote 157 An analysis of the interpretation and implementation of this provision of the Abortion Act might also offer an insight into health professionals changing roles within the interdisciplinary medical team, with RCN revealing the dominance of medicine over nursing and midwifery in the early 1980s.Footnote 158 For Lord Denning, a restrictive interpretation of the Act was necessary to protect nurses, young women who are dedicated by their profession and training to do all they can to preserve life from soul-destroying work, by requiring those doctors minded to prescribe abortions to perform them themselves.Footnote 159 The contrary interpretation, adopted by a slim majority in the House of Lords, relied on the view that the nurses actions were legally those of the doctors, representing nurses as little more than doctors handmaidens.Footnote 160 Each view stands in stark contrast to a far less hierarchical, contemporary view that the different professions each bring discrete competences to a multidisciplinary team effort.Footnote 161, Secondly, today Bloom's view that abortion should be available to any woman who wants one has become a widespread orthodoxy within modern British abortion services, at least in the context of early pregnancy.Footnote 162 The dominance of the corresponding, permissive interpretation of the Abortion Act may be read as reflecting broader shifts in jurisprudence and professional ethics, which have each moved away from an acceptance of paternalism (where a doctor's duty of beneficence towards the patient might justify his or her primary responsibility for important decisions) towards a strong foregrounding of the need to respect patient autonomy.Footnote 163 Changes in the application of the Act might also reflect a growing public acceptance of women's rights to control their own fertility and the consequent need for abortion services as an integral part of women's healthcare. While Bloom's detailed questioning of Kentish would be seen as unnecessary and inappropriately intrusive today, the practices described by the Daily Mail would surely have been deemed illegal in the 1970s. While the relevant statutory text at issue has remained unaltered since Bloom, this central aspect of how the Act is operationalised within clinical practice has changed significantly since the 1970s. At the time of writing, extensive and previously unstudied resources on Babies for Burning were held by BPAS, which was named in the investigation and actively involved in rebutting its allegations. 91 Steel, HC Deb, vol 732, cols 1075, 22 July 1966. These recommendations were broadly endorsed by a Select Committee and followed by the Government.Footnote 45 The use of regulation here emerged as an important means of seeking to address concerns regarding the operation of the Act, in a way which avoided allowing Parliament the opportunity to amend it,Footnote 46 a role which it has continued to play. Seen as a successor to the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the new Act encompasses significant structural changes to healthcare services. 107 Bloom, above n 52. 127 Litchfield and Kentish, above n 24, p 182. Occasional depression sometimes? The 1967 Abortion Act, which still regulates abortion practice, did not grant women the right to end an unwanted pregnancy. While 2,800 legal terminations were reported in the whole of 1962, almost 10,000 were performed in the fourth quarter of 1968 alone.Footnote 29 Numbers continued to increase rapidly over subsequent years, reaching 167,149 in 1973 for England and Wales alone, before declining slightly over subsequent years.Footnote 30 With Britain at the international vanguard of liberalising legislation, particular concern was provoked by the fact that over 50,000 of these were abortion tourists, seeking to avoid more restrictive laws elsewhere.Footnote 31 The immediate impact within the NHS, where no additional resources had been made available to cope with increased demand, was dramatic. While in 1967, doctors had performed abortions using surgical techniques, by the early 1980s many second trimester abortions were carried out using drugs to provoke uterine contractions, a process which might last anything up to 1830 hours.Footnote 79 In these procedures, it was common practice for a doctor to insert a catheter into the woman and then to remain available on call, while all steps directly causative of the abortion were carried out by a nurse or midwife. Campaigners Call For Urgent Abortion Law Reform After Woman Is - ELLE Abortion Act 1967: 50th Anniversary - TheyWorkForYou . In 1970, some 10% of consultant gynaecologists freely allowed access to abortion; 6% objected to it in any circumstances; and the rest interpreted the Abortion Act as seemed best to them in the light of their medical knowledge and the patient's needs,Footnote 27 no doubt representing the full spectrum of more permissive and restrictive interpretations beyond these two extremes. This would have required that women should be offered independent counselling before accessing abortion services, with independent defined to include only statutory bodies and those private organisations which had no financial interest in providing abortion services.Footnote 133 The same concern was clear in Maria Caulfield MP's opposition to a recent Ten Minute Rule Bill seeking the decriminalisation of abortion. GPs tended towards a more liberal reading of the Act, contributing to a significant, immediate increase in referrals into the NHS. While still stigmatised, abortion services are now entrenched as an essential part of mainstream healthcare, with almost all procedures funded by the NHS.Footnote 110 Bloom's belief that one must respect a woman's right to choose has become widespread within abortion services, with the majority of abortions provided by charities operating with an explicitly pro-choice vision; and entrenched in professional guidance.Footnote 111 This is reflected in how the law is interpreted in day-to-day practice.Footnote 112 Women's experience of accessing services will thus be very different in 2018, notwithstanding the fact that such access is governed by exactly the same statutory requirements. Copyright The Society of Legal Scholars 2018. In 1967, the Abortion Act was passed, providing a statutory framework for the provision of legal abortion in England, Wales and Scotland. In 1974, shortly before Lane was due to report and with controversy regarding the Act at its peak, a storm erupted around allegations made by two freelance journalists in a series of reports in the News of the World under the banner, Phantom Babies,Footnote 47 and later a book, Babies for Burning.Footnote 48 Michael Litchfield and Susan Kentish promised: a terrifyingly stark and graphic account of two people probing every facet of the private sector of the abortion industry. Total loading time: 0 'Having fear of death before me': life before the 1967 Abortion Act 179 Ewick, P and Silbey, S The Common Place of Law (University of Chicago Press, 1998) p 20Google Scholar, criticise the law-first tradition of legal scholarship as excluding study of how, where, and with what effect law is produced in and through commonplace social interactions; see further Cowan, D Legal consciousness: some observations (2004) 67(6) MLR 928CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Abortion in the United Kingdom is de facto available under the terms of the Abortion Act 1967 in Great Britain and the Abortion (Northern Ireland) (No.2) Regulations 2020 in Northern Ireland. 71 Clinicians were seen signing piles of 3060 forms, on the basis of just the reason for termination information noted on the back, without necessarily having access to all patient information. Similarly, the biography of one important statute can offer a unique appreciation of the operation of that one law and a narrow focus for analysing important trends in the broad sweep of history throughout its duration, as well as casting broader light on the way in which any law acquires meaning over its lifetime. 77 For critical discussion of this approach, typically associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement see Solum, LB On the indeterminacy crisis: critiquing critical dogma (1987) 54 University of Chicago Law Review 462CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 82 A letter from the RCOG President (17 December 1979) expresses dismay at ongoing indecision about the correct meaning of the 1967 Act, RCOG/A/16/19. Biography is taken as a useful shorthand for an approach which requires simultaneous attention to continuity and change in the historical study of a law's life. Individual doctors enjoy wide discretion under this provision and, unsurprisingly, they have exercised it to different effect. We acknowledge with gratitude the AHRC's support for our research (The Abortion Act (1967): a biography; AH/N00213X/1; www.kent.ac.uk/law/aa1967/index.html). I then discuss the reasons for the development of a policy about abortion counselling in the 1970s, and that policy's relationship to the assumptions about women underlying the statute. It's done before [you get to the clinic]. PolitiFact | How state abortion laws changed after the Dobbs decision View all Google Scholar citations Abortion in early America - PubMed Abortion is a divisive issue in American politics and culture wars, with widely different abortion laws in U.S. states.Since 1976, the Republican Party has generally sought to restrict abortion access based on the stage of pregnancy or to criminalize abortion, whereas the Democratic Party has generally defended access to abortion and has made contraception easier to obtain. Abortion Act 1967: Summary, Law & UK | StudySmarter The distinction is not that subtle.Footnote 102 Kentish told the Court that they had found that the Abortion Act was abused and treated with contempt:Footnote 103, We looked at the letter [to the gynaecologist, setting out Bloom's reasons for approving the abortion], we compared it with the consultation and we found it quite amazing and shocking that he should write this letter on the basis of such a consultation and could indeed sign an abortion form. 27 Lewis, TRT The Abortion Act (1967): findings of an inquiry into the first year's working of the act conducted by the RCOG (1970) 2 BMJ 529Google Scholar. 132 Bristow, J The Sociology of Generations: New Directions and Challenges (London: Palgrave, 2016) ch 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Abortion Act 1967 1967 CHAPTER 87. Surviving materials from a long range of historical periods and different "corePageComponentUseShareaholicInsteadOfAddThis": true, A statute acquires meaning across its life both through judicial determination and through the local, interpretative work of those who work within it. 80 Letter to doctors and nursing officers from Dame Phyllis Friend (CNO) and H Yellowlees (CMO), 21 February 1980, RCOG/A/16/19. Abortion Law Reform - CMF From the outset, a large majority of abortions were authorised on the basis of the first such ground: that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family,Footnote 88 with doctors able to take account of the pregnant woman's actual or reasonably foreseeable environment in reaching their decision.Footnote 89 While this wording left considerable scope for clinical discretion,Footnote 90 it had not been intended by the Act's sponsor that it should leave a wide open door for abortion on request.Footnote 91 However, just as a broad interpretation has given the Act a meaning capable of accommodating technical developments in abortion methods, so too has there been clear evolution in understandings of appropriate decision-making within the terms of the Act, with existing medical practice again offering an important reference point in giving it meaning.Footnote 92, As noted above, individual clinicians interpreted this provision of the Act differently, with charities and private practice developing to offer abortions where NHS services were unavailable. Finally, it suggests that consideration of a law can offer a unique window through which to explore these broader contexts, serving as a thread of continuity through changing times.Footnote 167. The failure of the Abortion Act 1967 in Great Britain The current abortion legislation does not protect all women. Theory and Practice, Doctors handmaidens: the legal contribution, A muted voice from the past: the silent silencing of Ruth Ellis, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Images of Welfare: Press and Public Attitudes to Poverty, Nanotechnology and the products of inherited regulation, Promoting dialogue between history and socio-legal studies: the contribution of Christopher W Brooks and the legal turn in early modern English history, Beyond Law in Context: Developing a Sociological Understanding of Law, www.lawcom.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Legal_Oddities.pdf, www.rcgp.org.uk/policy/rcgp-policy-areas/~/media/Files/Policy/A-Z-policy/RCGP_Position_Statement_on_Abortion.ashx. 87 Letter to the CMO from JS Metters Medical Induction Terminations (12 November 1980), NA MH156/579. Most of these laws were ambiguous and difficult to enforce. an attempt was then made to bring reform via two amendments introduced by individual backbench Alliance MLAs to a criminal justice Bill.172 The first sought to permit abortion in the presence of a fatal . He operated openly from an address at the heart of the medical establishment, requiring moderate payment by the standards of Harley Street. The ILP Act still stands, setting the legal . But the project is finite, and when your exploration is finished you will have, not only a unique appreciation of the particular cave, but a better feeling for geology in general.Footnote 184. and Historical data show that induced termination of pregnancy has been performed since the time of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks.2 In Britain, abortion was illegal in the 19th century and a significant number of women were suffering and dying as a result of illegal abortions. What are the UK's laws on abortion? - BBC News 85 [1981] 1 All ER 545, Lord Diplock, 56970; Lord Keith, 575; Lord Roskill, 577. L IKE MANY laws governing controversial matters, the Abortion Act of 1967 was a compromise. 123 T Stanley Scrapping the Human Rights Act won't abolish human rights (Telegraph, 1 June 2015). 46 The then Health Minister has described his reluctance to allow Parliament to vote again on abortion law reform and the role played by regulation in staving off this possibility: Owen, David Time to Declare (London: Michael Joseph, 1991) p 229Google Scholar. 21 Describing the difficulty of writing her own memoir, Woolf observed, I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream: Woolf, V Sketch of the past in Moments of Being (London: Pimlico, 2002) p 90Google Scholar. 5 M Muggeridge What the abortion argument is about (Sunday Times, 2 February 1975). It also involves the accumulation and entrenchment of, and occasional points of rupture in, public narratives reflecting what the law symbolises in broader socio-cultural terms. for Roxburgh and Selkirk, secured a second reading for his Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill " to amend and clarify the law " by an unprecedented 223-29 vote in the House of Commons. The Abortion Act (1967): a biography | Legal Studies | Cambridge Core 137 Litchfield and Kentish, above n 24, p 76. Home Health and social care National Health Service Correspondence Abortion Act 1967 (As Amended): Termination of Pregnancy Letter to all those involved in providing and commissioning treatment. 161 Lady Hale has read RCN to mean that the statutory requirement is met when the abortion is a team effort carried out under [the doctor's] direction, with the doctor performing those tasks that are reserved to a doctor and the nurses and others carrying out those tasks which they are qualified to perform. D Munday Introduction in A Book for Banishing: Special Supplement, BPAS Newsletter Feb 78, BPAS Unnamed 1, 1. Bloom assessed Kentish in her guise of a married woman who simply did not want children. Thy will be done.Footnote 131. The parliamentary debates surrounding David Steele's Bill, which became the 1967 Act demonstrate why the legislation failed to adequately . This was reduced to 24 weeks in 1990. Abortion in NI: Timeline of key events - BBC News 37 D Devlin Investigating the abortion laws (General Practitioner, 1 November 1974). This would have prevented charitable abortion service providers from counselling women who they then might go on to treat. 151 Norrie, K Abortion in Great Britain: one act, two laws (1985) Crim L Rev 475Google Scholar. The processes of negotiation and mutual accommodation involved in how an Act is applied and how it impacts in practice always require empirical investigation.Footnote 118 A biographical approach relies upon this fundamental socio-legal insight, while foregrounding the need to be attentive to both continuity (in the written text and the settling of received interpretations) and change (amendment to the text, evolution or points of rupture in those interpretations). The Impact of the Abortion Act 1967 in Great Britain - SAGE Journals The historical background to the 1967 Abortion Act 1.1 The long perspective 1.1.1 For many centuries women have endeavoured to implement retroactive birth control by means of abortion. The Act was introduced to allow abortion for the 'hard cases' and yet 50 years on we are ending more than 1 in 5 pregnancies, with 97 per cent of abortions being carried out on what have become very dubious mental health grounds. the woman is at risk of grave physical and . 183 Generally Cowan and Wincott, above n 19; Ewick and Silbey, above n 179. 17 Eg Gosden, C and Marshall, Y The cultural biography of objects (1999) 31(2) World Archaeology 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mukherjee, S The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (London: Fourth Estate, 2011)Google Scholar; Ackroyd, P, London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000)Google Scholar. 121 Paton v BPAS [1978] 2 All ER 987 at 992. As for any human subject, these broader narratives form an essential aspect of its story. "useRatesEcommerce": true 56 Kentish, Bloom above n 53, cross-examination of Mrs Susan Kentish, transcript at 7, BPAS Misc 2. Extensive documentation relating to each action was held in the BPAS archive. The 1967 Abortion Act legalised abortions in certain circumstances in England, Scotland, and Wales. Prior to this Act, everything a woman owned or earned became her husband's property when she married. Cf Denning MR, 557. 136 CQC, above n 70; Faulkner and Smyth, above n 23. Abortion: a public health issue | The BMJ The files are now held by the Wellcome Library, which has made some of them publicly available. 97 Excepting that the News of the World reported that Bloom had asked just 41 questions, while the tape recorded over twice that number. For example, however convincingly this story was subsequently rebutted, one thing that some people know about the Human Rights Act (1998) is that it allows an illegal immigrant to avoid deportation if he has a pet cat,Footnote 122 with this playing to a broader concern that the Act offers an affront to common sense British values and sovereignty.Footnote 123 Such narratives can enjoy a significant influence, despite having no self-evident, direct relationship to the legal meaning of the text of a law as it exists on the books.Footnote 124 Notably, what a law comes to symbolise in the popular imagination is crucial in shaping opinion regarding the need for its retention, reform or abolition. The legislation he was seeking to amend was contained in the Offences against the Person . It allowed women to be the legal owners of money they earned, and to inherit property. Timeline of the Women's Liberation Movement | The British Library Some exploited the greater freedom offered by the Act, battening on hard-up girls to offer abortions with the minimum amount of care for the maximum of money.Footnote 37 Later abortions emerged as a focus of particular controversy, with regular horror stories reported of live aborted fetuses left to die without basic care.Footnote 38 An early report went further still, claiming that whole live fetuses were being sold for use in research.Footnote 39 While ultimately shown to be unfounded or misleading, each of these initial reports gained far more attention than the subsequent investigations disproving their claims.Footnote 40. The Abortion Act was never intended to be the end of the campaign for women's reproductive rights. Generally Sheldon, S British abortion law: speaking from the past to govern the future (2016) 79(2) Modern Law Review 283CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 170 Ballinger, A A muted voice from the past: the silent silencing of Ruth Ellis (2012) 21(4) SLS 445Google Scholar, showing how the appeal in Ruth Ellis's case, 48 years after her trial and execution, reveals important continuities within the operation of the legal system with respect to the social control of women. 172 Eg Hall, S et al. 26 Abortion Act 1967, s 1(1). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Following a conception in decades of political struggle, 1 the Act was born at the height of the sexual revolution as part of a raft of liberalising legislation. 165 Joy, J Reinvigorating object biography (2009) 41(4) World Archaeology 540CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 545. Lane, above n 31, at [279(1)] reported giving anxious consideration to these stories but finding no evidence for any case of a fetus of less than 24 weeks gestation being viable. The 1967 Abortion Act took the concept of wellbeing further, by indicating that an abortion was lawful if 'the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman' (emphasis added). While we must leave it to others to explore what insights might be gleaned in the study of other specific laws, we have suggested that this approach has much to contribute to understanding the Abortion Act (1967), a statute which has exhibited considerable longevity in an evolving, highly controversial field. While such a position is fiercely contested, some have gone so far as to argue that the existing body of legal doctrines permits a judge to justify any result he or she desires in any particular case.Footnote 77, Relatively few cases regarding the Abortion Act have been considered by the courts, with still fewer reaching the Supreme Court or its predecessor, the House of Lords.Footnote 78 However, before turning to the focus on clinical decision-making at the heart of the two stings discussed above, it is worth offering one of these cases as a brief illustration of how legal meaning can be created by courts. A focus on the medical gatekeeper role and critical scrutiny of the appropriate exercise of clinical discretion was also central to the recent Daily Mail sting, which strongly echoes some of the allegations made in Babies for Burning. Most recently, a Daily Mail investigation followed up on the findings of a Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection of MSI.Footnote 70 The CQC had identified a string of flaws in service provision ranging from basic failures in governance, clinical care and safeguarding, to criticism of how the approval requirements under the Abortion Act were met, with doctors seen bulk signing abortion certificates.Footnote 71 The Mail investigation was far more limited than Babies for Burning in its scope. 49 Litchfield and Kentish, above n 24, back cover. The Abortion Act (1967) applies in England, Wales and Scotland but not Northern Ireland. . 51 Minutes of Evidence, House of Commons Select Committee on the Abortion Amendment Bill (7 July 1975), [1282][1294], [1301]. Background to Abortion Legislation | Feminist Fightback 102 Bloom transcript, above n 52. 120 Eg Lord Denning MR, RCN, above n 78, at 554; Cooke J, R v Catt (17 September 2012) at [15]. It reported some of the CQC's concerns and described how Mail journalists were apparently accepted as eligible for terminations services on the basis of a brief conversation with a call centre worker.Footnote 72 While the CQC inspection report was widely reported by the national press, the Mail sting received relatively little coverage in other mainstream media. 3 Passing the Abortion Act 1967 - Oxford Academic 158 Montgomery, J Doctors handmaidens: the legal contribution in McVeigh, S and Wheeler, S (eds) Health, Health Regulation and the Law (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1992) p 141Google Scholar. Abortion jail sentences are a public scandal - The Telegraph From 1776 until the mid-1800s abortion was viewed as socially unacceptable; however, abortions were not illegal in most states. The Mail investigation claimed, however, that MSI doctors approved abortions for women who would be signed off based on only a brief conversation with a call staff worker, with exploration of the woman's reasons for ending a pregnancy lasting as little as just 22 seconds. The ways in which policy has 76 Some interviewees in an Irish study were reluctant to speak about abortion law reform, wrongly believing even this was illegal under laws restricting the provision of information regarding abortion services: International, Amnesty She is not a Criminal: the Impact of Ireland's Abortion Laws (London: AI, 2015)Google Scholar. Today, contestation rather focuses on whether either of the two certifying doctors must see the woman in person and how much time is needed in order to reach a good faith view,Footnote 116 with the Mail and CQC reports suggesting that the bar is now set at a low level.
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