\n<\/p>\n
When the 1967 Abortion Act cleared parliament, marking one of the most significant steps forward for women\u2019s rights in history, Diane Munday was among the campaigners raising a glass of champagne on the terrace of the House of Commons.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m only drinking a half a glass,\u201d she told her colleagues at the time, \u201cbecause the job is only half done.\u201d<\/p>\n
And, she was right. \u201cFifty years later, women were still going to prison,\u201d says Munday, who co-founded the British Pregnancy Advice Service. She was also a leading member of the Abortion Law Reform Association during the 1960s and 1970s and is a patron of Humanists UK.<\/p>\n
The 94-year-old campaigner still spends most of her days at work in her home office, where evidence of her passion is clear: from the bookshelf stacked with titles about abortion, to the notes tacked above her desk, to the filing cabinet stuffed with decades of history.<\/p>\n
Various green swing files contain press cuttings, or copies of private members\u2019 bills printed on acetate. One, labelled \u201ccrank letters\u201d, is full of handwritten notes calling her a \u201cmurderer\u201d and \u201cmoral leper\u201d living a \u201clife of whoremongery.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the opposition she has encountered, Munday is undeterred. Ahead of a landmark vote in parliament early this summer, she was among the voices calling for change.<\/p>\n
In what has been hailed as the most significant advance for reproductive rights since 1967, parliament passed an amendment put forward by Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi to the crime and policing bill, which sought to end the criminal investigation and prosecution of women who terminate their pregnancies.<\/p>\n
This followed a series of high-profile prosecutions in which women were hauled before the courts for ending pregnancies outside the strict legal framework.<\/p>\n
Munday\u2019s passion is personal as well as political. In 1961, when she was already a mother to three young boys, she had an abortion.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d known a young woman who died, she lived near us in London, she was a dressmaker,\u201d she said. \u201cLike me, she was married with three young children. She had a pregnancy she found intolerable, she went to the back streets and she died.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe raised \u00a390, I went to Harley Street and I was alive. And the unfairness, the injustice of that, is I think what drove me all those years. I\u2019ve never forgotten her.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the 1960s, Munday threw herself into building public support for the abortion bill, in the knowledge that this was needed for it to clear parliament.<\/p>\n
She had started by lobbying politicians directly but said the prime minister of the day, Harold Wilson, had described abortion as \u201ca petty middle-class reform\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cGo away and prove to me the country wants it, and then come back again,\u201d Wilson told her.<\/p>\n
And so she addressed meetings of the Women\u2019s Institute, Rotary and the Townswomen\u2019s Guild, asking them to pass motions in favour of law reform.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went and they all wore gloves and hats and were very respectable,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I stood up and I said \u2018I have had an abortion\u2019 and one after another at the tea interval they came up to me and said things like \u2018I had an abortion. You\u2019re the only person except my husband that knows, it was during the depression\u2019 or \u2018my husband was out of work\u2019. This became the pattern wherever I went.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven my mother admitted that a very close relative had had an abortion and my mother had looked after her afterwards. Wherever I went \u2018I had an abortion, I had an abortion, I\u2019ve never told anybody\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it became obvious that this was common, that it was a thing that women did, but didn\u2019t talk about. The word wasn\u2019t written or spoken in those days, and that drove me on, because I kept remembering the woman I\u2019d known.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the vote in June, Munday is not ready to drink a full glass of champagne because she wants abortion to be fully decriminalised.<\/p>\n
She said: \u201cParliamentarians need to get rid of the restrictions \u2013 the two doctors [who must sign off an abortion] \u2013 make it readily available.\u201d<\/p>\n
Munday follows the news on abortion through internet alerts set up for the term and she is worried \u201ca great deal\u201d by the situation in the US. In 2022, the country\u2019s supreme court overturned the historic Roe v Wade ruling, which in 1973 had guaranteed women the constitutional right to an abortion.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always saw America as being a sort of \u2018modern society\u2019 and it\u2019s going backwards, and that worries me hugely,\u201d she added. \u201cAmerican women have got to get up and fight for what they want.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nigel Farage has called for a reduction in the abortion time limit and Munday said the Reform UK leader \u201ccould be the next prime minister the way things are going\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, she hopes that the younger makeup of parliament may counter any attempts to curtail reproductive rights: \u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019d see abortion rights restricted, because they would have grown up with it legal.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also welcomed the news in October that emergency contraception would become more readily available. \u201cThat is a big step forward,\u201d she said. \u201cThe morning-after pill, free of charge from any pharmacist, that\u2019s a huge advance.\u201d<\/p>\n
When she raised that half glass of champagne on the terrace of parliament, Munday said \u201cno way\u201d would she have expected, that 60 years later, abortion would still not be fully decriminalised.<\/p>\n
There are members of parliament who want to bring in a new, modern abortion act, relevant to the 21st century. Munday said this would be \u201camazing\u201d but she was \u201cnot very optimistic\u201d that it would happen in her lifetime.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was what I always aimed at from the early 1960s,\u201d she added. \u201cThat has been the thing I thought should be available.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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