Abstract
The Abortion Act 1967: A Biography of a UK Law is a social, political and cultural history of the iconic UK law reform of the late 1960s which opened the way for the widespread provision of lawful and safer abortions in England, Scotland and Wales. A biography of an act of parliament highlights its changing nature and its interaction with society and culture over time. Virginia Woolf's claim that ‘biography must offer the story of the stream as well as that of the fish’ (p. 19) is quoted.
Sheldon, a legal scholar, and advocate for liberalisation of the law, and her three co-authors, all historians, have combined expert archival research and historical perspective with critical understanding of the law to produce a detailed and sharp account of the 50 plus year life of the Abortion Act 1967. Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the depth of research is impressive. The authors identified the over 60 legislative attempts to amend the Act from 1969 until 2021, the over 40 court cases interpreting the Act over the same period and the related UK and Northern Irish legislation and statutory instruments. They worked in 10 different archives to excavate the papers of over 20 key individuals, campaign organisations and government bodies. They conducted 18 oral history interviews with key players, mostly campaigners from ‘both sides’ of the debate over abortion, which contribute invaluable personal stories and perspectives.
The book is organised mostly chronologically. An introductory chapter sets the scene and tells the story of the achievement of the Act in 1967. The book then works through five periods, each describing incessant challenge to the Act through various means and the shifting ground of its interpretation and contest. All attest to the changing (mostly improving) practices of abortion provision along the way. The chapter on Northern Ireland is the exception, covering almost the whole 50-year period since the Act to tell the distinct story of abortion in Northern Ireland. An excellent conclusion draws together the book's key themes. The authors state that the Abortion Act ‘may be the most contested piece of legislation in British parliamentary history’ (p. 263). It is thus a fascinating conundrum that it has been substantively amended only twice since its inception (p. 260).
The book makes several over-arching claims which act as conceptual framings – that the biography of The Abortion Act 1967 is ‘the story of the modern UK’ (p. 3), that it is a story of change achieved through constant battle resulting in improvement in access to care and the relative defeat of anti-abortion forces, and that the military metaphors used by campaigners on both sides, unavoidable in the narrative, justify the description of a ‘war’ (p. 19).
The institutions of parliament, the law, medicine, religion, the trade unions and the women's movement have shaped abortion politics. So too has the union itself. The national politics of Scotland and Northern Ireland have, at times, been centre stage in determining how abortion care would be delivered in those regions. These institutions have also been significantly shaped by abortion politics. The authors state, for example, that attempts to amend the Abortion Act 1967 offer ‘the paradigm case for the difficulties of achieving reform by Private Members’ legislation’ and that they constitute ‘a case study in the manipulation and exploitation of the parliamentary rule book and, indeed, on several occasions prompting its rewriting’ (p. 264). A stand-alone pro-choice/anti-abortion movement is pretty much a child of the Act.
Similarly, the politics of abortion have been formed through the nature of gender, disability and morality and have had major impact on these social and cultural phenomena. Developments in science have shaped the politics of abortion and made meaningful through this interaction. Contest over abortion has been key in the creation of subject positions which have become politically central over the last 50 years. Being a doctor, or a nurse, or a female member of parliament, or a feminist, or a disabled person, for example, and of course to be someone who is seeking an abortion, has changed markedly through the interaction of people occupying these positions with the Act and abortion politics more broadly. That abortion would be an issue belonging to women in Westminster was not evident at the time the Act was created and emerged as a given only through the 1970s (p. 73). The different relationship to abortion of women's organisations in England and Northern Ireland makes apparent that attachments between certain issues and women's politics are contingent on adjacent histories and politics. While second wave feminists in Britain made abortion a central issue from the earliest days, women's groups in Northern Ireland, ‘“familist” rather than feminist’ (p. 195), were reticent in becoming involved, through shame and silence but also antipathy to the union, at least until the mid-1990s (pp. 195–198).
The book's clarity in showing how ‘the modern UK’ is in part the effect of abortion politics could be its greatest achievement. The story of a gradual shift in the UK towards the dominance of women's rights and human rights approaches in the discourses that frame public discussion of abortion, and the improved quality of services and improved access to care over the last 50-plus years, is an excellent counter narrative to the rise of a popular belief (at least in my Australian context) inspired by abortion politics in the post-Roe USA that anti-abortion forces are ‘turning back the clock’ globally. The global trend is liberalisation of law and widening of access to abortion care.
The notion of an abortion war is no clearer than in the chapter on Northern Ireland. In the exclusion of Northern Ireland from its reforms the Abortion Act 1967 could be seen as an act of war on women in that place. The ‘safety valve’ of the boat to England to get an abortion and the opposition of parliamentarians from Northern Ireland (pp. 216–7), among other factors, saw Westminster refuse repeated attempts to remove the exclusion, notwithstanding increasing popular support and assertive pro-choice activism in Northern Ireland from the 1990s. In 2004, the Family Planning Association of Northern Ireland initiated a court process to clarify the existing law. A final ‘guidance’ was published in 2016 but the long process had led to a restrictive understanding of the legal status of abortion for foetal anomaly and this led to a dramatic decline in the already very small number of abortions recorded in Northern Ireland (from 400 in 1978 down to 12 in 2017/2018 (p. 213)). A leading Irish activist recalled that this was ‘a likely consequence of their campaign to clarify the law but believed it a price worth paying’ (p. 213) as it brought the issue of abortion into the open. This is a story of the costs of battle indeed.
Sally Sheldon's important earlier book Beyond Control: Medical Power and Abortion Law (Pluto Press, 1997) engaged directly with the post-structuralist theories of Michel Foucault and those, like Carol Smart, who developed his work in feminist legal theory. These authors are (almost) entirely absent in The Abortion Act. But the joining of the book's founding task, to track the life of the Abortion Act since 1967, with its rich empirical base amounts to an exemplary case of detailed historical research delivering post-structural analysis. Here is a law in action that is both fixed and a site of ongoing redefinition in ways which over time would be increasingly unrecognisable to its originators. New political subjects act in new terrain although the authority of the medical profession is a constant, as is the non-negotiable need for better abortion services. The story of change is not a liberal progress narrative, an inexorable path to an unchanging horizon of freedom and adequate health care. Some formal pro-choice victories in the courts, for example, were also victories for anti-abortionists, as the battle over meaning brought forth new conservative understandings of abortion that re-mapped practice, again.
The production of knowledge by the pro-life/anti-abortion movement, both through parliamentary committees, for example, and through their own research emerges as one of their central strategies. Concomitantly, the book's historical account of the shift of public debate about abortion from a contest over values (women's rights vs foetal rights, for example) to a contest over facts (abortion is good for women, no it isn’t) is an invaluable case study of ‘post truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ politics well before their Trumpian apotheosis.
My criticisms are few. I wanted more attention to the energy of pregnant individuals who seek abortion services as a force for change. Some are present, as victims of the law who appear in media coverage, for example. The effects on those whom women have asked for an abortion, in the privacy of a doctor's rooms for example, are unlikely to appear in the archives in the same way as those who have fought their battles in public but this force could have been given more space, even if speculatively. Attention to race politics, inasmuch as these are distinct from class politics, is relatively absent. The authors note that race has been less evident in abortion politics in the UK than in the US, but this does not necessarily mean it has not been a determining factor, especially given one activist's description of the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s as ‘a very white movement’ (p. 90). Attention to the neoliberal context is also relatively absent. The conclusion notes in passing that pro-choice campaigning is increasingly characterised discursively by ‘liberal individualism’ but there is little discussion of if, when and how this might have become a distinct neoliberal individualism. Nor is there a specific discussion of the impact of neoliberal policy (austerity) on the structure and resourcing of health care, as a historical development or future horizon. In some places I had a mild feeling of repetition, at times I wanted more dates to keep track of the detailed progress of various contests and the index was occasionally inadequate to my needs; these are very minor quibbles.
This biography of the Abortion Act brings together extraordinarily comprehensive research and astute analysis written in a highly readable style. I was breathless by the time I finished. It prompts thinking in many directions that lead into, away from, and return again to, abortion politics. The book offers much to those interested in the history of ‘the modern UK’ and, at its core, is a most thorough case study of the complexity and intransigence of why abortion continues as a problem yet to be (dis)solved.
