Peter Diggory is a gynaecologist who has had a long involvement with the Abortion Law Reform movement. Born in the Welsh border country in 1924, he started life as a physicist. During the war he worked on radar with C P Snow, the future novelist (of the “corridors of power”) and social critic (of the “two cultures”). After the war he turned to medicine, studying at University College Hospital under the celebrated Professor Will Nixon and becoming consultant at Kingston and Richmond hospitals in 1964 just as the political campaign for abortion law reform was gathering momentum. He published an early and notable paper analysing his first 1,000 abortion operations carried out during the early sixties at a time when it still needed much courage to carry out abortions openly let alone write about them. He was one of the first experts to recognise that women who had had abortions rarely suffered from severe guilt disturbances as was still widely believed at that time. But whereas this latter belief was based on supposition and assertion, Peter Diggory’s contrary findings were the outcome of follow-up research interviews with ex-patients conducted with scrupulous and characteristically meticulous diligence.
Peter Diggory acted as medical adviser to Sir David Steel throughout the passage of the 1967 Abortion Act, including the long, arduous and exacting committee stages of the bill. He strongly supported the insertion of the social clause into the Abortion Act and effectively opposed the idea of limiting the abortion operation to consultants, as had been proposed by opponents of reform as a thinly disguised wrecking measure. With hindsight one can see what a disastrous bottleneck such a limitation would have constituted. The success of this great health and social reform which has been influential throughout the civilised world owes much to the courage, shrewdness and compassion of Peter Diggory.
He came to the Eugenics Society, as the Institute then was, by way of his association with the Marie Stopes Clinic, then owned and operated by the Society. He was appointed Honorary Consultant to the Clinic in 1969, a post which he held until the Society relinquished control of the Clinic seven years later. He was first elected to the Institute’s Council in 1971 and, apart from compulsory sabbatical years, has served continuously since that date holding the office of Vice-President from 1979 to 1981 and again in 1989 and 1990. Since 1987 he has been a Trustee of the Institute’s Birth Control Trust, the fund from which research awards are made each year. In 1970 he presented a paper on “The Unwanted Pregnancy” at the Institute’s seventh annual symposium and in 1980 he gave a memorable Galton Lecture entitled “The Long-term Effects upon the Child of Perinatal Events”. He was joint organiser of the Institute’s twenty-third symposium in 1986 on “Natural Human Fertility” and a co-editor of the published volume.
Peter Diggory has published several books and numerous papers about birth control, abortion and world population problems and in 1972 he established the first abortion day unit at Kingston Hospital, a landmark innovation which was to prove a model for many later ones inside and outside the National Health Service. The Galton Institute has benefited enormously from his specific expertise in fields so central to its own interests and from his wise judgement in all matters discussed by Council in a period of more than twenty years.