Mrs. Madeleine Simms (Galton Institute Newsletter 11 : 4-5, December 1993), commenting on a book by Mrs. Alice Jenkins, entitled Conscript Parenthood? The Problem of Secret Abortion, privately printed in 1938, is no doubt right that “a small but highly organized group of religious fanatics” (ie the Roman Catholic Church) were among those who opposed the Abortion Act in 1967. But there were many others at that time who were worried about the rights and wrongs of abortion, especially if it was going to be procured effectively on request for non-medical reasons.
The supporters of Mr. David Steel’s Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill (its title was changed only at the very end) certainly did vigorously deny that this was its intention. For example, Mrs. Simms herself (Simms, M. and Hindell, K., 1971, Abortion Law Reformed, p. 188) tells how Alastair Service, Parliamentary Lobby organiser for the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), “wrote to thirty-five sympathetic columnists asking for their personal co-operation in correcting the impression put about by its opponents that the Bill allowed abortion on demand”.
But that is what we have now got, or at any rate abortion on request for any reason at all if you are prepared to pay for it privately, whether we like it or not. It is far from clear that the Act would ever have become law in 1967 if Parliament had been properly informed of its likely consequences, which have included well over 3 million abortions legally procured over the past 25 years, more than 95% of them for social and psychological rather than strictly medical reasons.
Mrs. Simms also notes that Dr. Joan Malleson, in her Foreword to the Jenkins book, “points out that it is well known that at least 90,000 women had illegal abortions every year”. But that rather begs the question as to whether this figure was anywhere near to the truth, even though it may have been widely believed at that time. Simms & Hindell (p. 167) do refer to a report by the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists (RCOG), published in April 1967, as suggesting “that 14,600 a year might be a more accurate figure than the hundred thousand frequently quoted”. But they gave no reasons for thinking that this estimate might have been wrong, apart from pointing out that “ALRA always regarded the RCOG and BMA as essentially hostile to worth-while reform... The tone of the RCOG report was conservative and somewhat lofty”.
More that 30 years ago, approaching the problem from a different point of view (Eugenics Review 55: 197-200, 1964), I arrived at a figure of not much more than 10,000 illegal abortions a year. This was based upon a study of the mortality statistics, which showed rather few deaths due to pregnancy and childbirth, including the effects of procured abortion. Even assuming that some of these had been deliberately concealed by attributing them to other causes of maternal death (and it isn’t easy to conceal the unexpected death of a healthy young woman), any realistic estimate of abortion deaths suggested that, if the total of illegally procured abortions had been anywhere near to 100,000 a year, the back street abortionists must have been experiencing remarkably few deaths among their clients. In a later definitive paper (Population Studies 27: 207-233, 1973) I revised this to “the true figure could not have exceeded 20,000 and was probably nearer 15,000 criminal abortions a year in Britain before 1967”.
Since then it has sometimes been more or less taken for granted (e.g. Francome, C., 1984, Abortion Freedom; Munday et al., 1989, Brit. Med. J. 298: 1231-4) that there were at least 100,000 illegal abortions a year before 1967.
But no convincing attempts have been published to refute the argument from mortality statistics that this figure is impossibly high, which should be sine qua non for the acceptance of any similarly high estimates. This is not a purely academic point, since it would be of some demographic significance to know whether the annual total of legally plus illegally procured abortions is still less than double what it was before 1967, or whether changing the law has multiplied the rate by more than 10 times. C. B. Goodhart