Fabian Women leading the fight for abortion reform- then and now

Charlotte Kelly

In 1937, Stella Browne, an active member of the Fabian Society, told a Commons Committee that she had previously chosen an abortion. In doing so, she was confessing to the criminal act of procuring a miscarriage under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, a crime carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. No legal action was taken against her. As a founder of the Abortion Law Reform Association, she described the ban on abortion as “a sexual taboo [born of] the terror that women should experiment and enjoy freely, without punishment.” It is difficult to imagine her horror at women being prosecuted for ending their own pregnancies until last year. 

Browne was the first Fabian to advocate legal reform to give women control over their own bodies, but she certainly would not be the last. This looks at how far we have come, how far we have left to go, and the role of women in the Fabian movement in liberalising abortion. 

At a Fabian Society lecture in the early 1960s, Gerald Gardiner QC, who would later become Lord Chancellor, stated that the next Labour government needed to reform the law on abortion. At that time, abortion was legal only if the mother’s health or life was in danger. 

The Abortion Law Reform Association had dwindled in the 1940s, but it was revived in the 1960s by Madeleine Simms, editor of Fabian News, and Diane Munday. 

By one estimate, Fabians made up one-fifth of the Association’s membership. The Association lobbied parliamentary candidates in the 1964 election, including David Steel, the Liberal MP who would go on to introduce the Abortion Act as a Private Member’s Bill in 1966. For Madeleine Simms, liberalising abortion was a matter of righting “social injustice… Working-class women often in desperate need had to go to the most appalling and often self-mutilating lengths and put themselves in great danger to obtain an abortion.” 

The Abortion Act as passed in 1967, is almost identical to the law that governs abortion in England, Scotland and Wales today. It provides exceptions to the offence of administering or procuring an abortion. These exceptions allow a pregnancy to be lawfully terminated if two medical practitioners agree that the pregnancy has not exceeded its 24th week and 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 in her family. Abortion can be carried out after 24 weeks, though this accounts for a tiny percentage of abortions overall, in the event of risk of death or grave injury to the mother, or severe foetal abnormality. Any abortion not carried out under these exceptions is a crime under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act and carries a potential prison sentence.

Today, abortion in England, Wales and Scotland is widely available – one in three women will have an abortion during their lifetime. 72 per cent of abortions in 2023 were by telemedicine, which allows women up to 10 weeks’ gestation to have a telephone consultation with an abortion provider and then be prescribed the two pills for medical abortion, mifepristone and misoprostol, which are posted directly to them. 

Yet from 2023, following the imprisonment of a woman for ending her own pregnancy by taking abortion medication after the legal limit set out in the Abortion Act, it became apparent that criminal investigations into women accused of ending their pregnancies were occurring on an unprecedented scale.

The sheer horror of such investigations catalysed legislative change. Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi successfully introduced Clause 208 of the Crime and Policing Bill, which would ensure that no person could be prosecuted for ending their own pregnancy.  

One of the greatest issues has been the stigma attached to those investigated for illegally aborting their child, even when the police have concluded that the miscarriage was entirely natural. Such investigations would appear on an Enhanced DBS Certificate. In the Lords, peers adopted an amendment by Baroness Thornton, former General Secretary of the Fabian Society, to pardon all women investigated or prosecuted for ending their own pregnancy. 

Stella Browne’s support for access to abortion for all women was because “our bodies are our own.” Northern Ireland and some Crown Dependencies have fully decriminalised abortion, but in England, Wales and Scotland, the model is still one of medical paternalism, and the recent prosecutions have shown the harsh penalties for those who deviate from the exact rules set down by the Abortion Act. Sisterhood, Solidarity and Service

(In a history of the Fabian movement and abortion, we must acknowledge that some early Fabians held eugenicist views, which led them to support abortion in order to reduce the numbers of poor children and people with disabilities in the population. The eugenics movement was a classist and ableist movement that devalued the lives of working-class children and people with disabilities. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now.)