In the preceding chapter it was maintained that the O. A.P. A. 1861 did not explicitly permit therapeutic abortion but that this did not prevent the performance of the procedure by medical men: abortion was openly induced according to indications established not by the law but by the profession. When these indications expanded, so too did the performance of abortion, even though the law remained unchanged in its apparent restrictiveness. Only in 1938, after the law was challenged by a member of the medical establishment was legal theory unequivocally brought more into line with the realities of clinical practice. It is apparent, therefore, that medical men exerted a significant influence not only on the restriction of the law in the nineteenth century but also on its subsequent relaxation. Did the profession exert any significant influence on the more recent relaxation of the law by the Abortion Act 1967?

The Act came into force on 27 April 1968. It represented the culmination of a campaign led by the Abortion Law Reform Association (A.L.R.A.) to make abortion more widely available. The history of that campaign has been adequately documented elsewhere. It is the aim of this chapter to consider, against this background, the views of the representative medical bodies on the reform of the law and their influence on the Act as it finally emerged from the legislative process.

The 1967 Act placed therapeutic abortion on a statutory footing. Previously, it had been regulated by case-law in the form of the summings-up in R. v. Bourne (1938), R, v. Bergmann and Ferguson (1948), and R. v. Newton and Stungo (1958).