why was the abortion act 1967 introduced

The Government responded with the establishment of two review bodies. "A woman who had an abortion without following correct procedures just got 28 months under an 1868 act - we need urgent reform to make safe access for all women in England, Scotland and Wales a . Abortion Act 1967 Birth of the USA American Constitution American Independence War Causes of the American Revolution Democratic Republican Party General Thomas Gage biography Intolerable Acts Loyalists Powers of the President Quebec Act Seven Years' War Stamp Act Tea Party Cold War Battle of Dien Bien Phu Brezhnev Doctrine Brezhnev Era Finally, it suggests that consideration of a law can offer a unique window through which to explore these broader contexts. When a Mail reporter contacted Marie Stopes saying she wanted an abortion, she was told there was no need to meet the doctor who would give the go-ahead because it was routine for doctors to fill out the necessary forms behind the scenes, based on the reason she gives the clinic's call centre staff. The Abortion Act 1967: a Critical Perspective | SpringerLink Following a conception in decades of political struggle,Footnote 1 the Act was born at the height of the sexual revolution as part of a raft of liberalising legislation.Footnote 2 It has been lauded as a key event in the liberation of women,Footnote 3 and one of the finest, most humane and far-sighted pieces of legislation in the twentieth century;Footnote 4 and lambasted as a transgression against the very basis of our mortal existenceFootnote 5 and symptomatic of all that has gone wrong with Britain.Footnote 6 While controversy, often fuelled by activists and lobby groups, persists, fifty years on the Act has achieved a venerable status as one of the oldest pieces of statute law to govern an area of modern medical practice.Footnote 7 It has survived dozens of attacks in Parliament and been amended only once.Footnote 8 While its text has endured largely without alteration, however, its legal and broader cultural meanings have evolved considerably over the last five decades. 151 Norrie, K Abortion in Great Britain: one act, two laws (1985) Crim L Rev 475Google Scholar. 3 Letter from Douglas Houghton to David Steel (6 February 1990), LSE archive STEEL/B/2/2. Every law has a biography. While still stigmatised, abortion services are now entrenched as an essential part of mainstream healthcare, with almost all procedures funded by the NHS.Footnote 110 Bloom's belief that one must respect a woman's right to choose has become widespread within abortion services, with the majority of abortions provided by charities operating with an explicitly pro-choice vision; and entrenched in professional guidance.Footnote 111 This is reflected in how the law is interpreted in day-to-day practice.Footnote 112 Women's experience of accessing services will thus be very different in 2018, notwithstanding the fact that such access is governed by exactly the same statutory requirements. 145 On the Nazi use of human cadavers to produce soap: Shallcross, B The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture (Indiana UP, 2011) ch 3Google Scholar. It allowed women to be the legal owners of money they earned, and to inherit property. Abortion Act 1967 1967 CHAPTER 87. But the project is finite, and when your exploration is finished you will have, not only a unique appreciation of the particular cave, but a better feeling for geology in general.Footnote 184. 38 BPAS (undated) The Foetus Myth, gathers together media reports of a steady stream of horror stories, dating from 19701979. 33 82,787 gynaecology patients were awaiting non-urgent NHS operations in December 1968, at a time when only 436 FTE of consultant gynaecologists worked in England and Wales, Hordern, ibid, p 105. 95 Litchfield and Kentish, above n 24, p 113. See further, Lane Report, above n 31, at [507]. Seen as a successor to the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the new Act encompasses significant structural changes to healthcare services. hasContentIssue false, Two episodes in the life of the Abortion Act, Continuity and change in broader narratives, Biography as a window onto the wider world. 102 Bloom transcript, above n 52. What are the UK's laws on abortion? - BBC News In 1967, the Abortion Act was passed, providing a statutory framework for the provision of legal abortion in England, Wales and Scotland. Currently, around 200,000 abortions are performed each year within the now well-embedded regulatory framework established by the Abortion Act.Footnote 68 Almost all terminations performed in Scotland are performed within the NHS. It requires the historical, contextual study of a subject that is simultaneously attentive to both continuity and change within it over an extended period. The veteran journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge argued passionately that the abortion controversy is the most vital and relevant of all: Either we go on with the process of shaping our own destiny without reference to any higher being than Man, deciding ourselves how many children shall be born, when and in what varieties, and which lives are worth continuing and which should be put out [] Or we draw back, seeking to understand and fall in with our Creator's purpose for us rather than to pursue our own, in true humility praying, as the founder of our religion and our civilisation taught us. 1967 - Abortion Act. 139 J Parsons The abortion conveyor belt; S Smyth There were lots of crying women I'd never go through it again (Daily Mail, 5 March 2017). The 1967 Abortion Act fifty years on: Abortion, medical - PubMed 158 Montgomery, J Doctors handmaidens: the legal contribution in McVeigh, S and Wheeler, S (eds) Health, Health Regulation and the Law (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1992) p 141Google Scholar. Legislation cannot hope to resolve political and ethical disputes but, rather, offers an important site upon which they may continue to play out.Footnote 143 The stories told about the Abortion Act are clearly marked by this ongoing struggle, as well as reflecting other contemporary concerns: current debates regarding sex selective abortion, for example, focus on particular ethnic communities and are clearly refracted through prisms of race and gender.Footnote 144 Alternatively, narratives may lose force as the broader concerns on which they draw fade from memory. It was reported across the News of the World's front pages for four weeks, at a time when it was the World's Largest Sunday Sale,Footnote 55 reporting a circulation of 5.5 million.Footnote 56 Several early reviews reproduced the book's claims uncritically,Footnote 57 and one commentator noted that it was certainly the most influential medical book of the 1970s, simply because so many people believed its fantastic allegations.Footnote 58 Babies for Burning was republished in at least four languages and quickly became established as the bible of the pro-life movement.Footnote 59 Litchfield addressed large Pro-Life rallies;Footnote 60 and the authors were interviewed on national radio.Footnote 61, The investigation had a clear impact on early attempts to restrict the Abortion Act.Footnote 62 One MP is said to have based his personal research for his 1975 abortion bill on reading the proofs,Footnote 63 and others explicitly attributed their support for it to the book.Footnote 64 Litchfield and Kentish were invited to give evidence to an important Parliamentary Select Committee,Footnote 65 which in turn influenced further measures aiming to restrict the Act.Footnote 66 However, the public unravelling of the book's more extreme claims may equally have militated against reform: with its most shocking claims revealed as fantastic, any truth in its more credible allegations may also have been treated with a large grain of salt.Footnote 67. The Abortion Act (1967), which last year reached its fiftieth anniversary, offers a good subject to illustrate this claim. 169 Simpson, AWB Cannibalism and the Common Law (London: Penguin, 1986)Google Scholar, locating R v Dudley and Stephens within a broader conflict between the old custom of the sea and the comfortable morality of the common law, p 271. Fertility control has come to be broadly accepted not just as a right but also, increasingly, a responsibility.Footnote 132 Some strong threads of continuity are nonetheless apparent. Theory and Practice, Doctors handmaidens: the legal contribution, A muted voice from the past: the silent silencing of Ruth Ellis, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Images of Welfare: Press and Public Attitudes to Poverty, Nanotechnology and the products of inherited regulation, Promoting dialogue between history and socio-legal studies: the contribution of Christopher W Brooks and the legal turn in early modern English history, Beyond Law in Context: Developing a Sociological Understanding of Law, www.lawcom.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Legal_Oddities.pdf, www.rcgp.org.uk/policy/rcgp-policy-areas/~/media/Files/Policy/A-Z-policy/RCGP_Position_Statement_on_Abortion.ashx. 173 Harrington, J Towards a Rhetoric of Medical Law (Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar. In 1938, a doctor was arrested for giving a 14-year-old girl an abortion . It takes seriously the insight that written norms are rooted in the past, enshrining a certain set of historically contingent values and practices, yet that as linguistic structures that can impact on the world only through acts of interpretation they are simultaneously constantly evolving. Crowter and Lea-Wilson are fighting to remove the final provision from the Act. Extensive documentation relating to each action was held in the BPAS archive. Most recently, a Daily Mail investigation followed up on the findings of a Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection of MSI.Footnote 70 The CQC had identified a string of flaws in service provision ranging from basic failures in governance, clinical care and safeguarding, to criticism of how the approval requirements under the Abortion Act were met, with doctors seen bulk signing abortion certificates.Footnote 71 The Mail investigation was far more limited than Babies for Burning in its scope. 183 Generally Cowan and Wincott, above n 19; Ewick and Silbey, above n 179. Following a conception in decades of political struggle,1 the Act was born at the height of the sexual revolution as part of a raft of liberalising legislation.2 It has Specifically, the abortion must be performed on NHS or licensed premises, by a registered medical practitioner, and following a good faith opinion that it might be justified under one of several broad grounds set out in the Act.Footnote 26. View all Google Scholar citations Individual doctors enjoy wide discretion under this provision and, unsurprisingly, they have exercised it to different effect. A closer consideration of these two episodes, occurring at either end of the Act's long life, suggests significant continuity but also evolution in how the Act is interpreted and in the broader stories told about it. 50 Litchfield and Kentish, above n 24, pp 1112. 55 News of the World front cover (3 March 1974). 5 min. "useRatesEcommerce": true A statute acquires meaning across its life both through judicial determination and through the local, interpretative work of those who work within it. BBC - Ethics - Abortion: Historical attitudes to abortion 60 The World this Weekend BBC Radio 4 (28 April 1974) transcript on file, BPAS, Pocket Folder 2 reported that Litchfield would be addressing a massive public meeting in Hyde Park. The first focused on the use of fetal remains in research,Footnote 41 producing a Code of Practice, which was adopted across the sector.Footnote 42 The second, the Lane Committee, conducted an extensive, three-year investigation into the workings of the Act. Finally, and briefly, there is no such thing as a life lived in isolation.Footnote 147 Biography implies the exploration of the fish and also the stream in which it swam,Footnote 148 offering not just a character-in-an-environment but also a character as a way of discovering an environment.Footnote 149 The biography of a statute should offer not just study of how its meaning is influenced by broader changes in the contexts within which it operates, but also an important window onto the world around it, permitting a tightly focused study of any one of the evolving contexts that have impacted on spatial and temporal variation in its interpretation and implementation. Do you tend to be a perfectionist at home? When he asked, You don't swoon over babies? Sue replied: No, I mean I like other people's babies. In the end, Dr Bloom said: Well, I don't see any purpose in having a child you don't want., Bloom certified the need for an abortion on the basis that Kentish had no maternal feelings and might react neurotically to an unwanted pregnancy.Footnote 99 He complained that while this had been a perfectly normal interviewFootnote 100 and that one must respect a woman's right to choose whether she has a baby or whether she should not have a baby, he had nonetheless been included in a rogues gallery of a multimillion pound industry.Footnote 101, Litchfield and Kentish robustly defended a very different view, claiming that if Kentish qualified for an abortion on the basis of that interview, then no woman is fit to bear a child [.] One gynaecologist noted ruefully: all in all, we [the RCOG] did not expect a very great change in practice from that obtaining before the Act. Get access Share Cite Summary This chapter focusses, against the background of the common-law offence of abortion, on the enactment of the first statutory prohibition of abortion in Lord Ellenborough's Act 1803 (43 Geo III c. 58). 108 M Waite Consultant psychiatrists and abortion [1974] 4 Psychol Med 74 found that, by 1971, 35% of consultant psychiatrists would recommend termination for any woman who had requested it before ten weeks, provided that she had seriously considered alternatives. 87 Letter to the CMO from JS Metters Medical Induction Terminations (12 November 1980), NA MH156/579. 47 The reports were trailed on 24 February 1974, appearing over the three following weeks. 9 Mulcahy, L and Sugarman, D Introduction: legal life writing and marginalized subjects and sources (2015) 42(1) JLS 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We thought there would be a slightly more liberal attitude to the problem, for that, after all, was the purpose of the new law. Prior to this Act, everything a woman owned or earned became her husband's property when she married. Environmental factors TheAct provides that, indeterminingwhetherthecircumstancesof a pregnancywould involve risk ofinjuryto thehealthof thepregnant woman or of her existing children, account may be taken of thepregnantwoman's actual or reasonablyforeseeableenvironment. It takes seriously the insight that written norms are rooted in the past, enshrining a specific set of historically contingent values and practices, yet that as linguistic structures which can impact on the world only through acts of interpretation they are simultaneously constantly evolving.Footnote 166 It acknowledges the complex, ongoing co-constitution of law and the contexts within which it operates, recognising that understanding how law works requires historical, empirical study. Abortion in early America - PubMed The Mail investigation claimed, however, that MSI doctors approved abortions for women who would be signed off based on only a brief conversation with a call staff worker, with exploration of the woman's reasons for ending a pregnancy lasting as little as just 22 seconds. The 1827 law was the first in the nation to impose criminal penalties in connection with abortion before quickening. California to vote on constitutional amendment protecting abortion Earlier work has described the historical circumstances which gave rise to the passage of specific statutes;Footnote 168 emphasised how individual cases must be understood within a broader historical context;Footnote 169 explored the legal impact of persistence or shifts in such contexts;Footnote 170 discussed how the meaning of a specific legal concept can evolve across time;Footnote 171 analysed how understandings of law and legality are refracted through broader cultural anxieties at particular times;Footnote 172 considered how legal reasoning relies on rhetorical strategies likely to prove persuasive to concrete audiences within specific historical, cultural and political contexts;Footnote 173 described how an inherited regulatory environment informs the interpretation and implementation of any law;Footnote 174 and discussed what socio-legal scholars might learn from legal history.Footnote 175 However, the approach proposed here combines these insights in ways which are either new or, at least, uncommon in existing socio-legal scholarship, with biography's simultaneous attention to change and continuity over an extended period offering the potential for a richer and more nuanced appreciation of law.

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