Abortion Law Reform Association

The Abortion Law Reform Association was founded on 17 February 1936 by Stella Browne, Janet Chance, Alice Jenkins and Joan Malleson, with Chance providing funds and publicity and Jenkins, as honorary secretary, building a network of supporters. From 35 members in its first year it grew to almost 400 by 1939, many of them working-class women recruited through labour groups and women’s co-operative branches who wanted the privileges “moneyed classes had enjoyed for years”. Between 1936 and 1939 it sent speakers around the country and placed letters and articles in newspapers.

Stella Browne, a founder of the Abortion Law Reform Association, had given her lecture “The Right to Abortion” at the World Sexual Reform Congress in London in 1929, and in 1926 had become secretary of the Chelsea Labour Party in the hope of putting birth control and abortion on the political platform. In May 1938 a 14-year-old girl, raped by guardsmen in April, was refused an abortion by a hospital, and Malleson, a physician on the association’s medico-legal committee, referred her to the obstetrician Aleck Bourne. Having informed the police, he openly terminated the pregnancy on 14 June and asked to be arrested; acquitted in July, Bourne set the precedent of Rex v Bourne that abortion to protect the mother’s health could be lawful.

After the war the Abortion Law Reform Association continued to campaign against legal obstacles. In Law for the Rich (1960) Jenkins exposed the double standard by which rich women could persuade private doctors to perform abortions denied to most women. Vera Houghton, chair from 1963, won the support of the Liberal MP David Steel, whose private member’s bill became the Abortion Act 1967. In 2003 the association merged with the National Abortion Campaign to form Abortion Rights.