BOOK: Sally SHELDON, Gayle DAVIS, Jane O'NEILL, and Clare PARKER, The Abortion Act 1967: A Biography of a UK Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 358 pp., ISBN 9781108496384, £95

 

(image courtesy: Cambridge University Press)

Book description: 

The Abortion Act 1967 may be the most contested law in UK history, sitting on a fault line between the shifting tectonic plates of a rapidly transforming society. While it has survived repeated calls for its reform, with its text barely altered for over five decades, women's experiences of accessing abortion services under it have evolved considerably. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this book explores how the Abortion Act was given meaning by a diverse cast of actors including women seeking access to services, doctors and service providers, campaigners, judges, lawyers, and policy makers. By adopting an innovative biographical approach to the law, the book shows that the Abortion Act is a 'living law'. Using this historically grounded socio-legal approach, this enlightening book demonstrates how the Abortion Act both shaped and was shaped by a constantly changing society.

Table of contents: 

1. Introduction
2. The Early Years
3. The Parliamentary Battle for Restrictive Reform
4. The Battle for Normalisation
5. The Battle for Legal Meaning
6. The Battle for Northern Ireland
7. The Parliamentary Battle for Modernising Reform
8. A Biography of the 'Great Untouchable'
Appendices
Bibliography
Index.

About the authors: 

Sally Sheldon is a professor of law at the University of Bristol and University of Technology Sydney, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, an editor of the journal Social & Legal Studies and Cambridge University Press's Law in Context series and a former trustee of the Abortion Support Network and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. She has published extensively in healthcare law and ethics. She was formerly a professor in Kent Law School, where she worked on the research for this book.

Gayle Davis is Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely in the history of medicine and reproductive health, including the recent co-edited volumes, Abortion Across Borders: Transnational Travel and Access to Abortion Services (2019) and The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History (2017).

Jane O'Neill is a social historian at the University of Edinburgh whose research interests include twentieth-century youth, gender, and sexual behaviour. She has published on the history of courtship, contraception and abortion in journals such as History and edited volumes including Students in Twentieth-Century Britain and Ireland.

Clare Parker is an historian who is currently based at the University of Adelaide and has worked at universities in the UK and Australia. She has published on the history of medicine and the politics of abortion and sexuality. She is also a consultant archivist currently working with the State Library of South Australia.

More information can be found here.