Obituary: Diane Munday, Abortion rights trailblazer

By Judith Orr

Diane Munday, who died this weekend at the age of 94, was a fearless pioneer of the abortion rights movement.  

She played a leading role in Britain’s first abortion rights organisation, the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), which was formed in the 1930s. Diane was one of a younger generation who joined ALRA in the 1960s and shook it up. They were pivotal in persuading MP David Steel to choose to abortion rights when his name came up in a private members bill ballot in 1967. His Bill became the 1967 Abortion Act, a landmark victory that made abortion legal, under certain conditions and saw an end to backstreet abortions, which had led to the deaths of thousands of working class women. 

When I interviewed her for my book Abortion Wars in 2017, her home still had an active working office filled with files, books and letters on abortion law and campaigning. She was a formidable woman and described how she broke taboos in the 1960s by talking publicly about her own abortion. Despite being illegal it was done safely because she and her husband raised £90 to pay for it in Harley Street. 

She told me that as she came to after the operation she remembered a dressmaker she knew who had died after a backstreet abortion, leaving three children: ‘I made some sort of anaesthetic-muddled vow to myself. I would spend the rest of my life fighting for other women.’ 

She toured Women’s Institute meetings, in her best pearls, and spoke out on the radio about her experience. She talked of how every working class area had a ‘knitting needle Nora’ who carried out abortions and denounced the injustice faced by women who were forced to risk death in the backstreet. 

She said she was moved by the number of women who would come and talk to her privately after her talks and interviews and describe their own, often traumatic, experiences of having illegal abortions. In many cases they said she was the first person they had ever told. 

In those days she simply pulled her car up and parked outside the House of Commons and stalked the corridors of Westminster for hours to win MPs to back the bill. 

When the 1967 Act passed, after a night-long debate, campaigners celebrated with champagne and she famously insisted on only filling her glass halfway. She said this was because she knew the bill, although a massive advance, hadn’t yet achieved full freedom for women to choose, and Northern Ireland had been excluded.

Over the next decades she was part of campaigns to defend the act against multiple attacks by anti-abortion MPs. Then, when ALRA later merged with the National Abortion Campaign in 2003 to form Abortion Rights, she continued to fight for full decriminalisation.

Abortion Rights was honoured that she agreed to speak on a plenary session at our event to mark the 50th anniversary of the Act, alongside fellow ALRA member Dilys Cossey and the veteran Irish campaigner Ann Rossiter. It was a powerful coming together of generations of activists on whose shoulders we stand today.

Diane leaves a lasting legacy. Many others might have been satisfied with being part of winning that historic victory in 1967, but not Diane. Throughout her remarkable life she remained impatient for change saying ‘I just kept fighting’. 

Abortion Rights salutes Diane and all her groundbreaking work. We send our deepest condolences to her family and friends. She will be missed.

Rest in power.

Judith Orr is Vice Chair of Abortion Rights and author of Abortion Wars, the fight for Abortion Rights.