Preface Divisions on the abortion issue run deeper than disagreements on any other issue of socio-politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century.1 Despite being legalized in most Western countries and with an estimated 45 million legal abortions worldwide every year2 —and despite rhetoric about a woman’s right to choose—there is no absolute right to abortion.3 Neither is there an authentic debate; indeed, it would be more accurate to describe the situation as an armed truce, with occasional forays into enemy territory.4 Some supporters of abortion feel it is a tragic necessity rather than a desirable feature of a civilized society and that its incidence should be reduced; some opponents support partial restrictions;5 however, 1. Petchesky (1990, xiv). 2. Per SPUC (6.9.2005). This figure excludes provision of the “morning-after pill,” postcoital devices such as the coil and contraceptives that may have an abortifacient action (“All the measures which impair the viability of the zygote [the newly-conceived embryo] at any time between the instant of fertilisation and the completion of labour constitute in the strict sense, procedures for inducing abortion” (Public Health Service Leaflet No. 1066, U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1963: 27). 3. See Glendon (1993). 4. Tribe, in Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (1992), attempts to see both sides of the question; anti-abortionist Alcorn (2000) examines objections to the “pro-life” position, while pro-abortionist Pollack Petchesky, in discussing early feminists and their attitude to abortion, fails to allude to the existence of pro-life feminism, claiming that early feminists, who were staunch critics of abortion, aimed their protests “not against abortion per se, but at the one-sided and exploitative sex relations that often made abortion necessary” (1990, 45); all write from an American perspective. The British publication Abortion: Whose Right? (2002) unusually provided a platform for opposing views. Although the abortion issue has featured in American politics to a much greater extent than in Britain, attempts to suppress the debate in British politics (particularly in the Labour Party—see chapter 5) have not been wholly successful, with some candidates now standing in local elections on an explicitly Christian platform. 5. For example, Hillary Clinton, who in 2000 wrote in the New York Times, “I am and always have been pro-choice and that is not a right anyone should take for granted,” shocked pro-abortion activists on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade by saying that “we can all recognize xi there is little genuine “middle ground” on the issue, and related problems soon become equally mired in controversy, as will be seen. Nevertheless, it has been assumed that abortion rights were won by feminists; histories of abortion reform have typically emphasized the gender of campaigners. However, pro-life feminists claim an authentic historical mantle of feminist opposition to abortion,6 and there is a large body of hitherto neglected evidence that the English abortion campaign actually originated in movements opposed to feminism, namely, eugenics and population control; funded with American money, this campaign created a domino effect on abortion legislation that spread across virtually every Western nation, including the United States.7 This study focuses on these lesser-known aspects of the abortion campaign, portrayed by abortion histories as incidental to the concern with backstreet abortion (where they are mentioned at all—for example , Brookes 1988 keeps the abortion and eugenics movements carefully separate).8 Histories of eugenics and population control have also tended to treat the abortion campaign as a discrete and sometimes antagonistic movement.9 Typically, the 1967 Abortion Act has been associated with feminism, despite the absence of a feminist campaign being the most striking feature of the campaign to legalize abortion (as implicitly recognized that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic, choice to many, many women” (Suzanne Fields, “Reinventing Hillary Clinton,” Washington Times, January 31, 2005). In Britain, proposals to reduce time limits for abortion have been supported by some anti-abortionists but not by SPUC (per literature, January 2006). 6. See MacNair, Krane Derr, and Naranjo-Huebl (1995); also chapter 2. 7. See Francome (1984). 8. Brookes (1988) states: “In some quarters, particularly the Eugenics Society, there was a good deal of support for abortion for a woman who was likely to be carrying a mentally ‘defective ’ child” (8–9), but she fails to link this to female campaigners. For example, she says that Dorothy Thurtle applied ALRA’s viewpoint (that legal...