A Medical View of Abortion in the 1960s

Abstract

Unwanted pregnancy was a serious problem for women in the 1960s. The pill and the intra-uterine device were introduced in 1961, but contraception was not freely available through the National Health Service (NHS) and could only be obtained easily from the clinics of the Family Planning Association by women who were married, or said they were about to be married. Pregnant single women and unmarried mothers were stigmatized. Many single women who became pregnant felt compelled to marry — in 1960, 27 per cent of first births were less than eight months after the date of the marriage (this proportion decreased progressively in the 1970s to become negligible in the 1980s).¹ Those who did not marry were often forced to leave home and to accept the spartan and usually censorious environment of the mother and baby homes. An increasing proportion of single women felt obliged to surrender their child for adoption — adoptions of children under one year old increased from 9,214 in 1961 to 12,308 in 1966.²