On 27 October the Abortion Act 1967 became law. It was a landmark piece of legislation and the hard-won result of years of campaigning by Diane Munday, who has died aged 94.
However, her glass was only half full. The law applied only to Great Britain, not to Northern Ireland, and it did not give women complete freedom to choose: two doctors were required to authorise the procedure. Speaking about that October night, Munday said: “The act was a compromise. Only when women had the power to decide for themselves would our task be fully done. At 3am we were sitting on the terrace drinking champagne. And I remember saying that it’s too soon to celebrate. We have done only half the job, so let’s drink half glasses of champagne.”
Munday was a longstanding patron of Humanists UK, and humanism and justice-seeking underpinned her beliefs. To her critics she said: “Abortion is not a negation of the maternal instinct. It’s an extension of it, which comes into force when a woman knows she cannot cope with a child and give it the love and care that should be every human person’s birthright.”
Born in London, Diane was the daughter of Amelia (nee Lyons) and Phillip Schieferstein, a bus driver, and had a younger brother, Trevor. She had a tough working-class upbringing in the East End of London, where she attended East Ham grammar school, and where Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts were an unsettling presence on the streets. Having a Jewish mother and a German surname, she said she got called “a dirty German Jew” and was pushed off her bike, learning early on to stand up for herself.
On leaving school, she worked as a research assistant at Barts hospital in London, studying biochemistry at Birkbeck College (now Birkbeck, University of London) in the evenings. After the second world war, she enjoyed cycling holidays in mainland Europe, through which she met Derek Munday, who trained fighter pilots and later worked for Imperial Chemical Industries in marketing. They married in 1954, and by 1960 had three sons.
In 1961, Munday was pregnant for the fourth time. With three under-fives to look after, she was adamant, saying: “Nothing, nobody could have made me have another child.”
Fortunately, she found a Harley Street psychiatrist who was prepared to argue that her mental health would suffer if she had a fourth baby and she was able to get an abortion, paying £90, which was a considerable sum of money at the time. The sheer injustice that this option was open only to those with money and who knew how to bend the rules was a deeply uncomfortable truth.
Most ordinary women who wanted to end a pregnancy in the early 1960s had to visit a backstreet abortionist, and Munday was horrified when a young dressmaker in her neighbourhood died following a botched procedure. Talking to her colleagues at Barts, she discovered just how widespread and dangerous these abortions were. On Friday nights in particular the hospital would put beds aside, knowing that at least two to three women would come in bleeding badly following a so-called “miscarriage”.
In the Harley Street clinic after her own termination, Munday said: “I woke up thinking of the women who had died, and it was because I had a cheque book to wave in Harley Street that I was alive. I thought I’m going to do what I can for women.”
In 1962 she became the vice-chair of the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), working with other activists such as Madeleine Simms and Vera Houghton. They lobbied Harold Wilson’s new government in 1964, but were told there was no public demand for legalised abortion. ALRA set out to prove them wrong.
Munday wrote to townswomen’s guilds and to branches of Rotary and the Women’s Institute offering to give a talk. She called it “Women’s rights in the 20th century” and would arrive conservatively dressed, wearing a hat and gloves. But then she would break a taboo, openly talking about her abortion and why it should be legalised.
It opened the floodgates, with women queueing up to speak to her in the tea break about their experiences. There was a groundswell of support: the gatherings got bigger and she spoke on the radio and at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. She also trained up other speakers, and persuaded influential organisations such as the National Council of Women of Great Britain to support ALRA.
Not everyone approved, and Munday endured an onslaught of abuse from slights such as her local shop refusing to serve her, to finding her car covered in red paint symbolising “murdered babies’ blood” and phone calls night after night where she heard a baby crying and the words: “Mama, you murdered me.” It was hard on her young family, but she soldiered on.
Before the 1964 general election, ALRA had sent candidates a questionnaire, asking if they would support reform of the abortion law if they were elected. The Liberal candidate David Steel ticked “yes”. When he became an MP, he agreed to work with ALRA and introduce a private member’s bill to legalise abortion. Munday and her colleagues had to rapidly get up to speed on parliamentary procedure, spending long hours drafting briefings and speeches for MPs, and negotiating clauses with representatives from bodies such as the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
After the act was passed, in 1968 Munday helped set up the Birmingham Pregnancy Advisory Service (later the British Pregnancy Advisory Service – BPAS) to offer counselling and advice. She was its parliamentary, press and public relations director and main spokesman, estimating by the time she stepped down in 1990 that she had spoken in public more than 1,000 times since 1962.
Munday was very interested in justice and, alongside her work for BPAS, in 1969 she became a magistrate, serving as chair of the family panel in Hertfordshire until 2001. As a diabetic she was interested in helping fellow sufferers and was the chair of the St Albans diabetes support group from 1988 to 2007, helping people to administer their insulin.
She called out injustice or unfairness wherever she saw it: when her son was called a “pagan” at her local Church of England school in Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, she campaigned to set up a secular school there, as she did not agree with the way religion was imposed on children.
Munday took care of her elderly parents and of her husband, too, when he had a stroke in 1984, and never stopped making the case for causes she believed in, including assisted dying. She gave her last interview to the Guardian just days before she died.
She is survived by her sons, Jeremy, Simon and Nicholas, and her four grandsons.
• Diane Munday, abortion campaigner, born 4 March 1931; died 9 January 2026
