Jamie Green and Vivien Walsh
October 2025 – news broke of the “biggest change to sexual health since the 1960s”: people would now be able to access the ‘morning after pill’ on high street pharmacies without needing an appointment with their GP or an appointment at a sexual health clinic – an NHS expansion that spanned across almost 10,000 pharmacies. Many people, particularly those of Generation X, Millennial and younger generations, wouldn’t be able to recall a time when we didn’t have the right to free access to contraception on the NHS in the UK; Vivien Walsh does. In the time of rising anti-abortion rhetoric and funding, right wing “trad-wife”, misogyny of the “manosphere” and its pyramid schemes (as captured by Louis Theroux on his Netflix special), it’s important to remember where these rights came from – and the ongoing struggle under neoliberal, late-stage capitalism.
Fight for the Right to Choose
“Women in the Labour Movement have been campaigning for at least 100 years on issues of maternal health and the right to choose whether and when to have children, and to use any technological advances that might make those choices easier, or even possible. From 1924 onwards the Women’s Labour League annually and unanimously supported birth control. The men in the Labour and Trade Union Movement were not always so unanimous, or so interested in the subject.
In 1924 the first Labour Government was elected, and the League bombarded John Wheatley – the first Labour Minister of Health – with demands for improved health care in childbirth and after, and for the provision of free, state birth control clinics. They organised meetings and major demonstrations. They kept reminding him that giving birth had four times the death rate of working in the mines, the most dangerous job for men, and twenty times the likelihood of permanent disability. However, it was not until 1974 – another 50 years later – that women achieved the right to free contraception on the NHS, irrespective of age or marital status…”
Walsh, who had joined the Labour Party, was coming off the back of campaigning for these exact contraception rights in the Young Socialists and carried the fight into the Labour Women’s Organisation. It was the enactment of the NHS Reorganisation Act of 1973, brought in 1974, which introduced, for the first time, a requirement for family planning services to be formally provided on the NHS.
Only a year before that, it was May McGee in Ireland, who sadly passed away at age 81 last October, and her husband Shay who successfully challenged the Government of Ireland’s state ban on contraception, winning a landmark Supreme Court case that recognised the right to marital privacy and paved the way for reproductive choice for women in Ireland. At the time, it was illegal to sell, import, and advertise contraception (Section 17 of the Irish Criminal Law Amendment Act 1935). The McGee’s, who had attempted to obtain a diaphragm and spermicide jelly shipped from the UK, had their contraception seized by Irish custom authorities. McGee had suffered three brutal pregnancies and following the birth of her twins, in fear for her life – a reluctant icon was forged. Mr McGee, who preceded her in death in 2024, was remembered for his courage under invasive cross examination when asked if he would be happy to see his wife on contraception, responded, “I’d prefer to see her using contraceptives than be placing flowers on her grave.”
For some, it may seem these rights have always been with us – but the reality is far from it. Change crept at an almost brutally glacial pace. The contraceptive pill was, rather reluctantly, introduced first in 1961 (only 65 years ago this year), by prescription on the NHS – and only to married women. It wouldn’t for another 13 years later that the NHS Reorganisation Act would legally restructure and open access further to unmarried women.
“This meant that doctors could give contraceptive advice to a girl under the age of 16 without informing her parents and that they should seek the girl’s consent to tell her parents. It was this particular element of DHSS [Department of Health and Social Services] contraceptive guidelines that resulted in a high-profile campaign to control teenage sexuality” (People’s History NHS, 2018). At the same time, the longstanding Offences Against the Person Act 1861 that criminalised abortion in the UK and carried potential life imprisonment for women inducing their own miscarriage or anyone assisting, persisted largely until the Abortion Act of 1967.
“Making abortion illegal in 1861 had not stopped it, and the 1967 Act did not encourage it: it just made the difference between a woman dying as a consequence, or surviving. (In Romania, abortion was illegal until 1989: but abortions still outnumbered live births – in 1987 by four to one.) I remember providing accommodation to Spanish women coming to the UK for abortions before 1985, when it became legal in Spain, and from the Republic of Ireland before the end of 2018 when it was legalised there.
However, the 1967 Abortion Act, like the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, was not the end of the matter. There were several attempts to repeal or considerably amend the Abortion Act, such as the White Bill, the Corrie Bill and the Alton Bill, which gave rise in turn to their own protest movements. A very large demonstration against the Corrie Bill was called by the TUC (on the initiative of the Women’s TUC) in 1980, the first time in the world that a major trade union federation had called a demonstration on abortion rights; and another against the Alton Bill in 1988, again with the support of the trade union movement. None of these Private Member’s Bills was successful, but in the end the period during which abortion could be legally carried out was reduced to 24 weeks in 1990, by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act.” (Walsh, 2020)
Despite the enactment of the Abortion Act of 1967 which has provided legal exceptions, the Victorian-era act has not officially been repealed – with portions of the act, specifically Section 58 and 59, still underpinning abortion law in England, Wales and Scotland. In Ireland, it wasn’t until 2018 that Ireland saw overwhelming support (64%) to overturn the (1983) ban of abortion in a nationwide historic referendum. Through the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution and implement of the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018, abortion was legalised, free through the HSE for residents, up to 12 weeks of pregnancy (mandatory 3-day waiting period). Post 12 weeks gestation, abortion is only permitted in cases of “risk to life/health or fatal fetal abnormality”. Grimes et al., 2023 data indicated that there is a desire for policy change by both service users and medical practitioners to allow for improved access to abortion post-12 weeks – read more, here.
In 2023, SHA’s Central Council, of which Walsh is a member, called on Labour Women’s Conference to take a position on abortion rights – deploring imprisonment of women for obtaining an abortion illegally and giving recognition that UK abortion law is “outdated and dangerous, impacting access and preventing the provision of best care.”
In England and Wales June 2025, two amendments aimed at decriminalising abortion under the UK’s Crime and Policing Bill; were debated and supported by majority MPs; endorsing the NC One (New Clause one) which could see an end to the “threat of criminal investigation and prosecution of women who choose to terminate their pregnancy” (BMA, 2025). BMA welcomed the move described as ‘long overdue’ while maintaining the issue is a healthcare matter, and not one for the police. Note: the Crime and Policing Bill itself has been regarded by Amnesty International as an “assault on the right to peacefully protest”.
Walsh has been at the forefront of reproductive health, carrying forth the socialist arguments for the right for free, accessible, safe abortions as well as pursuing the developments of reproductive technology that we have in place today.
Reproductive Technology as a Political Issue
“Thirty years ago, I wrote those words in a book called “Whose Choice?”, published at the time of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which became law in 1990. The question was why the Labour Movement should take up issues such as contraception, abortion and treatment of infertility, which were often seen as purely personal matters.
My answer…was that it was our belief that decisions about whether or not to have children, how many to have, whether or not to have an abortion or use any of the technologies available to overcome or by-pass infertility, or to avoid having a child with disabilities, or to enable those of us who were lesbians to become parents, were all personal decisions to be taken by the individuals concerned, and not by the Church, the State or the Medical Profession. And since it is women who give birth to children and even now usually bear the main responsibility for child rearing, these decisions must primarily be theirs. As socialists we argue for women to have the maximum choice possible in the decisions that shape their lives. In order for a working class woman to have the choices already available to richer women, she must have the economic means (a living wage or income), and necessary social arrangements, such as childcare and decent housing, so that she can choose to have a child. It means expanding the NHS, taking back control of the services that have been contracted out to the private sector, resisting any further attempts to privatise parts of the NHS, and running the NHS democratically so that women can have access to free and safe abortion, contraception, artificial insemination and IVF treatment.”
Walsh’s point strikes home still, “The campaign then – and still is now – was not just for legal rights, but for the practical means to realise them.”
Current struggle and connections to big-tech capitalists
We cannot go back to the “dark ages” before the NHS. At a time when the NHS is being actively bled dry by the creeping corporate capture over the last 40 years – no less by the 2024 NHS Ten-Year-Plan that further facilitates profit opportunism and advancement of PFI 2.0 – the campaign for reproductive health and right to choose is inherently linked in the fight for the restoration of the NHS: a national service publicly owned, publicly provided and free at the point of use.
This month, Reform UK announced plans to “restore Britain’s Christian heritage”, with Humanists reporting that the ‘Alliance Defending Freedom’ was investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Europe – to further the political agenda it successfully pursued in the United States, “which to date has seen the overturning of Roe v Wade and constitutional protections for abortion rights”. ADF has doubled its spending in the UK (over £770,000) to increase the reach of its anti-abortion lobby, as well as on LGBTQ+ rights and education. Heavily involved in the fight against reproductive rights is none other than billionaire and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, who invested big in 2022 in a period-tracking app. Thiel is the co-founder of Paypal, and Palantir, which secured contracts worth £300M in the NHS and overall £500M contracts in the UK government. Palantir was a client of Global Counsel, the lobbying consultancy firm founded by Peter Mandelson. Inevitably, the lines will be drawn on human rights – on all fronts of healthcare – including reproductive health – against the NHS as a battle of “democracy” and “freedom” – freedom of the market of privatised healthcare, the “invisible” hand of the market deciding who lives – and who dies.
“We have lived through a post-war boom in the economy and back to hard times, with disputes involving workers in all sections of the NHS and related areas, those in transport, postal services, teaching, journalism, the civil service, security, airports, fire-fighting and elsewhere, all feeling the pinch. We cannot go back to the world described by Margery Spring-Rice. In particular we must not only fight tooth and nail against any more areas of health care becoming business ventures, but on the contrary extend the NHS (or extend it once again) to areas it currently does not cover.”