Abortion campaigners faced years of hate mail and abuse

Fifty years to the day since abortion was legalised in Great Britain, a key campaigner has told Sky News how she received years of abusive phone calls and hate mail from pro-life protesters during the 1960s.

The Abortion Act 1967 was passed on 27 October that year, making abortion legal in all of Great Britain apart from Northern Ireland.

Five decades on, Diane Munday still keeps some of the hate mail sent to her and remembers the fierce opposition she faced.

"I had red paint poured over the bonnet of my car and a note left under the windscreen wiper saying ‘this is the blood of the babies you’ve murdered’.

"For years on end my telephone rang three or four times a night and there was a recording on a loop of what sounded like a very young baby and a voice saying ‘mummy you killed me, mummy you killed me’.

"It broke my sleep every night but it didn’t deter me – in fact I think it made me more desperate to do something about the situation," she added.

Diane told Sky News about the first time she heard the word ‘abortion’.

"When I was a young woman abortion was a word that was never ever used.

"It wasn’t spoken, it wasn’t written.

"Indeed I was in my early 20s the first time I ever came across it.

"A young woman in east London, where I lived, had a back street abortion and died.

"I was absolutely shocked."

Diane was working as a medical researcher at the time, and remembers talking to doctors about it.

"They said, ‘stay behind on Friday evening after work and we’ll show you the reality of abortion’.

"I learnt then that every London teaching hospital, and I guess most of the others, put wards aside on Friday and Saturday nights for the botched abortions of the back street abortionists.

"Friday and Saturday because Friday was pay day."

In 1961 – six years before it was made legal – Diane found herself needing an abortion.

At great expense she managed to pay for a legal abortion on psychological grounds – an accepted reason for abortion at the time.

"I found my way to Harley Street where anyone could get a legal and safe abortion for enough money.

"We scraped together 10 guineas for a psychiatric opinion that I was suicidal and would kill myself if the pregnancy continued.

"That opened the door for an abortion.

"I woke up from the anaesthetic and I had that other young woman (in my mind) – I could see her face.

"I made a vow to myself that if needs be I would spend the rest of my life fighting for women who didn’t have cheque books to have the privilege – as I saw it then – of a safe abortion."

Soon after Diane joined the Abortion Law Reform Association.

She campaigned alongside Dilys Cossey, who was secretary of the ALRA at the time.

Dilys said: "My name, address and phone number, as condition of being secretary, appeared in the telephone directory.

"Women looking for abortions would immediately seize on that…at least somebody wasn’t hostile and they could talk to somebody.

"Women would turn up at my flat – from the living room window I could see that they were waiting at the doorbell.

"I would let them in and talk to them.

"We had a leaflet that said ‘What help can ALRA give?’ and it laid out that we were there to reform the law and that we were not a referral agency.

"I would always point out that listed below were the great and the good, which included gynaecologists.

"I said you can always look to see if they can help you, but I never wrote that down."

Five decades on, the issue remains divisive.

Seven Supreme Court judges are currently deciding whether or not elements of Northern Ireland’s abortion law breach women’s human rights.

In west London a council is considering implementing an exclusion zone to prevent pro-life campaigners protesting outside an abortion clinic.

For pro-life groups, the anniversary is no celebration.

Alithea Williams from the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children says instead it’s a sad moment.

She told Sky News: "It’s 50 years on and 8.8 million lives, or slightly more, have been lost to abortion.

"That’s all those women and families who have been affected.

"We do a lot of work with woman who have suffered with abortion.

"We’re always hearing from women decades later saying they’ve not been able to come to terms with what happened to them and are feeling great sadness."

(c) Sky News 2017: Abortion campaigners faced years of hate mail and abuse