Dorothy Thurtle

Thurtle's most significant contribution to the cause of abortion rights reform was as a member of the Birkett Committee, an interdepartmental committee on abortion and maternal mortality which sat from 1937 to 1939 under the chairmanship of Sir Norman Birkett.[1] Thurtle was the only member of the committee openly supportive of abortion law reform.[3] The report acknowledged that abortion law was frequently and "freely disregarded" for valid reasons,[4] and that backstreet abortions were extremely common, noting that "between 110,000 and 150,000 abortions were carried out annually, 40% of these were criminally induced".[5] The committee majority treated abortion as a medical and legal problem and overlooked the underlying cause, fertility control.[6] It opposed the legalisation of abortion on the grounds that it posed "danger to life and health" and risked being a "temptation to loose and immoral conduct", proposing adjustments to the law to ensure that medical partitioners were acting legally when they undertook an abortion following a medical consultation which determined that the woman's life was in danger, but recommending greater restrictions on abortifacients to prevent self-medication.[7]

Thurtle publicly dissented the committee's conclusions and issued an influential minority report which approached the issue from a fertility standpoint.[8] Thurtle stated that the primary cause of abortion was a "high degree of fertility", a "stark reality" facing all fertile women, and argued that because many married women would face pregnancy every one or two years until their menopause, withholding access to fertility advice and birth control was "a form of class discrimination and penalisation",[6] particularly as maternal death rates rose rapidly after the fifth child.[5] Thurtle's report asserted that abortion was not riskier than childbirth or amateur operations, a view the British Medical Association agreed with – evidence from 95 practitioners provided to the committee by Arthur Leyland Robinson concluded that "setting aside all sentimental and ethical objections, legalised abortion ... would not produce any ... disadvantages and dangers inseparable from operations for the interruption of pregnancy".[9] Based on this, the minority report proposed the creation of local authority birth control clinics and the legalisation of abortion in various circumstances where the woman's life was not in immediate danger: for women who had already had four pregnancies, on eugenical grounds, and in cases of sexual crime, such as rape.[8][10]

Thurtle's report was praised by the National Council for Equal Citizenship and the ARLA,[11] but otherwise her proposals for "voluntary abortion" (under restrictive criteria, such as four prior pregnancies) received little contemporary support.[12] The limited recommendations of the committee majority were also not implemented, ostensibly due to the outbreak of the Second World War, although the classification of both reports as "non-parliamentary" likely indicated that the government had never intended to enact legislation.[11]