Despite legalization, abortion remained relatively difficult to access in the 1970s, and women frequently had to travel to other regions of the UK to access abortion (Halfmann, 2011: 112). Access problems notwithstanding, political attacks on the Abortion Act 1967 were frequent, underpinned by the perception that widespread ‘abuses’ of the Act were occurring in the private sector. The alleged abuses ranged from abortions being carried out ‘on demand’ despite Parliament's intentions, to obscenely high charges, to low standards of care for women undergoing abortion. Public outrage over these claims heightened in 1974 after a series of articles was published in the News of the World, and later as the book Babies for Burning (Litchfield and Kentish, 1974), by freelance journalists Susan Kentish and Michael Litchfield. The journalists made several shocking allegations: that samples of both journalists’ urine received positive results at pregnancy testing centres who refer for abortion (Kentish was not pregnant, and Litchfield was of course unable to become pregnant); that many abortion doctors were Nazi sympathisers; that viable foetuses were being destroyed; and that at least one doctor had agreed to sell foetuses to be made into soap. These claims were to be called into question in a Sunday Times report, which discovered, for example, that one of the alleged ‘Nazi sympathisers’ was Jewish and had lost his wife and son at Auschwitz (Francome, 1984: 166– 8).

Nonetheless, these and other allegations influenced several MPs to introduce anti-abortion Bills during this period. Such claims served to undermine the notion of the ‘socially responsible’ doctor that was central to the Act's logic of medicalization. However, there was another powerful image underlying the Act: that of the weary, vulnerable women in need of paternal guidance. Up to this point, the Act's supporters had been able to present themselves as the protectors of these women, meaning that those attempting to amend the Act had a ‘woman problem’ (Amery, 2015a) to grapple with. This chapter charts the various attempts to ‘solve’ this problem by depicting women as threatened not by adverse social conditions and their inability to access abortion legally, but by exploitation by ‘legitimate’ abortion providers.