Far from ‘finished business’: Judith Orr on 50 years of fighting for abortion rights

An interview with Judith Orr, Vice Chair of Abortion Rights UK

Credit: Judith Orr

Judith Orr and I meet thanks to two apparent cornerstones of the 2026 activist experience: a WhatsApp group chat and a video call. With around nine hundred miles between us, we greet each other through grainy squares of video, wasting no time in getting down to business. 

Judith has been active within the campaign for access to safe reproductive healthcare in the UK for just shy of fifty years now. I, a volunteer for RRAC’s Comms Team, am keen to pick her brains about campaigning in the 70s, what’s changed, what we’re up against in 2026, and what we need to do. 

The road to activism

Judith grew up in Belfast during The Troubles, when abortion was illegal in Northern Ireland. Like so many at this time, she had the need for safe, accessible abortions impressed upon her after witnessing the human impact of abortion bans on a friend. But, when Judith turned 18, she left Northern Ireland for London to go to university. 

The year was 1977 and the situation was different. The Abortion Act - the Act that made abortion broadly lawful - had been passed a decade earlier. Why, then, were her university years ones of further galvanization? Why didn’t Judith, on arriving in the capital, simply hang up her cap and celebrate the good news?

The answer bears an acute significance for us in 2026. From the moment it was passed in 1967, the Abortion Act was subject to a barrage of attacks. Right-wing MPs devised countless plans to overturn, undermine, or chip away at the edges of the Act. It was these that Judith joined the struggle against. 

Our position is similar in 2026. The most dangerous mindset, Judith and I conclude, is not an anti-abortion one,  the belief that this is “finished business”. 

Toppling Corrie

One such attempt to curtail the Abortion Act, the ‘Corrie Bill’, led to one of the most memorable episodes of Judith’s activism. Named for its author, John Corrie, this bill proposed a number of measures to restrict access to abortion - reducing the upper legal limit from 28 to 20 weeks, criminalising charitable organisations that performed abortions or provided advice - you get the picture. 

In October of 1979, the bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons, bolstered by the Conservative majority that Margaret Thatcher had secured earlier that year. The National Abortion Campaign was tireless in protesting the bill, but it’s important to emphasise that many believed it was destined to become law. 

The turning point, perhaps, was on 28th October, when some 80,000 activists (Judith among them), marched for abortion access. Their placards read: “Keep it legal, keep it safe”. 

What is so notable about this demonstration was that it was organised by the Trade Unions’ Congress, a coalition that included several heavily male-dominated groups. Why did the TUC feel called to this cause? Judith underlines to me that their involvement reflects the understanding of abortion as a class issue. The very rich had always been able to access abortion, even before 1967. What was at stake here was the democratisation of abortion access - and this is what the TUC stood in support of. 

“Everyone knew someone who had died,” Judith muses. The dark days of the backstreet abortion were still in living memory, but they had never affected all of Britain evenly.  “Both women and men felt abortion was theirs.”

In March of 1980, five months later, John Corrie himself withdrew the bill. 

Methods and strategies 

I ask Judith, then, what methods she feels were successful in the 70s that might be effective now. She immediately responds by pointing out that the anti-abortion lobby is hosting demonstrations, so we certainly can’t stop attending and hosting them ourselves. RRAC's video from September's Stand Up For Choice is a timely and powerful testament to this.

She also advocates for maintaining a connection with trade unions. “They’re still the largest membership organisation in the UK,” she adds. “We need to keep talking about why abortion access is relevant for trade unions.” 

As far as knowing thy enemy goes, Judith highlights how the anti-abortion camp has expanded and adjusted its messaging to co-opt feminism. Whereas, in the 70s, many of those against abortion claimed that women who had one would go to hell, in the 2020s, we instead see a focus on the ‘empowering’ nature of motherhood and conception. We even see the anti-abortion lobby organising on student campuses. 

To meet this shift in message, says Judith, we need to “keep up a barrage of evidence”, unravelling the paradox that forced pregnancy is empowering.

A historic problem?

One of the more hopeful themes of our interview, however, was Judith’s rejection of the deterministic view that oppression on the basis of sex goes all the way back to the beginning of history. In other words, that things have always been so. 

Judith traces earlier iterations of our society in which there is no evidence for one gender’s systemic oppression of another. Indeed, she points out that it was only with the transition from nomadic to settled ways of life that having more children was advantageous as it made for more hands to work the land. 

It is in this incentive to have children, Judith offers, that the oppression of childbearers finds its roots. Not, then, some omnipresent reality to which we must resign ourselves. By zooming out on human history, activists can resist an unnecessary pessimism, which only bolsters those fighting against reproductive justice. 

I wanted to know what Judith feels is most misunderstood about abortion and to use this article as an opportunity to emphasise it. If there’s one thread that stands out from Judith’s (phenomenal) book - and our conversation - it’s that a desire to control one’s fertility is as old as time. Being able to manage fertility is central to any vision of liberation and justice because without it, those who birth and raise children cannot play an equal role in society. 

In other words: we will always need abortions.