Vera Houghton and the fight for maternal health

'Hundreds and thousands of women's lives'

A very rare photo of Vera Houghton!

Vera Travis was born with the first big guns of a World War sounding in her ears – on 18 October 1914, in Southall, West London. Her father John had moved down from Carlisle to be a manager at the Maypole Dairy, the largest manufacturer in the country of a new product called margarine. Her mother Lizzie was a dressmaker. Vera, their only child, and bright, did well to win a place at the prestigious Haberdasher’s Aske School for Girls, at that point based in Acton, but rather than going on to university she chose to study shorthand and typing at the Kerr-Sander’s Secretarial College in Piccadilly. (Miss Kerr-Sander’s Secretarial College advertised for ‘well-educated girls wishing to qualify for the higher branches of the secretarial profession’).

Initially, in the depths of the Depression, Vera could only find work in a shoe shop in Piccadilly, but in 1934 she got a job with a civil service trade union, the Association of Officers of Taxes, and was quickly promoted to be the secretary of its house journal, which bore the imaginative name of ‘Taxes’. It was here she met her future husband, Douglas Houghton. He was sixteen years her senior, already a significant figure in trade union circles, and married to a girl from his hometown in Nottinghamshire. As a civil servant working for the Inland Revenue, Houghton had founded the Association of Officers of Taxation in 1922 and would be its General Secretary and guiding light right through until 1960, by which stage it had merged with several other unions to become the Inland Revenue Staff Federation. In 1937 his divorce came through and he and Vera married in March 1939. They worked together during the War – Douglas was too old to fight, and had had his share of horror when as a young man he had fought at the Battle of Passchendaele, serving as a private in the Civil Service Rifles. He credited his terrible experiences under fire with forming his determination to dedicate his life to his fellow men, and to concentrate on what he considered the important issues.

Doug Houghton (Arthur Leslie Noel Douglas Houghton, Baron Houghton of Sowerby, CH, PC)

In 1941 the BBC asked Doug Houghton to join a panel of experts to provide advice over the air on various topics. Houghton’s fifteen minutes on employment tax matters was so popular that it became a weekly broadcast, ‘Can I Help You?’, dealing with a myriad of topics ranging from finance and employment to social problems. It generated a postbag of some two thousand letters every week, and Vera helped to handle the post, which gave her an extraordinary insight into the real problems being faced by families up and down the country. The programme ran until 1964, when Houghton entered Harold Wilson’s Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The couple never had children, but devoted their lives to politics, to the Labour Party, to animal welfare and the RSPCA, and particularly in Vera’s case, to campaigns for family planning and for reform of the laws on abortion.

I have approached this article with some trepidation – the subjects that Vera campaigned for remain controversial to this day and not everyone who reads this will applaud her achievements. But Vera was always clear that her work for the Abortion Law Reform Association (‘ALRA’), was driven by her concerns for maternal health. She was trying to help the thousands of women whose lives were endangered every year, who suffered irreparable damage, both physical and mental, or who died, at the hands of the back street abortionist. ‘I first became aware of the abortion issue when I was working in an office during the war. Quite a few of the girls became pregnant at different times and had to buy illegal abortions – I saw one or two girls through that experience. I had seen what illegal abortion meant, and I knew that women were bleeding to death on bathroom floors’.

The 1861 Offences Against the Person Act had made abortion illegal in all cases, the only exception being that provided by the 1926 Infant Life Act, which made it legal only in order to save the life of the mother. Of course, these Acts did not prevent abortions from being practised; they simply drove them underground. By the middle of the twentieth century, the luckier women might afford a secret visit to a qualified doctor who charged an exorbitant fee but was at least likely to be safe. For the vast majority, it was home-remedies, or the services of a back street abortionist. The death toll was rising.

Once she thought she had started a baby, and oh! the unspeakable terror of it! She had taken castor oil for three days running, and somebody had said that boiling up parsley was a good thing and she had tried to do this in the middle of the night in the cavernous kitchen at Chester Square, had been caught, and had to pretend that she was making some preparation for her skin. Thank goodness that had been a false alarm….

After Julius, Elizabeth Jane Howard

Part of the problem was the lack of proper family planning services. Information was hard to come by, particularly for unmarried or working class women. In 1930 the Ministry of Health began to allow local authorities to offer birth control advice in welfare centres, but progress was slow. The Family Planning Association was set up in the 1930s by Lady Denman and Margaret Pyke, to promote education on the subject. They set up clinics around the country in borrowed rooms staffed by volunteers with a doctor in attendance – but to ensure a level of respectability, they could only cater for married women. Gillian Greenwood was lucky in having a father who introduced her at an early stage to a Harley Street gynaecologist ‘I think I was the only girl in my set who didn’t have an abortion.’ Barbara Betts, later Barbara Castle, found that her father had hidden a copy of Marie Stopes’ ‘Married Love’ among her books when she went to university. In 1935, Dr Joan Malleson, working at a local authority clinic in Ealing, West London, published her book ‘The Principles of Contraception’. Yet the number of children born out of wedlock continued to rise, as did the number of women seeking abortions, with a noticeable spike of activity at the time of the two World Wars. By the mid-1950s, there were over thirty thousand illegitimate children born every year.

The public were increasingly aware that the existing legal framework was being tested and found wanting: in 1931 a well-known judge, Justice McCardie, presiding over the trial of a woman being prosecuted for the ‘Wilful Murder’ of an unborn child, pronounced ‘I cannot think that it is right that a woman should be forced to bear a child against her will.’ 1936 saw the foundation of the Abortion Law Reform Association, led by three women, Janet Chance, Stella Browne and Alice Jenkins, with support from Malleson. In 1938, Dr Alek Bourne performed a termination on a fourteen year old girl who had been raped. It was brought as a test case, and the judge guided the jury to an acquittal on the grounds that although the girl’s life was not in danger, the pregnancy constituted a severe risk to her mental health.

This may have appeared to be as a welcome clarification of the legal position, but the fact that the law seemed to be so outdated was still a massive problem. Membership of the ALRA doubled as the Thalidomide scandal hit the press, because it was not clear that risk of severe disability could justify a termination under the existing law. Between 1938 and 1966, six different Private Member’s Bills addressing the issue were introduced into Parliament but failed to pass, even though public opinion polls showed the country moving in favour of improving access to safe abortion services. 1958 saw another well-publicised case, when a Dr Newton of Harley Street was imprisoned for two years for the manslaughter of a suicidal pregnant woman to whom he had administered a drug to bring on an abortion. The number of legal abortions was rising, but these were performed mostly safely in private clinics, and were expensive. (Back in the 1930s, as described in Rosamond Lehmann’s novel, The Weather in the Streets, a private abortionist was asking £100 for the procedure - more than £5,000 in today’s money.)

By the 1960s, the principal cause of maternal death was the backstreet abortion, and of course there was no way of knowing how many of these were being performed each year, estimates ranged from between 30,000 to 100,000 per annum. In 1960 Alice Jenkins, one of the founders of the ALRA, published a book, Law for the Rich, drawing attention to the two tier system operating which discriminated so badly against poorer women. She pointed out that most of the women seeking abortion were actually married, with large families, who simply could not afford another mouth to feed. It was an issue of social policy.

When her husband was elected MP for Sowerby in 1949, Vera Houghton looked around for an effective way to use her excellent administrative talents. She applied to be General Secretary of the Family Planning Association, but was encouraged instead to apply for a bigger, international role. Over in the United States, Margaret Sanger, the leading campaigner for family planning support and contraception, had just formed an exploratory committee, the International Committee on Planned Parenthood, to bring together representatives from birth control organisations in several countries around the world. Four years later, in 1952, the committee evolved into the International Planned Parenthood Federation, with Sanger as its first President. Vera initially took on the role of an administrator, and by 1952 was working full-time as the Executive Secretary of the IPPF, travelling all over the world with Sanger, educating, lecturing, organising meetings and helping third world countries to create their own family planning services. In 1954 she was in Rome at the first World Population Conference organised by the United Nations. The local press in West Yorkshire duly reported on all her travels, impressed by, if not necessarily approving of, such an unusual career for the wife of a local MP: Vera took care always to round off a foreign trip with a lecture (plus coloured slides) for the local Women’s Section of the Labour Party. Wherever she spoke, she emphasised that the aim of the IPPF was to raise living standards in economically deprived areas, by helping women to control their own fertility and health.

By 1960 she had resigned from her main role at the IPPF, but was still travelling. In 1961 the Todmorden and District News reported that she was sailing for Ceylon, where she had accepted a temporary appointment with her old organisation to act as the administrative adviser to various family planning associations in East Pakistan, Burma and Singapore. She would be away for five months. A year later she was helping to organise the IPPF World conference, visiting Madras, Bangalore, Mysore and Ceylon. She had been a member of the ALRA since 1951 – in 1963, with Alice Jenkins now in her late 70s but still active, Vera was asked to take over the chairmanship of the organisation. For the rest of her career, she would be firmly focused on Britain’s maternal health issues.

In 2013, after Vera’s death, a fellow ALRA campaigner Diane Munday was interviewed about Vera on the BBC’s Last Word programme. How had she found Vera? ‘Much nicer than we’d been told, very quiet, unassuming, almost mumsy…we were quite difficult young women, but she took us on. She welded us very gently into one of the most effective political lobbying group’s there’s ever been.’ Being married to a member of the Government was of course an enormous advantage. Vera changed the strategy of the ALRA - until 1963 they had mostly concentrated their efforts in the Courts. Vera determined to attack the law head on - through Parliament. She cultivated the sympathetic MPs on both sides of the House and she knew how to work the Lobby. Her campaign began slowly, with a delegation to Sir Frank Hoskice, Labour’s first Home Secretary, asking for legislation that would firstly recognise the case law assumption that an abortion was permitted where the woman’s physical or mental health was seriously at risk, and secondly that doctors could legally terminate pregnancies resulting from assault or where there is high likelihood of physical deformity. She had the team prepare detailed and professional briefing packs, and on the days when the ballots for Private Member’s Bills were being run, she would be standing in the lobby of the House of Commons waiting to pounce on the lucky MPs who won.

In May 1966, the ALRA hit the jackpot. David Steel, a young Liberal MP from Scotland, aged only 29, came third in the ballot to sponsor a Private Member’s Bill. He had read Alice Jenkins’ ‘Law for the Rich’ and been impressed by her arguments - he now agreed to take up the cause. The full story of the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act is too long to tell here: but why did it succeed where so many others had failed? Partly because Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary, and Richard Crossman, Leader of the House of Commons, were supporters of the bill and prepared to give it adequate time for debate. But principally, as Lord Steel would be the first to admit, because of Vera’s extraordinary determination and powers of persuasion. She never took centre stage - it is unusual even to find a letter from her in the press, and even then it is in reply to some attack that she had found too exasperating to ignore.

‘Until now, the majority of women (and some doctors too) have believed that all abortion was illegal. For the first time, because of the publicity given to this Bill, women are beginning to realise that they can seek medical help for their problems and the doctors themselves are beginning to realise how many women need help to go through with a pregnancy. This Bill has been under discussion for 15 months; it has been considered by the House of Commons for 60 hours, and it represents the greatest measure of agreement between medical opinion and public opinion. It should be passed into law without further delay.’

Grimsby Daily Telegraph, 14 October 1967

Just ten days later, the Act received Royal Assent. Unfortunately Alice Jenkins did not live to see the Act come into operation in 1968, she died in December 1967. But Vera had kept her informed throughout the campaign, writing to her in July 1966 ‘How I wish you could have been with us on Friday to see a packed House of Commons voting solidly in favour of Mr Steel’s bill.’

But Vera did not stop there. She was only too well aware of the root cause of the problem - the lack of adequate birth control advice and support. Together with Alastair Service, another seasoned campaigner and Parliamentary lobbyist, she founded The Birth Control Trust, whose charitable object was stated as being ‘RELIEVING POOR PERSONS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND ELSEWHERE BY THE PROVISION OF FACILITIES FOR BIRTH CONTROL’. In 1973 Vera took over as Chair of the Family Planning Association. The following year, in 1974, contraceptives became freely available under the National Health Service in England, to all women, regardless of age or marital status.

In June 1986, Vera was honoured with a CBE for services to women’s health and the Family Planning Association. ‘I’m very pleased, it was a lovely surprise and honour’, she told her local newspaper. When she began her work, there were perhaps a hundred deaths a year from illegal abortions. Now there are none. All of this was achived without histrionics or emotional blackmail. As she told The Guardian in a rare interview in 1988 ‘ALRA never went in for emotive propaganda. We could have published photographs of women lying in pools of blood on bathroom floors…we always felt that wasn’t the way to tackle it.’

Vera died in 2013, an unsung heroine of the feminist movement. By showing how women could achieve results by concentrating their efforts on a single issue, she advanced the women’s movement as a whole. And in doing so, she brought into law a system that would save lives, year after year. Not a bad result for a girl from Miss Kerr-Sander’s Secretarial College.