For the intrepid campaigner Diane Munday, the enactment of the Abortion Bill on October 27, 1967 crowned her decades-long activism with only partial success. The law applied to England, Scotland and Wales, but not Northern Ireland (where abortion laws were not liberalised until 2020) and terminations required the consent of two doctors.
Munday damned it as “a compromise… Only when women had the power to decide for themselves, would our task be fully done.” And so, on the terrace outside the Commons at 3am that day, she declared: “We have done only half the job, so let’s drink half glasses of champagne.”
Munday, who has died aged 94, had dedicated her life to social reform and was also an influential voice in the campaign for assisted dying, now being debated in the Lords. She said she was guided by her rational and humanist principles, and her need to challenge prejudice. A patron of Humanists UK, she had joined the movement, then the Ethical Union, in the 1950s and was elected to the executive committee in 1967.
Campaigners at the time were battling restrictive laws on homosexuality, family planning, capital punishment and divorce. “I am still proud to have been an active part of the movement that so effectively tackled and defeated religious prejudice and power,” she later said.
In the early 1960s, Munday faced her own problems while trying to seek a safe abortion. Pregnant with her fourth child in 1961 she found a Harley Street clinic prepared to argue that her mental health would suffer if her pregnancy continued. “It was the fact that because I had a chequebook to wave in Harley Street that I could buy a safe abortion, but other women were suffering.”
The morning after her termination, she woke up thinking of the many women who had died because they had gone to back-street abortionists.
She joined the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) in 1962 and became vice chair and later general secretary. She addressed women’s organisations all over the country on the need for reform. Looking conventional in conservative hat and gloves, she soon turned that image on its head when she revealed her own abortion, calling for the legal option to be open to every woman. She involved the media in her battle and began training other speakers. She also enlisted the support of the National Council of Women of Great Britain.
The campaign resulted in Lib Dem MP David Steel’s private member’s bill, the medical termination of pregnancy bill, which passed into law as the Abortion Act in 1967. Munday joined other humanists in co-founding the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. But critics and trolls waited in the wings. She told them: “Abortion is not a negation of the maternal instinct. It is an extension of it, which comes into force when a woman knows she cannot cope with a child and give it the love that should be every human person’s birthright.”
It was a cause that required her to be thick-skinned. “It made me brazen,” she said. “I became accustomed to being attacked, knowing that the attacks were unjustified, and just getting on with it… I had death threats. I had red paint poured over my car. I was called names, there were awful letters put through the letterbox. It just made me determined to ignore them and carry on. My upbringing has given me strength.” The worst incidents, she said, were the nightly phone calls in which a baby’s voice was heard to cry: “Mama, you murdered me.”
Munday served as a Justice of the Peace on the St Albans Bench for 33 years, as a director and trustee of the Rationalist Press Association and became deeply involved in the NHS and medical research. Later she adopted the causes of transgender rights, women against racism, and assisted dying. She quoted her own devastating family experiences in which loved ones had pleaded for help to die. As for herself, she revealed – “I now have a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia with Parkinson’s and have no wish or intention to suffer as they did.”
Diane Munday was the daughter of Amelia née Lyons and bus driver Phillip Schieferstein. She was brought up with her younger brother, Trevor, in London’s East End, then dominated by Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. With a Jewish mother and a German surname, she was an early target for antisemitism. She was taunted as a “dirty German Jew” and was pushed off her bike. On leaving East Ham grammar school she joined Barts Hospital as a research assistant and studied biochemistry at Birkbeck College in the evening.
While cycling across Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War she met her future husband, Derek Munday, who trained fighter pilots and later worked in marketing at Imperial Chemical Industries. They married in 1954. She is survived by their sons, Jeremy, Simon and Nicholas and four grandsons.
Diane Munday: born March 4, 1931. Died: January 9, 2026
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