The 50th anniversary of the Abortion Act this week has left me reflecting on the 40th and 30th anniversaries. Ten years ago, abortion rights were under near constant attack, a pincer movement by a couple of Conservative MPs and the Daily Mail, advancing elaborate, often rather confusing arguments for the miracle of the foetus. The Daily Mail was so entranced, for a while, by the marvel of gestation that it ran a double-page spread of the ultra-sound scans from a horse. The aim was to make a wedge issue out of the time limit, reduce it from 24 weeks to 21, with a 10–minute rule bill tabled by Tory MP Nadine Dorries suggesting a “cooling off period after the first point of contact with a medical practitioner about a termination”.

It was plain, it seemed then, that the time limit was of no real consequence – late term abortions were a small proportion of the overall number. Rather, the intention was to undermine the act itself; to festoon an already complicated piece of legislation with extra hazards. Ten years before, in 1997, abortion had been the thing nobody talked about; back then nobody, apparently, had ever actually had an abortion, or been party to the thing that gives rise to one. Everybody pro–choice was fighting on behalf of some unnamed other woman, who needed access to safe services, otherwise she would be unsafe; nobody was fighting for their own bodily autonomy. With the Labour government delivering the first majority pro–choice parliament in history, we were all expecting change – most urgently, for the women of Northern Ireland, British citizens denied the abortion rights of their compatriots for reasons that made no constitutional sense and pertained only to the loud voices of devout men. No change came and an air of embarrassed necessity settled on the matter.

The most important thing from a pro–choice point of view, across these two decades, was to defend the act, prevent its being warped. There was very little space to criticise it, even though there was plainly plenty to criticise.

The requirement that, in order to get an abortion, two doctors had to sign off on the damage having a child would do to a woman’s health means, for practical purposes, that women seeking one have always had to pretend to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That was always my problem with the way the law was framed, that we were allowed to have this procedure only if we were prepared to be cast as dangerously unstable. This isn’t a matter of huge individual consequence – you don’t have to put it on your CV – but it is meaningful, socially, that at the very moment a woman asserts her right to make a choice for herself, she can do so only on the understanding that she is almost incapable of making choices.

I was missing something much more fundamental though, which has been the crux of a sea–change in thinking, and that means, on its 50th anniversary, more and more people are calling for the abortion law to be abolished altogether. As Diana Johnson, Labour MP for Hull North, says, “The problem with this law is that it’s in the criminal code. It doesn’t belong in the criminal code. Clinicians are put off going into this area because of the criminal legislation surrounding it.”

Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the country’s leading abortion provider, says that with the 50th anniversary coming up, “we really had to start thinking about what we wanted out of a modern abortion law. Because what we’ve been doing for years is a workaround on what exists. There’s a really big political cost to the workaround; one is the continued stigmatisation of something that an increasing number of women are availing themselves of, but the other thing is that so many countries’ laws are influenced by Britain’s law. So we thought, if we had an abortion law that actually worked, what would it be? It was completely obvious that the thing that everybody wanted was no abortion law. The best abortion law would be a blank sheet of paper. Abortion would be regulated like any other healthcare measure, and that would pretty much be that.”

Earlier this year, Johnson took decriminalisation to the house in a 10–minute rule bill and won it by 30 votes. Dr Ellie Lee, sociologist at the University of Kent, a pioneer of parenting studies which have included some fascinating work on abortion, says, “There have been 50 or 60 abortion bills put to the house since 1967, and they’ve all tried to restrict access to abortion. I think this is the first time there has been a genuinely liberalising reform bill.”

Ten–minute rule bills, notoriously, don’t mean a lot; they aren’t binding, they don’t necessarily kick–start any draft legislation – although Johnson is now working on draft legislation for a full–blown decriminalisation bill – and, especially on “conscience” votes (where there’s no party line), you can’t rely on being able to replicate any support. Yet, undeniably, something has finally shifted. How did this happen?

It’s significant that all the major medical bodies – the British Medical Association, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and Royal College of Midwives – came out in favour of decriminalisation. They have always been pro–choice, and have always resisted attempted incursions on the time–limit, but have never been radical organisations. But the sex–selective abortion furore cooked up by the Daily Telegraph in 2012 brought home to clinicians the ramifications of the Abortion Act.

In February 2012, Telegraph reporters visited five BPAS clinics, pretending to be seeking an abortion because they had a female baby on the way and had wanted a boy. Footage was released of one of these visits; it was quite funny at the time, since the schtick was so unconvincing. Hats off to the slimly-staffed newspaper for finding a pregnant reporter, but they didn’t find one who could act. Besides, BPAS staff had some experience of the matter, as they said in a statement at the time: “Requests for sex-selective abortion are … overwhelmingly made by journalists.” In a grainy video, you can hear the journalist state her sex–selective intentions – there was a racist undertone, of course; who aborts girl babies? Foreigners, that’s who – with a doctor gently if wearily saying it was none of her business why the abortion was sought. This kick–started a rather sluggish anti–sex–selective abortion campaign – the Conservative MP Fiona Bruce tabled an amendment to the serious crime bill in 2015 – but the immediate consequence was that Andrew Lansley, then health secretary, directed the Care Quality Commission to investigate the doctors. They spent months not knowing whether they were going to be prosecuted, before being exonerated. “The anti–abortion campaigners have really brought this on themselves,” says Furedi. “In threatening to drag doctors into court, they got the BMA against them.”

Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland anomaly has thrown up more unintended consequences. Women in Northern Ireland are heavily reliant on buying abortion pills – two pills, mifepristone first, prostaglandin second, effective up to the ninth week of pregnancy – online, since the alternative is an expensive, lonely trip to England. The first prosecution of a woman for procuring an abortion using a poison was secured in 2016. Yet despite the threat of prison, women are becoming more and more open about it, “tweeting pictures of their pills, saying ‘come and arrest me, then’,” says Lee. Meanwhile, women in England are also getting the pills online, to avoid what is surely one of the most needless, appalling effects of our abortion protocol: the pills have to be administered in a clinic; if you’ve had to travel any distance, you then start miscarrying in transit. “It’s an interesting thing how medical technologies interact with culture and the law,” says Lee. “The potential for demedicalisation and putting abortion into women’s hands is enormous. Where are the boundaries between early medical abortion, emergency contraception and any hormonal treatment?”

There has also been a change in the general understanding of the kind of women who need abortions. In the 90s, abortion was always framed as the opposite of motherhood. It was a classic Madonna/whore binary, with the wholesome, clean, ordered, structured mothers on one side, and the degenerate, sullied, chaotic anti-mothers on the other. Finally, after 50 years, that narrative has been interrupted by reality: over half of women who have abortions are already mothers (54% in 2015), a proportion echoed in the US. It is accepted that you can’t have modern motherhood without having abortion, and that far from undermining maternal devotion, abortion might well be a signal of it. Lee has noticed, among her students, that opposition to abortion has completely fallen away; the new taboo is drinking in pregnancy. “Motherhood is now seen as something you should choose to do, and choose to do well. You need this clean, wholesome, foetus–ready body, you need to live your life completely differently. In the 70s, you got pregnant, you had a baby. It was just a thing that happened. It’s not like that any more. And that creates a powerful legitimation of family planning generally, and abortion in particular. People are much more accepting of it.”

Perhaps inevitably the slow erosion of the taboo has put new fire into the anti-abortion campaigners. Demonstrations outside abortion clinics have become so intense and splenetic that Ealing council announced this month that they are considering an exclusion zone around the Marie Stopes clinic. Furedi is conflicted about buffer zones: “I’m hugely in favour of the right to protest. If these people had not been behaving the way they have, nobody would have taken any action. We’ve been putting up for years with a couple of nuns and some leaflets. But you walk up, and there’s a crowd with GoPro cameras on their heads, telling you you’re going to get cancer. This isn’t a protest issue, this is a you–behaving–badly issue.”

These groups tend to operate so closely to the American template – huge, graphic images of foetuses, filming people going in and out of the clinic, chanting, “We’ll adopt your baby” – that it’s hard to see this as anything other than a straight import. The anti-abortion movement in the US is a very different ideological scene, a carrier issue for evangelism and opposition to state-funded healthcare. To see it replayed in Ealing seems incongruous and disingenuous, like a Slug and Lettuce celebrating the 4th of July. But that doesn’t make it any less threatening, and one London clinic was recently forced to close as a result of it. “It makes me feel sick when I see protesters outside clinics,” says Kerry Abel, head of Abortion Rights. “I think everyone feels it’s pretty disgusting, to whisper in the ears of individuals on their way into clinics.”

For Abel, the other pressing issue remains access for women from Northern Ireland. Another victory was secured in June, when Labour MP Stella Creasy, with impressive cunning, basically gamed the government into an arrangement to fund the abortions of Northern Irish women (enabling them to have a termination on the NHS, in mainland Britain), by collecting a group of pro–choice Tory MPs who threatened to rebel on the issue, in that post–election quiver where a rebellion was utterly unaffordable. Abortions previously cost Irish women about £900, so this was no small achievement.

“We were expecting a huge backlash,” Furedi says, “but actually people were more outraged that women in some parts of the UK couldn’t get services that were provided for women in other parts of the UK.” While significant, this is still nothing like the extent of the change needed. “Midwives tell me that people with Irish accents are really on the clock, they just want to get out of there,” says Abel. “It really hardens women going through it, to be so far from home, on your own.”

Nevertheless, morale is now running high among pro–choice campaigners. “I first got involved in abortion campaigning in 1982,” says Furedi, “and at that point, only half of abortions were paid for by the NHS. Our big campaign over the next decade was for 75% of abortions to be paid for by the NHS. We never thought we’d get to that. And now we’re at 98%. It’s become incorporated. I don’t think people will ever think it’s good. But they think it’s right.”