As Dr. Aleck Bourne, gynecologist, stood in the dock of London’s Old Bailey Courthouse in 1938, he could not possibly foresee the ethical impact his case would have on the medical profession. Charged under Section 58 of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act for performing an abortion on a 14-year-old girl who had been gang-raped, Bourne, a consultant gynecologist at St. Mary’s Hospital, pleaded not guilty.
The case was a cause célèbre; the girl had been referred to Bourne by Dr. Joan Malleson, a prominent member of the Birth Control Movement, after another doctor refused to perform the abortion. Bourne did not deny that he had aborted the child. Abortion was legal if it would save the mother’s life, and he argued that the mental impact on the mother of carrying the child to term was sufficient justification. The jury took a mere forty minutes to deliver a verdict of “not guilty.”
The presiding judge, Mr. Justice Macnaghten, had told the court: “If the doctor is of the opinion, on reasonable grounds and on adequate knowledge, that the probable consequences of the continuation of the pregnancy would make the woman a physical or mental wreck, then he operates, in that honest belief, for the purpose of preserving the life of the mother.” The British Medical Association was in session in Plymouth when news of the verdict arrived; the room erupted in cheers.
Decades later, Dr. Aleck Bourne would become one of Great Britain’s most distinguished pro-life advocates—and spend the remainder of his life attempting to counter the events set in motion by the case that bore his name.
Rex v Bourne was not significant simply because it was an abortion case; it was significant because Aleck Bourne was not a stereotypical back-alley abortionist. Bourne was one of the most distinguished physicians in the country. His Synopsis of Midwifery, published in 1913, went through multiple editions. Throughout his life, his achievements in the medical field would be recognized as outstanding.
In Great Britain, the Rex v Bourne verdict made it possible for doctors to begin performing abortions without fear of legal consequences in cases where the mother’s life was not physically in danger and set the stage for legalization, although abortions initially remained relatively rare. It also had international ripple effects. In 1988, the Canadian Supreme Court cited Rex v Bourne in its R v. Morgentaler decision, which overturned Canada’s abortion laws, as did other Commonwealth countries in their own abortion decisions.
Initially, Bourne supported “abortion reform,” although he only condoned abortion in the very limited cases in which he thought it “necessary” and firmly believed that a society in which poverty was addressed and women were empowered would eliminate abortion almost entirely. He sat on the British Medical Association’s 1935 Committee on Abortion and served on the Medico-Legal Committee of the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), which pushed for the liberalization of abortion laws.
But Bourne was soon horrified by the impact of his landmark case on English law. In 1945, he left the ALRA. Bourne, an agnostic, affirmed the fundamental scientific truth that a unique, individual human life begins at conception and found the idea of abortion on demand morally abhorrent. In 1966, he became a founding member of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, one of the world’s first anti-abortion organizations.
