Diana Mason

Diana Manby Mason (née Shaw; 29 July 1922 – 5 June 2007) was a prominent New Zealand medical doctor and obstetrician also active in the anti-abortion movement during the 1970s.

Early life Mason was born in 1922 the daughter of Frieda Charlotte Manby Shaw and Charles Bertram Shaw. She grew up in Karori, Wellington where she attended Karori School and Samuel Marsden College. She had always wanted to be a doctor and attended Victoria University of Wellington followed by medical school at the University of Otago from where she graduated in 1945.

Career Mason's internship at Wellington Hospital during her final year at medical school sparked her interest in obstetrics. She returned to Wellington Hospital as a house surgeon after graduation but in 1947 joined a general practice in Newtown, Wellington. In 1949 she went to England with her husband Bruce Mason and baby daughter to do post–graduate training at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. They returned to New Zealand after three years to live in Tauranga for a year before moving to Wellington where Mason returned to work in the general practice where she had worked earlier.

Mason was opposed to abortion and was politically active in the anti-abortion movement in particular in the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC); she was SPUC's national president from 1974 to 1976.

In the late 1980s she became the second woman to hold the office of president of the Wellington division of the New Zealand Medical Association.

She retired at the age of 78.

Personal life Mason met her husband, the playwright Bruce Mason, at Victoria University in 1940. They married in 1945 after Bruce returned to New Zealand from war service overseas and she had finished her medical degree. They had three children. Diana and Bruce were well known in the arts and culture world in Wellington.

She died in Wellington on 5 June 2007.