Dorothy Thurtle

Dorothy Thurtle (; 15 November 1890 – 28 February 1973) was a British women's right activist, a campaigner for contraceptive and abortion rights, and a Labour Party politician.

Early life She was the sixth child of the eight daughters and four sons of George Lansbury, politician and social reformer, and Labour Party leader from 1932 to 1935, and his wife Elizabeth Jane Lansbury (née Brine).

Throughout her career, Thurtle was a tireless advocate for working-class women having free access to information on abortion, pressing the Labour Party on this, saying it made nonsense of their supposed commitment to sexual equality. The report acknowledged that abortion law was frequently and "freely disregarded" for valid reasons, and that backstreet abortions were extremely common, noting that "between 110,000 and 150,000 abortions were carried out annually, 40% of these were criminally induced". The committee majority treated abortion as a medical and legal problem and overlooked the underlying cause, fertility control. It opposed the legalisation of abortion on the grounds that it posed "danger to life and health" and risked being a "temptation to loose and immoral conduct", proposing adjustments to the law to ensure that medical partitioners were acting legally when they undertook an abortion following a medical consultation which determined that the woman's life was in danger, but recommending greater restrictions on abortifacients to prevent self-medication.

Thurtle publicly dissented the committee's conclusions and issued an influential minority report which approached the issue from a fertility standpoint. Thurtle stated that the primary cause of abortion was a "high degree of fertility", a "stark reality" facing all fertile women, and argued that because many married women would face pregnancy every one or two years until their menopause, withholding access to fertility advice and birth control was "a form of class discrimination and penalisation", particularly as maternal death rates rose rapidly after the fifth child.

Thurtle's report was praised by the National Council for Equal Citizenship and the ARLA, but otherwise her proposals for "voluntary abortion" (under restrictive criteria, such as four prior pregnancies) received little contemporary support. The limited recommendations of the committee majority were also not implemented, ostensibly due to the outbreak of the Second World War, although the classification of both reports as "non-parliamentary" likely indicated that the government had never intended to enact legislation.

Personal life In 1912, she married Ernest Thurtle (later MP for Shoreditch).