Joan Malleson

Joan Graeme Malleson (née Billson; 4 June 1899 – 14 May 1956) was an English physician, specialist in contraception and prominent advocate of the legalisation of abortion.

Life Billson was born at Ulverscroft, Leicestershire. She was educated at Bedales School, where she became Head Girl, and studied medicine at University College, London from 1918, later moving to Charing Cross Hospital due to the hostility to female students she experienced at UCL. In 1923 she married the actor Miles Malleson; they divorced in 1940. She qualified in 1926 and worked for Holborn Borough Council and the West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases, developing an interest in the fields of fertility, reproduction and sexuality.

In 1931, while working for Ealing Borough Council, she became one of the first British doctors to provide birth control advice on behalf of a local authority. In 1936 the Abortion Law Reform Association was started by Alice Jenkins and Janet Chance. Malleson was amongst its more influential supporters. He performed an abortion, then illegal, and was put on trial for it; the King v Alek Bourne trial.

Malleson had suffered with severe depression since the breakdown of her marriage and the birth of her second son. Because she had told them that "if her depression became unmanageable she would inject herself with a large dose of insulin and swim out to sea," her sons believe that her death was a suicide.