David Paintin, who has died aged 88, will be remembered for his important work to achieve a liberal abortion law. A doctor and lecturer in obstetrics and gynaecology at St Mary’s hospital, London, David also helped to develop current abortion services, including use of the abortion pill, in this country. A quiet man of excessive modesty, David was nevertheless a stubborn and resolute advocate with great foresight.
In the 1960s, he was a medical adviser to the formidable team of women who led the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) in its campaign to legalise abortion. His clinical arguments that legal abortion was of benefit to both women and society were central in convincing the Liberal MP David Steel (now Lord Steel of Aikwood) to introduce the bill that became the Abortion Act of 1967.
Prior to this, abortion was available only to preserve a woman’s life, but as there was no clear definition of those grounds, doctors were at risk of prosecution for providing it. As a consequence, most abortions were only performed privately, or illegally, resulting in loss of life or damage to health.
The act, liberal for its time, clarified that abortion could be provided when it was in the best interests of the woman’s physical or mental health, or that of her existing children. Crucially, and of particular importance to David, was that the legislation, which applied to England, Scotland and Wales, allowed social circumstances to be taken into consideration.
The act, which stipulated that two doctors must agree on one of the grounds for abortion, was carefully worded to allow flexibility in interpretation. For example, it allowed doctors to approve any abortion if they considered that compelling a woman to have an unwanted child would negatively affect her mental health. Most did, but some did not. While some doctors considered a woman with four children as a legitimate candidate for abortion, others saw it as evidence that she was a good mother who could cope.
David came to the conclusion that women should be trusted to make their own decisions about pregnancy, whatever their age or background. Because of this, he continued to press for legal reforms and medical improvements that would place abortion in women’s hands.
The abortion pill, which enables women to avoid a procedure at a clinic or hospital, and allows for an early abortion, was initially dismissed by British providers as impractical when it was first licensed in France in 1988. It was David, with Dilys Cossey, his long-term collaborator from ALRA and the then director of the Birth Control Trust, who organised the first national meetings, in 1989 and 1993, to educate doctors on the abortion drug mifepristone, which was licensed in the UK in 1991.
David continued to monitor the implementation of the Abortion Act and contributed to resisting the many attempts to restrict it, through his advice to government. He also supported the campaign for legal abortion in Northern Ireland and the current campaign to decriminalise abortion completely in the UK. He saw his relationship to a woman as her doctor, not her conscience or moral instructor. The woman, he said, not the doctor, lives with the consequences.
Born in Oxenhope, West Yorkshire, to Bernard Paintin, a Methodist minister, and Kathleen (nee Leech), David went to Bridlington grammar school, then, after a family move, to Andover grammar school in Hampshire. His decision to study medicine was based on his commitment to a life of public service in the “new” NHS. He was a strong opponent of the commercialisation of the national health service and never practised privately.
He qualified as a doctor at Bristol University in 1954, then did his postgraduate training in obstetrics and gynaecology at Aberdeen University, where he was influenced by Dugald Baird. Baird had studied the influence of socioeconomic deprivation on women’s health, and as a consequence had decided that abortion and sterilisation should be available to all.
David provided abortions with Baird and was impressed by the demonstrated reduction in family size and infant death compared to other major Scottish cities. In 1963 David moved to St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, west London, where he worked in the academic department, teaching undergraduates in obstetrics and gynaecology.
He also provided abortions at the hospital, both before and after the act was passed, and in the 80s was able to combine this with the established family planning service at Raymede Clinic, West Kensington, to provide an integrated community abortion service with teaching, counselling and continuity of contraceptive care, one of the first of its kind in the country.
Accuracy mattered to David. It was important to him that everything about abortion, whether it was the history, the law, clinical practice or the reason why it is necessary was told truthfully without sensationalism or sentimentality. He was editor of the British Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology from 1988 to 1992, and held the journal to these standards in the face of nudges to be more commercial.
He retired from clinical practice and teaching in 1991, when he became emeritus reader in obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of London.
The medical abortion unit at St Mary’s was named the Paintin unit in his honour in the mid-90s. He was a trustee of the Birth Control Trust from 1973, and chairman from 1981 to 1998. He was also a trustee of the Pregnancy Advisory Service (1981–96) and British Pregnancy Advisory Service (1996-2003); and a trustee and board member of Brook (1996-2003), and chair of its medical advisory committee (1996-98).
David is survived by his wife, Avril (nee Reed), a doctor, whom he married in 1958, and described as his “essential other half”, and his two daughters, Sarah and Anne.
• David Bernard Paintin, gynaecologist and campaigner for women’s reproductive rights, born 18 December 1930; died 30 March 2019
