The concluding chapter sets out some of the key themes to emerge from the book. It recalls the influence of the various groups of actors who gave meaning to the Abortion Act, emphasising how the Act was shaped over time in a complex process of negotiation, dispute, revision and consolidation. We locate the Act within the shifting contours of a country undergoing a demographic revolution, exploring how it shaped and was shaped by processes of secularisation, the decline of discursive Christianity and an enhanced role for science in ordering understandings of the world, changing norms of gender, family and disability, shifting ideas of medical authority and changing technologies.

Chapter 4 explores how the Abortion Act became embedded in daily life: abortion for non-medical reasons became gradually more widely accepted, services were embedded and streamlined and abortion technologies became safer and less technically demanding. We consider how dispute would now come increasingly to turn on the ‘normalisation’ (or ’trivialisation’) of abortion. While these disputes would find focus in contestation regarding the meaning of the Abortion Act, they were always also about far more, lying along a fault line between competing visions of gender, family, religion, science and society.