Diane Munday

Diane Schieferstein was born in east London in March 1931 to a Jewish family. Her mother was believing but not practising, and from an early age Diane was drawn to a humanist worldview. She later named Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin among her early intellectual influences.

She worked as a laboratory researcher at St Bartholomew's Hospital in the City of London. In December 1954 she married Derek Bradlaugh Munday (1930-1996) in East Ham. By her late twenties she had three children under the age of four. During pregnancy with her third child she was prescribed thalidomide for sleeplessness but did not take it; when the thalidomide scandal became public she said she would have wanted an abortion had she been carrying a disabled child, and she joined the Abortion Law Reform Association.

In 1961 she became pregnant again and decided to have an abortion, then still a criminal offence under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. Because her family could afford private care she obtained a termination after a Harley Street consultant and a psychiatrist certified that her mental health and life were endangered. That experience shaped her public activism.

From 1962 Munday became a leading public voice in the Abortion Law Reform Association. With Madeleine Simms she became one of ALRA's most visible faces, speaking openly about her own abortion on television, radio and at meetings when few women did so. Vera Houghton became ALRA chair and Munday vice-chair. She faced hostility in her village, including refusal of service by a local greengrocer and threatening messages, but continued organising.

After Labour's 1964 victory ALRA pressed Home Secretary Frank Soskice for reform and was told to prove demand beyond middle-class circles. Munday trained speakers for women's organisations, including the National Council of Women, and helped build pressure that led to private members' bills. Lord Silkin's Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bills fell with the 1966 election; the working party then backed David Steel's bill. After an all-night sitting on 27 October 1967 the Abortion Act received approval. Munday watched from the parliamentary terrace and said the job was only half done, criticising the exclusion of Northern Ireland and the two-doctor rule.

She was ALRA general secretary from 1970. In 1974 she co-founded and became press and publicity officer of the Birmingham Pregnancy Advisory Service, later the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. She also sat as a magistrate on the St Albans Bench until age 70, served on the British Humanist Association executive, was a patron of Humanists UK, and from 2000 to 2005 was listed as a director of the Rationalist Association. She later campaigned for voluntary euthanasia and assisted dying, including commentary on the Diane Pretty litigation. In 2017 she appeared in Abortion on Trial and Kind to Women.

Munday married Derek Bradlaugh Munday in December 1954; he died in April 1996. They had three children. The family lived in the Wheathampstead and St Albans area of Hertfordshire, where she sat on the local bench and campaigned for a state school after her eldest son was called a pagan at an Anglican school.

Her public life was closely tied to humanist organisations she had joined in the 1950s. She remained a patron of Humanists UK into later life and continued to speak about reproductive rights and end-of-life choice.

Diane Munday died on 9 January 2026 at the age of 94. Humanists UK announced her death and published a tribute describing her as a leading campaigner for the Abortion Act. No cause of death was publicly disclosed in the sources consulted for this page. Place of death was not stated in the English Wikipedia entry.

Munday is remembered as one of the activists who made abortion law reform a public question in 1960s Britain and who helped deliver the Abortion Act 1967, imperfect as she judged it. Through ALRA, BPAS and decades of humanist campaigning she linked personal testimony to parliamentary lobbying and service provision.

Her later work on assisted dying and her long association with Humanists UK extended that record into the twenty-first century. Tributes after her death placed her among the campaigners who changed the legal and social landscape for women seeking abortion care in the United Kingdom.