About us

Our aims

We are a group of UK-based clinicians who believe that evidence-based, high-quality abortion care should be recognised as a routine part of women’s reproductive healthcare and accessible to everyone who needs it.

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What we do:

  • Promote the idea of ‘conscientious commitment’ to abortion care and inspire future abortion providers

  • Work towards the destigmatisation and normalisation of abortion for those accessing and those providing abortion care

  • Advocate for comprehensive abortion care teaching as part of the core curriculum in all UK medical schools

  • Support evidence-based workshops on pregnancy-decision making and abortion in secondary schools

  • Draw attention to current workforce issues in abortion care and call for improved postgraduate training pathways

  • Raise awareness of the problems with current UK abortion law and campaign for the decriminalisation of abortion across the UK

Our history

Doctor's for Choice UK was formerly Doctors for a Woman’s Choice on Abortion.

 

Doctors for a Woman’s Choice on Abortion was set up in 1976 with the following aims:

  • to make it clear to the public and to MPs that a large number of doctors would favour a change in the law to give women the right to make the abortion decision

  • to press for such a change in the law

  • to answer at a medical level the arguments of anti-abortionists

 

Within the limits of the existing law, DWCA campaigned for:

  • improved facilities for abortion, including day-care early medical abortion and the introduction of home medical abortion

  • all areas to meet the of the standards in the RCOG guidelines, “The Care of Women Requesting Induced Abortion“, which include waiting times and provision for counselling

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DWCA changed its name to Doctors for Choice UK on 27 April 2018, the 50th anniversary of the implementation of the 1967 Abortion Act.

The committee

JAYNE KAVANAGH

Co-Chair

Jayne Kavanagh is a Principal Clinical Teaching Fellow and medical ethics lead at UCL Medical School, and a sexual and reproductive health specialty doctor in North/East London. She set up UCL’s flagship widening participation project Target Medicine, and Viva la Vulva, a reproductive rights action group for medical students. She trains UCL medical students to run ‘Education for Choice’ workshops in London schools and supports colleagues to roll out the programme nationally.

 

Jayne is co-chair of Doctors for Choice UK and a member of the RCOG abortion taskforce group. In 2017, she produced and directed the documentary Kind to Women, to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act. She has toured the UK with My Body My Life, a multimedia exhibition that addresses abortion-related stigma, and was the clinical and ethical consultant on I told my mum I was going on an RE trip, a verbatim theatre piece exploring the ethical and practical issues related to young people and abortion.