British Section of the World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life

January 3 2008 (The times)

Find the orginal here.

Peggy Norris was a passionate and formidable anti-abortion campaigner who was one of the initial committee members of SPUC, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, an association which was founded in 1967 in opposition to David Steel’s Abortion Bill. Later, Norris fought attempts to legalise euthanasia and founded the anti-euthanasia pressure group, Alert.

Peggy O’Meara was born in Kilcormac, King’s County (now Co Offaly), Ireland, in 1921. In 1943 she graduated from the National University of Ireland and worked in UK and Irish hospitals.

After the war she went to Germany with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, treating Polish concentration camp survivors, many of whom suffered from tuberculosis. In 1948 she married Dr Jim Norris, and until 1979 worked as a GP on Merseyside.

In 1967 Norris and her husband were among the first supporters of SPUC, a non-denominational association set up to fight David Steel’s Abortion Bill. Norris regretted the Roman Catholic bishops’ decision not to make a powerful attack on the Bill, as they had followed advice that to do so would be counterproductive.

Fellow members of SPUC’s executive committee included the gynaecologist Aleck Bourne, who in 1938 had carried out an abortion on a raped woman, a case which made therapeutic termination legal in case law.

Norris’s anti-abortion stance was deeply influenced by the time she had spent in postwar Germany and observing the consequences of the Nazi philosophy as applied to medicine. Other anti-abortionists at the time founded a separate anti-abortion group, the charity LIFE, which provides counselling and care for women considering abortion.

After abortion became legal, Norris was at the forefront of the series of large SPUC demonstrations organised in London, Liverpool and elsewhere calling for an amendment of the law. There, she and other SPUC supporters faced pro-abortion students who chanted “not the Church, not the State, women must decide their fate.” In Liverpool Norris was with Malcolm Muggeridge when an angry crowd shouting “Half of you were unwanted” showered them from a bridge with condoms. Muggeridge responded: “I have heard it all before . . . trying to silence us . . . in Germany in 1936.”

In 1974, however, Norris resigned from the executive committee of SPUC, along with a majority of the original committee and secretariat, a move resulting from an internal wrangle. Four years later she founded the Medical Education Trust, which promotes ethical standards in medicine and disseminates little publicised scientific reports from governments and scientists on public health concerns.

In 1972 she was also a founder member of the Dutch-inspired World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life (WFDWRHL). It argued that doctors should adhere to the 1948 Declaration of Geneva, which states that human life should be respected from conception until natural death. In 1991 Norris started Alert as an anti-euthanasia pressure group.

A tall, attractive woman with an apparently tough exterior, Norris combined unfailing kindness with generosity, while concealing her own vulnerability behind a brisk aura of certainty. She was also known internationally as an articulate speaker and writer on anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia issues, who liked, in an argument, to pin down her adversaries on the precise use and meaning of their terms. In 1991 Cardinal Basil Hume appointed Norris a Dame of St Gregory.

Norris’s husband predeceased her, and she is survived by three sons and two daughters. Another son died in a motorcycle accident.