Nancy Beaton-Loudon

Nancy was a pioneer in providing contraception and abortion care in the 1960s when both subjects were still taboo. During her early medical training, she encountered gender-based prejudice but turned it into a positive career move, to the lasting benefit of women in Edinburgh and across the UK.   

 

She began training in Edinburgh as an obstetrician, but because she was engaged to a fellow trainee, John Loudon, she was told by the professor that she could not continue her career as a married woman.  She left and worked in the Edinburgh Mothers’ Welfare Clinic, established in the 1930s when calling it a birth control clinic would have been unacceptable.  Later the Dean Terrace Clinic, based in Stockbridge, Edinburgh, became a leading centre for sexual health care and research.  

 

Nancy ran a postnatal contraceptive clinic in the maternity unit at the Eastern General Hospital, and her husband, John, provided Edinburgh’s abortion service. The 1967 Abortion Act was highly controversial, as was the then-new oral contraceptive pill.  The idea of prescribing it to students caused outrage. Nancy and John were steadfast in supporting both services and the need for them. 

 

Nancy’s Handbook of Family Planning, published in 1985, became “an established reference for all those working in reproductive health” according to Elsevier, who published the fifth edition in 2007.  A long-time lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, she became Chair of the National Association of Family Planning Doctors. She was elected as a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and awarded an OBE in 1992.