Scottish lives

Barbara Millar on Libby Wilson
A police suspect at 83

You could pretty well guess that a letter addressed to 'The Den of Iniquity' was never going to be a paean of praise. It was one of many vituperative missives sent to Libby Wilson in the 1960s when she opened the doors of the family planning clinic she ran in Sheffield to unmarried women. She was also blasted by the local bishop. But the doors to her trail-blazing clinic remained firmly open.
     Libby Wilson, now 83, is still rising to challenges. At the end of this month she could well be making the long journey from her home in Glasgow to a police station in Surrey. She was arrested last year and questioned by Surrey police under suspicion of 'aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring a suicide'.
     Cari Loder, a multiple sclerosis sufferer in her late 40s, had bought a helium-based 'suicide kit' off the internet and had telephoned Libby, a former GP as well as reproductive health expert, to make sure she had everything in order so that she could successfully take her own life.
     'I was arrested because I spoke to a lady, whom I had never met, who had advanced MS, and who wanted to die using helium, which starves the brain of oxygen,' Libby explains. 'She wanted to do it while she could still turn on the gas herself, and she wanted to run through the process with a doctor who would be understanding and not try to stop her. I spoke to her a couple of times, and the police found my number on her telephone records.'
     Libby was held in a cell for several hours and subjected to 'a long interview' at Woking police station with a cast including two policewomen, the duty solicitor, and a variety of experts, who took her DNA, fingerprints and photographs. 'The cost must have been ridiculous,' she comments.
     But she adds she is 'not in the least bit worried' about the possibility of further action. 'The press would be all over it. Can you imagine the headlines: "Great grandmother faces 14 years in jail for speaking to someone on the phone". Now that the election has been called I don't think they will proceed.'
     Libby has been involved with right-to-die societies since a friend took her along to a Voluntary Euthanasia Society meeting. In 2000, with colleagues, she founded her own society, the UK-wide Friends at the End (FATE). She describes FATE as 'dedicated to promoting knowledge about end-of-life choices and peaceful death', with one of its main objectives being to change the law in order truly to enable this. Cari Loder was, she says, 'a highly intelligent, independent person who was determined to die by her own hand'. And, as she also told the police, she adds: 'It is not my business to persuade people not to commit suicide'.
     She has her own helium-kit at home, but visits to the dentist years ago have left her with a horror of having to put anything over her face. 'I'm not obsessed about dying,' she says. 'I don’t have any specific plans. After all, I could get run over by a bus.'
     And, while supporting independent MSP Margot MacDonald's bill advocating physician-assisted suicide, she does not hold great hopes of it becoming law. 'I fear her bill will fail because of the lily-livered cowardice of MSPs.'

Libby Wilson has never been lily-livered, and she does not come from lily-livered stock. Born in London, her father was a GP and her mother trained to be a missionary, nurse and midwife, back in the days when assisting at a home birth meant returning to hospital by train – with the placenta – to prove the birth had been successful. The couple also worked in what was then Portuguese East Africa, her mother making the perilous journey back to London while pregnant with Libby.
     Libby graduated from King's College Medical School in 1949, one of just eight women out of 50 students (and King's was one of only three London teaching hospitals to admit women medical students). She then promptly married fellow medic Graham Wilson. They moved to Sheffield where Libby worked as a part-time GP and also started running family planning clinics. Hers was the first outside London to fit inter-uterine devices (IUDs) and then, against normal practice at the time, she offered family planning services to unmarried women and faced the opprobrium of many in the city. 'But recognition from patients more than compensated for the lack of it by peers,' she says.
     In the late 60s, six children between the ages of seven and 16 in tow ('before any contraceptive that worked', she says, in an aside), the family moved to Glasgow, where Graham had taken the post of Regius Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University, a position he held until his untimely death at the age of 59 from stomach cancer. As well as setting up three family planning clinics and a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, Libby began a groundbreaking home visiting service in the most deprived areas. 'The poverty was dreadful,' she recalls. 'The average number of children in a family was six. You could have 13 people living in a single room with a cold tap and a lavvy on the stairs. These people simply would never visit a clinic. They often didn't have clean knickers.'
     Many women struggling with large families were desperate to have abortions but GPs whose Catholic faith would not sanction this, either refused or delayed a referral until it was too late to perform the operation safely. 'But we could refer for abortions,' says Libby. 'We knew the tricks of the trade and we also had sympathetic gynaecologists.' She also offered free vasectomies and it was not unusual to carry out 40 in a week.
     Libby was also the first to offer contraception by injection – Depo-Provera – a full 10 years before it was licensed, with the blessing of two professors of obstetrics in the city. 'It was being used to treat ovarian cancer,' she explains. 'And we got it from the pharmacy at Rotten Row. It was a godsend for domiciliary use.'
     Men who were on bail, about to go to prison, were always anxious to leave a pregnant wife behind, as insurance against her straying while he was inside. 'If their wife was on the pill, these men would burn them. But they never knew their wife was protected by injection.' But this caused more conflict with the authorities and, in particular, the Catholic Church, which, she says, 'was against any form of contraception that worked'.
     In the late 1980s she worked in Sierra Leone for a year, running family planning clinics with a strong general practice element. She wrote a book about her experiences there and another about her family planning work in Britain, 'Sex on the Rates'.
     When she returned from Africa she was 65 – and the emphasis in her life changed from helping people make informed choices about birth, to assisting them to make choices about their own death. 'We now have choice at the beginning of life,' she points out. 'We should have that same choice at the end.'

Barbara Millar is a journalist and author