John was involved in the publication of a pamphlet, No more chains! Why you should oppose the constitutional ban on abortion, knowing that what they were doing was in contravention of the law, specifically the law on censorship that actually prohibited advocacy on the issue.
‘I remember that I typed it out on an electrical typewriter that I got a loan of . . . I remember we deliberately put in the middle . . . it was a diagram or drawing of how an abortion takes place; it was full of drawings of genitalia and things like this and S was joking that it must have been the first pamphlet she was involved with that had dirty pictures in it.’
The pamphlet’s authors knew that they were likely to lose the referendum but they thought it provided an opportunity to raise the issue of abortion rights.