My first job was at the Family Planning Association, and I joined in 1975. And I started off because I wanted to be a writer and a journalist, so I joined their Press and Publications Department. So I was working on the newspaper that they had and also taking calls from journalists writing press releases, and also writing the leaflets about family planning. (…).  I was also starting to write articles for newspapers and magazines, and in fact I brought with me two articles that I wrote for The Guardian newspaper about Spain and family planning. (…)

The FPA in London started getting a lot of enquiries, phone calls and visits from people who were involved in family planning in Spain. So it came from the Spanish emerging organisations and doctors and activists (…)

When did I go [to Spain]? Well, it must have been in 1977, 1978, 1979. That kind of time. And I also remember very vividly that I smuggled in large quantities of contraceptives [laughs]. And there was a very funny incident, while I was never searched at the airport, thank goodness, but the night before I got the flight I actually had tickets for the opera in London so I went to the opera, and it was the time when there were IRA bombings and they searched all the baggages. They opened my baggage and saw all these contraceptives and one of them said I was obviously planning to have a very good time abroad [laughs].(…)

But I did take contraceptives in and just provided kind of information about how [the FPA] operated, the leaflets that we wrote, how we provided a sort of telephone information service to women who had worries and problems.(…)[In Spain] I went to loads of meetings which were all chaotic and really smoky and (…),  lots of different people, doctors, feminists, and other people, they all’d been doing lots of different things. And so it was the question of how could they come together, how could they work together. How could they organise themselves effectively rather than just being all these different people who were working in different organizations.

[The main difficulty] was this fragmentation. It was two things, it was the fragmentation, the fact that obviously Spain is a country which is quite divided by big spaces with very definitely different regions who were not in that much communication. And also, of course with the distrust between Cataluña and Madrid, and so there were issues there, I think. And also the speed with which everything happened. And also, it was like under Franco there was a kind of lid, and then suddenly the lid was off and everything was flowing over. 

Either you have repression or you don’t have repression, you can’t kind of have half repression. Either you know that someone is going to come to your house and shoot you if you do something or put you in prison, or not. So it’s like there was this explosion, you can kind of have a slow transition, because it goes from the lid on pot to suddenly this complete sort of freedom and it must have been just very difficult to move that quickly, because people had expectations, you know. Contraceptive rights, now it’s legal, now I can go and get it, but I can’t because there’s nowhere to go. 

There aren’t any doctors who know how to do it. Or some of the doctors don’t want to do it because there are still those old fashioned doctors who think it’s wrong, they are still Catholic there. So I think that was very tricky. I suppose there was also the issue of the Catholic Church and still being quite powerful and influential in Spain.