She was the most divisive figure in Australia’s anti-abortion battles. But even her adversaries acknowledged her stamina

Margaret Tighe, the most durable and divisive figure in Australia’s pro-life movement, has been remembered as a warrior for the defenceless, the aged, weak and vulnerable.

Tighe, who died last week aged 94, was farewelled on Tuesday at St Monica’s Catholic Church in the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds. It brought a close to a life campaigning against abortion, euthanasia and stem cell research that reshaped state and federal elections, hardened political debate and enraged her opponents.

Tighe, whose health had declined after suffering a stroke last October, was a mother of four, a grandmother of eight and a great-grandmother of three. But it was the cause which began as pamphleteering and church-hall organising became in the 1960s came to dominate her life and public reputation.

She pursued a career in pharmacy after school and started voluntarily working in the Caroline Chisholm Society, a pregnancy support service near her home in Essendon. When the UK regulated abortion laws in 1967, she quickly became involved in Right to Life Victoria. She served as president of that group, later Right to Life Australia, for 23 years before retiring in 2010. Retirement, however, proved largely nominal.

Tighe’s methods were hardline, confrontational and condemned. In the early years of her movement, she adopted United States-style civil disobedience tactics and was accused of intimidatory tactics. In 1978, she and fellow campaigners were dragged away by police after obstructing the entrance to the clinic of Melbourne doctor Bertram Wainer, who had successfully campaigned for women to have legal access to abortion.

Tighe was arrested several times over the course of her life, once spending a weekend in the lock-up after refusing to move on during a protest. In 1991, a coroner criticised aspects of her pro-life activism during the landmark Baby M case, where doctors were accused of starving a newborn baby to death. Tighe disputed the findings.

She further enraged her critics in 2001 when, after a security guard was killed when a gunman entered a fertility clinic in East Melbourne, she said she was not surprised.

“I just want to say very strongly that I abhor the use of violence,” she said, while adding that unborn children were being killed there. “It is not surprising that somebody might want to take the law into their own hands.”

Tighe believed abortion at any stage constituted the taking of human life and rejected compromise as moral failure. That absolutism won loyalty from supporters and enduring hostility from critics.

But even those who rejected her cause acknowledged her stamina. Ethicist Peter Singer, an occasional adversary, once remarked that anyone who devoted so much of their life to a cause without lining their own pockets was worthy of respect. It was not endorsement, but recognition of the singular persistence that defined Tighe’s public life.

“The political journalist, Mungo McCallum, described her activities at the time as representing the Viet Cong of the pro-life movement,” her son Justin told mourners, which included Archbishop of Melbourne, Peter Comensoli.

“It was a line she quoted with pride, but some in the Catholic church at the time had their reservations.”

Beside her coffin was a photo with her late husband Ron and a silver tea pot, in recognition of decades of welcoming others into her own home.

Justin and his sister, Elizabeth, remembered their mother as a woman who confronted injustice wherever she saw it, particularly violence and aggression towards women.

“She hated to see anybody badly treated, disregarded or left out,” Elizabeth said. “I recall one time she rebuked the proprietor of the car wash … for the way he was talking to and demeaning his wife. She simply couldn’t sit by and stay silent.”

Politically, her impact was most visible in Victoria’s marginal seats. She ran, unsuccessfully, for the state seat of Kew in 1976 and in 1980 campaigned against federal Liberal MP Barry Simon in the seat of McMillan over his pro-choice stance, a defeat long credited by pro-life supporters to her efforts.

She later opposed Labor and independent MPs who backed abortion reform, culminating in a targeted campaign after Victoria decriminalised abortion in 2008.

At that 2010 state election, six of the eight Labor MPs singled out by the movement lost their seats. Allies argued the campaign helped bring down the Brumby government; detractors said it overstated its reach. Either way, it cemented Tighe’s reputation as an activist who could translate conviction into votes.

She built alliances across denominational lines, welcoming evangelicals alongside Catholics, and framed the struggle as extending “from conception to natural death”, carrying her opposition into euthanasia debates.

Amid the assisted dying debate in Victoria in 2017, she told this masthead: “We’re taking the fight right up to the enemy. The gloves are off.” In 2019, she supported a losing high court challenge on the validity of no-protest zones around abortion clinics.

The notoriety cut deeply. In later years, she spoke of overhearing strangers whispering her name in public places – “that awful Margaret Tighe”. Still, she pressed on.

“She could cop all manner of abuse and hostility directed to her face and remain seemingly impervious and intent on her message,” Justin said.

“I think some of this did affect her. Sometimes she would come home and talk about how appalling … a particular media encounter had been. But then she would enthusiastically be fielding media calls for comments and interviews at 6.30 the next morning.”

Tighe became a regular feature on TV news services as she lobbied politicians and led protests. Justin recalled that in the late 1970s, future prime minister Paul Keating, ensured a Commonwealth car would take her to the airport after a day spent lobbying at Parliament House in Canberra.

She never sought consensus and never achieved it. Abortion is now legal across the country as is, except for the Northern Territory, euthanasia and voluntary assisted dying.