[2] Throughout her career, Thurtle was a tireless advocate for working-class women having free access to information on abortion, pressing the Labour Party on this, saying it made nonsense of their supposed commitment to sexual equality.

[6] It opposed the legalisation of abortion on the grounds that it posed "danger to life and health" and risked being a "temptation to loose and immoral conduct", proposing adjustments to the law to ensure that medical partitioners were acting legally when they undertook an abortion following a medical consultation which determined that the woman's life was in danger, but recommending greater restrictions on abortifacients to prevent self-medication.

[9] Based on this, the minority report proposed the creation of local authority birth control clinics and the legalisation of abortion in various circumstances where the woman's life was not in immediate danger: for women who had already had four pregnancies, on eugenical grounds, and in cases of sexual crime, such as rape.

[8][10] Thurtle's report was praised by the National Council for Equal Citizenship and the ARLA,[11] but otherwise her proposals for "voluntary abortion" (under restrictive criteria, such as four prior pregnancies) received little contemporary support.

[12] The limited recommendations of the committee majority were also not implemented, ostensibly due to the outbreak of the Second World War, although the classification of both reports as "non-parliamentary" likely indicated that the government had never intended to enact legislation.