"Up the Junction" is an episode of the BBC anthology drama series The Wednesday Play directed by Ken Loach and produced by James MacTaggart.

[2] As story editor Tony Garnett's biographer Stephen Lacey has written, the play "is less concerned with its narrative high-points ... and is motivated more by the seemingly haphazard interplay of accident and incident".

[3] The play included documentary elements, such as an interview with a doctor advocating a change in the law to prevent 35 deaths each year from back-street abortions.

[5] Christian morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, responding to Up the Junction, wrote in her book Cleaning-up TV (1967):"The sooner these terrible back-street abortionists are put out of business the better!

But what about a play which would make it clear that any kind of abortion, legal or otherwise, has dangers to mental and bodily health far greater than natural childbirth.

A proposal to repeat the play was rejected by the governors in the summer of 1966 who noted the "great offence" the piece had caused at its first screening.

[7] Trade unionist Dame Anne Godwin, a BBC governor who had herself not seen the play,[8] was minuted at a meeting in June 1966 as complaining of "too great a tendency ... to concentrate on the 'sick' elements in society as sources from which to illustrate contemporary problems.