Abortion in England 1900-1967

Barbara Brookes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415622998
• eBook ISBN: 9781136248733
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Over the decades from 1900 to 1967 abortion was transformed from an important female-centred form of fertility control into a medical event, closely monitored by the State. This transition, the author argues here, took place against a background of debate over fertility control and its implications for women's maternal role.

The book, originally published in 1988, suggests that the inter-war years saw a crucial mapping of boundaries in the debates over abortion. The distinction between methods of fertility control used before and after conception was more sharply drawn. The abortion law was difficult to enforce and in 1936 the Abortion Law Reform Association was founded by feminists to call for safe legal abortion as a woman's right.

Resort to criminal abortion continued in the post-war years and the number of therapeutic abortions also began to increase. The medical profession's attempt to create a distinction between worthy medical and spurious social reasons for fertility control gave way in the face of women's demands for safe and effective means to plan when and if they would have children. After a hard-fought battle, the abortion law was reformed in 1967. The abortion decision, however, remained firmly in the hands of the medical profession.

1
Abortion in the Early Twentieth Century

Introduction

Abortion is a universally practised but by no means universally approved procedure.¹ The legitimacy of the act varies according to religious and scientific evaluations of foetal life, sexual mores, state population policies, the circumstances of conception, and the status of the woman involved. Society’s attitudes to abortion, therefore, reveal anxieties over the family, sexuality, secularism, the birth rate, and shifting gender roles. Legal strictures on abortion which arouse little comment at one time may become the focus of much discontent under different social circumstances.

Criticisms of the 1861 Act prohibiting abortion were raised in England in the early twentieth century. It was clear to many that the abortion clauses of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act were unenforceable.² The extent of recourse to abortion was revealed by the decline in the birth rate and the success of the child welfare movement. Infanticide was a fast-fading problem in the early twentieth century and infant mortality rates improved.³ The decline in the crude birth rate from 36.6 per thousand of the population in 1876 to 24 per thousand by the First World War increased public concern for infant welfare. As Janet Lane-Claypon wrote in 1920,⁴

The teaching of all the experiences with Child Welfare work [was] to throw back further the need for care from the period after birth to the period before birth, and then yet further back to the health of the mother before marriage.

The emphasis on healthy infants in turn led to a concern with the status of the foetus, imbuing foetal life from the moment of conception with a new significance. It is not surprising, then, that a 1918 Circular to County Councils (excluding London) urged local authorities to do what they could to ‘stop the traffic of abortifacients and the practice of abortion-mongers in their districts.’⁵

Methods of family limitation came under greater scrutiny as social investigators and welfare workers intruded into the previously private aspects of women’s lives. Many were alarmed at the ‘national calamity’ of the decline in the birth rate and the apparently ‘general spread of Malthusian principles among the masses.’⁶ It soon became clear that the methods used to limit family size were varied and that abortion played an important role. ‘Evidence of the use of abortifacients’, a Yorkshire Medical Officer reported to the 1906 Infantile Mortality Conference, ‘is growing in our industrial centres.’⁷ Working-class women were in the habit of anticipating their menstrual period by taking ‘violent purgatives, or by resorting to any one of the reputed means for the interruption of pregnancy – not only chemical, but physical.’⁸

Resort to abortion was common and, many claimed, increasing. In the late 1920s the British Medical Journal lamented that the extent of abortion was such that it presented ‘a grave national danger.’⁹ The gap between the statute law and the social practice of abortion in the early twentieth century became a focus of concern and points to significant social change. What, then, were the changes in English society which, by the inter-war years, allowed public discussion of a previously unmentionable subject? To understand this transition it is important to examine the traditional use of abortion as a common method of birth control; the impact of the First World War on social mores; women’s new status as hastened by the war and recognised by enfranchisement; and the ideological and institutional reinforcement of motherhood and the family at a time when family size reached dramatically low levels.

Abortion as birth control

In the early twentieth century abortion and contraception were fused in the popular mind in the single category of birth control. In 1908 the Lambeth Conference of Bishops found no incongruity in denouncing birth control as ‘preventitive abortion.’¹⁰ By the inter-war years those in positions of authority were far less likely to confuse the two methods of fertility control. The medical profession, assisted by the birth control movement, intensified its campaign to impose a clear separation between those methods of birth control used before and after fertilisation. Contraceptive methods employed during coitus were held to be a matter for the individual conscience, but the full weight of medical and clerical censure fell on those who aborted after conception and so caused ‘the death of a new individual.’¹¹

The evidence relating to working-class women and fertility control in the early twentieth century suggests that women regulated their fertility in a number of ways primarily oriented around menstruation rather than intercourse. Experience suggested that not every act of intercourse led to pregnancy, whereas late menstruation for a woman whose periods were regular was a sure sign of something amiss. Emmenagogues of many kinds and increasing potency had traditionally been used to ensure regularity, to ‘cure’ late menstruation and prompt problematic menstruation.¹² Indeed, doctors themselves, until the decline of humoral theory in the mid-nineteenth century, were primarily concerned to ‘regulate or restore’ the flow of normal secretions whenever they were disrupted.¹³ They might, therefore, prescribe emmenagogues for amenorrhoea, and thus women’s needs and medical therapeutics may have coincided to some extent. Even in the 1920s, doctors were warned that ‘women will frequently deceive a medical man with regard to their symptoms in order to induce him to administer drugs which they hope may have the desired effect.’¹⁴

Controlling fertility by means of abortifacient drugs gave women a measure of control when the main method of birth control, coitus interruptus, was subject to male judgement. Drugs were usually easy to obtain, inexpensive and put the power of decision-making into women’s hands.¹⁵ At a time when sexual intercourse was often regarded by women as ‘an obligation to be submitted to rather than as something desired’, it was not planned for and hence family limitation often took place after the event.¹⁶ Moreover, leaving the decision about birth control until a period was actually overdue allowed more accurate short-term calculation of the burdens or benefits of another mouth to feed.¹⁷ Abortion, then, represented an important survival strategy which women used to prevent the hardships that another child would bring.

Working-class women shared information and helped each other procure abortion when necessary. Drugs and douches were popular methods of ‘bringing on’ a period. Dilation of the mouth of the uterus by the insertion of slippery elm (a bark that expanded with moisture) was another common method of inducing an abortion.¹⁸ In Salford, Robert Roberts recalled that abortifacient drugs were widely advertised but that ‘most of our women in need of such treatment relied on prayer, massive doses of penny royal syrup, and the right application of hot, very soapy water’. Some women, driven by desperation, took ‘abortifacients sold by vets for use with domestic animals.’¹⁹ For many women such methods remained more natural than the use of ‘artificial’ birth control. Claud Mullins, a London magistrate commenting on women’s reluctance to attend birth control clinics in 1933, wrote ‘contraception is not … considered “respectable”, but harmful methods of birth control, and even abortion, are.’²⁰ Women would exchange remedies for delayed menstruation yet ‘artificial’ birth control continued to be viewed as a ‘sin against the Holy Ghost.’²¹

The wide use of abortifacient drugs by women from all social classes received publicity in the late nineteenth century in the sensational trials of the Chrimes brothers and William Brown and Associates, distributors of ‘Madame Frain’s’ preparations.²² The former had over 10,000 requests from women for their abortifacient preparations and were caught only when they attempted to blackmail their customers. These businesses were by no means unique.

In 1899 the Lancet ran a series of investigations into abortifacient preparations and the newspapers that advertised them.²³ Many of the so-called abortifacient pills were thought to be useless, but the Lancet commented that ‘any pregnant women taking a reputed emmenagogic or ecbolic drug in large or even at times normal doses runs the risk of producing abortion.’²⁴ The journal gained some success in dealing with ‘quacks and abortion’, but it seems that it was the free trade in abortifacients rather than the drugs themselves that were at issue. Its own Lancet General Advertiser continued to carry advertisements for ‘well known and most trustworthy’ emmenagogues such as ‘Apioline.’²⁵ Apiol, along with quinine, was one of the most reliable abortifacient drugs becoming available in the early twentieth century.²⁶

Diachylon, or lead plaster, was one abortifacient which could have disastrous results. The Assistant Medical Officer at the South Yorkshire Asylum reported in 1901 that ‘the consumption of this preparation for illegal purposes is prevalent in the districts of Leicester, Nottingham, and Birmingham.’²⁷ Information about the efficacy of lead for inducing abortion seems to have been spread by word of mouth and by 1914 its use was reported in Lancashire, London, Bristol, Hull and Newcastle. Ethel Elderton’s 1914 Report on the English birth rate noted the spread of information about lead and about ‘bitter apples’, or colocynth. Many of her correspondents from different areas of the country noted that, for family limitation, ‘chief reliance’ was ‘placed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Abortion in the Early Twentieth Century
• 2. The Abortion Law: Theory and Practice
• 3. The Medical Profession and Abortion, 1900–1939
• 4. Women and Abortion Law Reform
• 5. An Official Investigation: The Birkett Committee
• 6. Towards Reform, 1939–1967
• Conclusion
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Selected Bibliography
• Index