‘I worked half my young life with haemorrhages. Now I know that it could have been ever so dangerous, but then you just got up and went to work, go out to the toilet … I was always in a state of haemorrhage. I never knew anything else and I’m sure all the people I knew never did. I caused a bad illness over it. I used to get pregnant very, very easily. That first marriage, there wasn’t much sex in it at all. Perhaps twice a week if that, and there you are, suddenly you’re pregnant and not even a love affair.’
However, when we discussed abortion with Lou N., she said she didn’t know of any women who were aborting themselves:
‘Except this woman was having a baby and she had to get rid of it because her two children were over 20 or so, a good age, and they were so disgusted with their own mother that the poor devil had bought herself a lace corset and she got someone to pull it as tight as possible every day, and that’s how she killed the baby. That’s the only thing I ever remember.’
When we rephrased the question as: ‘You didn’t hear of anything you could take to help you bring on a period if you were a bit late, or …?’ she replied:
‘No … unless you took Beecham’s pills … that’s the only thing I remember they had. So whenever I thought I was … that’s what I took, because I didn’t believe in a lot of medicine, see. But I did do that, just in case.’
In fact, Lou N. was regularly taking something in an attempt to terminate a possible pregnancy, but she certainly did not define this as an abortion. The women we talked to mostly sympathised with other women who found themselves driven to abortion rather than face yet another pregnancy and child to raise. Abortion was seen as an awful thing to have to do, but to the mother, not to the foetus.
Edie M., however, did have misgivings about what she had done:
‘I must’ve done one in Leadenhall market. I had one when I was working in a kitchen there. It was through using the syringe. That baby must’ve been quite far on. The barmaid that picked it up and put it down the toilet, she said, “It was fully formed, Edie, it was.” She said she’d put her black apron over it – they used to wear black aprons, barmaids – and put it in the toilet. I had a job to get home. I had a big haemorrhage at the City – I had to go down to the ladies toilet. My brain – (I think) – Oh, God – I had to push it out, like I do my daughter’s death, I had to push it away, ‘cause you’d never live if you thought of what you done.’
She also remembers the hospital staff’s attitude to abortion:
‘And the hospitals weren’t very kind to you. They’re not today either, they don’t like abortions. “Did you do anything?” You tell a lie up to your teeth. “No, I’ve never done anything.”’
Ivy D. remembers telling lies when she had an abortion in the 1930s to protect the woman who helped her:
‘It was a really secret thing. The woman who came and did it said, “Don’t tell anyone what you’ve had done or who did it.” I promised that and I never let her down. I didn’t even tell my husband. They all thought it was a natural miscarriage.
‘I don’t know where the woman lived. She came to my home. I don’t know who she was really. A friend told me about her. It was all very secret. She knew she’d get into trouble if she got found out. She was just a local woman – well known in the area for what she did – who helped women out. She didn’t ask for payment but I just gave her what I’d got. I was so anxious to get her out of the house really. I used to save the rent in those days in a little cup beside my bed and I just tipped it out into her hand. I was really frightened, you know.
‘I didn’t really want to have an abortion but my husband didn’t want us to be confined to the house again. You see, we used to go out a lot before we had the children. We’d had two babies already. One cried all the time and we wasn’t very well off in those days. He said, “Oh no, we’re going to be confined for another five years – another crying baby.” He was a kind man but he just didn’t want another baby. It was awful, really. When you’re pregnant everything’s enlarged, isn’t it. Everything feels worse than it is. He didn’t know what I was doing, but I tried everything. Pills, gin … and none of it worked. So I was four and a half months gone. It was too long really, wasn’t it. It was too late. When I had the next one, I had a terrible labour, had to have forceps in the end. That was punishment for the abortion, that was …
‘She came to my home and she did it with needles. She put needles up inside me. And I was in agony all day. Of course, the woman what done it had gone. As soon as she did it, she went. It’s wicked, really. It’s cruel, isn’t it. It was a long labour. They called the lady doctor out. And I remember this doctor kept looking at herself in my full-length mirror in the bedroom because she was very glamorous, only young. I’ll always remember that bit.
‘I lost the baby in the chamber. I saw it, you know. They would never have allowed that in hospital, would they? I can see it now, you know. It was a little girl. The eyes were shut and all bluey. I’ll always remember that. And its little arms all folded up … It was very upsetting. I don’t know what they did with her body.
‘I had to go in hospital. The doctor at home, she thought it was a natural one but she said, “You’ll have to go in. It’s an incomplete abortion.” I was haemorrhaging. I nearly died. It was really frightening. And the doctor in hospital said to me, “You’ve been interfered with. This isn’t an ordinary abortion.” I said, “Beechams pills,” kept saying, “Beechams pills”. That’s all I said. So I kept her secret. I never let her down. But they were horrible to me in there.’
Jane W. remembers similar attitudes from hospital staff:
‘When I was in hospital a long time they put them down the other end of the ward. They’d call them “the naughty ward”. There was one woman next to me. She used to talk to me, and what she didn’t get up to was nobody’s business! She used to go out with other men. When she was pregnant, what she used to do … well, she’d have different things done to her. Oh, I used to be shocked. The things I used to hear in there. And that’s dangerous what they’d do. They gamble with their lives. They can take it, you know, get away with it. But it’s silly of them. I mean, gamble on my life? – No way.’
We met only one woman who had been offered an abortion by a doctor. It was Vera W. It was unclear whether the doctor considered her life to be at risk from continuing the pregnancy (she was a small woman with a large baby) or whether it was an option because she was middle-class and able to pay. Either way, it would have been a very late abortion, presumably carried out by abdominal surgery:
‘I was about five foot then and he was eight and three quarter pounds born. He was very large. I carried him – right, way up here. So – they told me that all the bits of my inside were pushed to my back, as the baby made room for himself, and the last two months I used to faint about the house. In fact, at seven months Dr. M. said that – um – I could still have the baby taken away if I wished. But I wanted very badly to have a child and I had a feeling that it was going to be the only one.’
Some women knowingly risked their lives time and again by giving themselves abortions rather than increasing their poverty with another child. It was not just a question of ‘another mouth to feed’. Another baby could make it impossible for the mother to earn the only income in the family. Edie M. explained this to us and described with great sadness the mental and physical threat posed by the trap in which she found herself:
‘Once, I’d done the soapy water in the morning and the miscarriage started to happen on the tram on the way to work. I could feel something happening on the tram. So just as I was going on the platform to go in the lift at Charing Cross, this miscarriage started, so I crouched down by the way and I covered me face. Two ladies came; one had an ear trumpet and the other must have been her maid or something. She said, “Anything wrong?” I said, “Yes, please help me. I’ve got a haemorrhage. I think I’ve miscarried.” So they got a porter. I was taken up in the lift and a sacking canvas thing with poles was put round. I
don’t know where they got it from.
‘I had me face covered up all the time in case anyone knew me – I wasn’t known there, of course, but I’d been travelling regularly from Hammersmith to Stockwell – and I was taken away to St. Giles Hospital. I was kept there a few days and then went back to work, where I had another big haemorrhage! There was a wonderful mistress there and she brought miles of tablecloth to help me. So I was taken back to hospital.
‘We were in dire poverty then and we owed half a week’s rent. I’d told the landlady – loaded with rings and diamonds, she was – that we would be moving out to my sister’s in Dulwich as soon as I was well enough. I’d had ten haemorrhages in a week and my bed was tipped up – you can guess how ill I was. And she only put the bailiff in! I couldn’t get over it ‘cause it wasn’t a lot of rent we owed. “If you like,” he said, “You can call your doctor in and I won’t be able to touch the place if you can’t be moved.” “Well, I mustn’t be moved but we’re going up my sister’s ‘cause we can’t afford to stay here.” (Twenty-five shillings – and me not working, two children and only Alec’s dole – there was no way we could stay.)
‘So I made arrangements to go to my sister’s on the Friday. Took the home up there on a barrow – he pushed the barrow from Brixton up to the top of Dulwich with our home on it. I had to wait in the bed ‘til my sister finished work. She came with Dolly who was courting my cousin, to fetch me. They helped me dress in the bed and then they helped me to a tram, both holding an arm each side. I was all right ‘til I got up to Braemar Road, up the top of Dog Kennel Hill, and as I got off the tram there, I haemorrhaged. So my sister picked me up in her arms and ran me quick down the street to her house. I was put in her front room, bed tipped again, and the doctor was sent for.
‘I always say that people should be very careful when they speak in front of unconscious people ‘cause nine times out of ten they can hear. I heard every word what was said. I kept sinking down into a black hole – that’s the only way I can describe it – a black hole. I kept sinking down. But I heard the doctor say, “Send for an ambulance”, and I heard the ambulance men say, “We can’t move her, she’s got no pulse. We’ll come back in the morning.” I heard the doctor say, “Well I’ll come back every hour.” Yes, I was very ill. It’s happened on about four or five occasions in my life.
‘See, girls today fall deeply in love and you think, “Poor devil”, but in those days you was just going to work to bring in some food. That’s why today I think I’m a much harder person. I used to be a romantic young thing but this old memory don’t shut much out either. It goes over the worst parts. Sometimes I have to block it out and think “Well, let’s think of some nice things”. You can’t live with some of the things you’ve done.’
Midwives and abortion
The midwives we met varied in both their memories of abortion and their attitudes towards it. Some, like Nellie H., denied ever having come across it:
‘No, I didn’t know of it. I don’t remember any.’
Others spoke about abortion as an inevitable part of women’s lives:
‘There used to be the old slippery elm. And some used to use the crochet hook that went into the uterus. Some of the mothers died, you know. Oh yes, the slippery elm was round the corner – there was a woman who was doing it. And the poor women who were at their wits’ end – they’d do anything to get rid of the foetus.’ [Josephine M.]
Midwives who had also trained as nurses often had memories of women being brought into hospital dangerously ill as a result of giving themselves abortions. Florence W. remembers that many of these women died:
‘I did wonder once with my mother. She’d had a miscarriage and I remember seeing her desperately ill. I think they used to talk amongst themselves about this, but of course it didn’t register until I became older and looked back on it. When I was doing general training, it first came home to me because in the women’s medical ward we did have women that came in and died of septicaemia as a result of these abortions. There were no antibiotics at that time. Sulphonamides were introduced in the 1930s and if you could get to them before they got too seriously ill you could save them.’
Elsie B., who had done direct-entry midwifery training, had no such memories. Like many midwives practising in the 1930s, she disassociated herself from the subject of abortion.
‘I didn’t meet any, but I think they were about. I don’t think there was so much of it then. You had the odd miscarriage but you accepted them as inevitable, which I think most of them were.’
Many midwives like Esther S., suspected that abortions took place but were not directly involved in them:
‘There was an old wives’ tale about using pennyroyal to get rid of their babies and all that business. I don’t think they told their midwife about trying to get rid of babies so I didn’t come across it a lot. So maybe there were more than I knew. But they just had big families and accepted it.’
We got the impression that midwives felt that they had to keep themselves ignorant of abortion to ensure they weren’t accused of being involved in an illegal activity. Such an accusation could lead to a hearing before the Penal Board of the Central Midwives Board, followed by removal from the Register of Practising Midwives. A midwife would be an obvious person to go to for advice, so it would be important to keep her name clear.
The same line of reasoning could apply to handywomen. One of the major accusations levelled at handywomen by those who wanted to drive them out of midwifery was that they were putting women’s lives at risk by performing abortions. In his thesis on handywomen, Bob Little argues that handywomen would not have risked their reputation and livelihood by acting as abortionists as well.4 Other authors such as Mary Chamberlain, however, have assumed that the handywomen and the abortionists were one and the same person.5
From our research, we think that it is extremely unlikely that handywomen were involved with abortions. The handywoman’s work was primarily in attending births, looking after the mother and baby postnatally and laying out the dead. No woman we interviewed ever made a connection between handywomen and abortion. They would often talk about ‘the woman you’d go to’ if you wanted an abortion, but in no cases was she ‘the woman you called for’ if you were having a baby or wanted someone to lay out your dead. Ivy D. confirms this:
‘She didn’t do midwifery or anything like that. Oh no. She just did abortions. The midwives were more honourable. My husband’s mother used to lay out the dead but she certainly didn’t have anything to do with abortions. That was always a different person.’
So who were the abortionists? Studies by Moya Woodside and Dr J. C. Weir suggest that most abortionists were women. Most were older, married and from the lower middle or working classes. They charged for their services but all regarded themselves as ‘helping’.6
One of the authors of this book had a conversation with her grandparents about the various roles of members of the community in the Berkshire village where they grew up. The grandparents remembered a number of different practitioners who could advise and treat a woman. Granny Richardson was the local washerwoman and handywoman, and she delivered all the village women’s babies. The barber was also a herbalist and performed abortions. He was also used by the village people to treat illnesses when they could not afford to pay the doctor (a common occurrence); lastly, there was the chemist, who made up special medicines for individual complaints according to his own recipes and who also ‘helped women not to have children’. It was unclear from the account what exactly ‘helping a woman not to have children’ involved. Again, the dividing line between contraception and abortion is very hazy in people’s memories.7
Midwives were very aware of ‘picking up the pieces’ when abortion went wrong. They were sometimes called in when women were left with life-threatening haemorrhage following what was euphemistically described as ‘miscarriage’. Mary W., who from the early 1930s, practised for 37 years on the district in a Yorkshire mining community, give
s an example of how frightening that could be:
‘Oh yes, trying to get rid of the pregnancy, that was quite common. But they wouldn’t tell you. I remember once – this was before ‘37 – the old doctor asked me if I’d go. You see in those days you couldn’t get an ambulance if they’d done it [the abortion] in the middle of the night. You’d have to wait till the ambulance man came on duty at 8 o’clock next morning. He said “Will you go and stay with this woman until we can get her into hospital tomorrow?”
‘Doctor said, “Of course, you know, nurse, she hasn’t done anything, hasn’t taken anything …” “Oh, I don’t think about it, doctor.” But … later I had the old nerves on the go! She was practically at the last gasp. And do you know? She recovered, that woman, and she lived to be ninety! Yes, she already had a large family. They would never tell you what they’d done – a mixture of herbs, I don’t know. Gin and raspberry leaves was one thing, I think, but there was very little birth control. It was sort of a woman’s mission in life to have babies. Families of six to ten were the usual thing.’
Katherine L. and Margaret A., sisters who practised as domiciliary [community] midwives in Essex for 28 years, starting in the late 30s, talked about keeping a tactful distance from the local woman who performed abortions. Katherine explained:
‘You heard things. There was one woman here in the town who had a name for it – but they could never catch her. But they knew she existed. They knew her and I s’pose you could call it a brothel. I don’t know whether she did have a brothel. I wouldn’t be surprised. But she could perform abortions on pregnant girls. I wouldn’t know how she did it. I mean, we’ve heard all sorts of things about mothers taking gin and nutmeg and the like but I wouldn’t know how an abortionist performs an illegal abortion. They rupture the membranes somehow, I presume. Do it with a knitting needle or a button hook …
The Midwife's Tale Page 15
