Abstract
In 1937, the doctor who worked at a birth control clinic in Cardiff reported: ‘We have had two requests for abortion this week and both seemed to think that the clinic existed for the purpose. The unlawful side of it had not struck them at all. One was a young woman who had recently re-married.… I think she intends to bring about an abortion by some means. The other said, “surely you are going to do something for me”. I had to explain to her very plainly that we did not teach how to destroy life. She had douched with very hot lysol, taken salts, Beechams pills and female pills.’
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Notes
Barbara Brookes, Abortion in England, London, Routledge, 1988.
Macolm Potts, Petter Diggory and John Peel, Abortion, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977
Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, London, Methuen, 1984.
Ministry of Health, Interim Report of the Departmental Committee on Maternal Morbidity, London, HMSO, 1930.
Isabella D. Cameron and Dilwys M. Jones, Reports on Public Health and Medical Subjects no. 68: High Maternal Mortality in Certain Areas, London, HMSO, 1932.
Ministry of Health, Report on Maternal Mortality in Wales, London, HMSO, 1937, cmd. 5423, 1936–7, p. xi.
Ministry of Health, Home Office, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion, London, HMSO, 1939, p. vi.
R. v. Bourne (1939) 1 K.B. 687, cited in Barbara Brookes, Abortion in England, London, Routledge, 1988, p. 143.
Ministry of Health, Home Office, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion, London, HMSO, 1939, p. 70.
Stella Browne, ‘The Right to Abortion’, in Sheila Rowbotham, A New World for Women: Stella Browne — Socialist Feminist, London, Pluto Press, 1977, p. 114.
Moya Woodside, ‘Attitudes of Women Abortionists’, Family Planning, 12, no. 2, July 1963, 33.
Madeline Kerr, The People of Ship Street, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958, p. 83.
American research into a number of women who had illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s revealed similar attitudes, although the researchers did not acknowledge this: ‘I felt nothing. I didn’t feel anxious. I think I was stupid. No, I was not stupid … I just went to take care of business … I just got on the train. Not only did I not think about the moral or ethical implications, I didn’t think about the physical possibilities.’ Ellen Messer and Kathryn E. May, Back Rooms: Voices from the Illegal Abortion Era, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1988, p. 21.
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© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Fisher, K. (1998). Women’s Experience of Abortion before the 1967 Abortion Act: a Study of South Wales c. 1930–1950. In: Lee, E. (eds) Abortion Law and Politics Today. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26876-4_4
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