Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Abortion in the UK

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

As the right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy is challenged on the other side of the Atlantic, today Betwixt the Sheets we are looking at the history of abortions here in Britain.This is the second episode in our two-part series on abortion in the US and the UK.First, Kate speaks to Elinor Cleghorn, author of Unwell Women, about the history of abortion law in the UK, and the significance of harrowing case of 'the horse with a green tail’ in the journey to legalising abortion.Kate is then joined by Diane Munday, an abortion rights activist who became active in the movement in the 1960s, and believes that her work is not yet done.*WARNING there is discussion about abortion, sexual assault and death in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. This is Kate Lister, jumping in for quite a serious fair do's warning for today's episode. We are talking about the history of abortion in the UK. This is quite a tough subject, and it's definitely quite an emotional episode. So if this isn't something that you're comfortable with, if you want to just give this one a swerve, there's plenty of other episodes in our back catalogue

for you to be listening to, and don't worry about it at all. I'll catch you in the next one. There's been a lot of news about abortion in the United States recently, after the Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade, leaving millions of women across America without access to safe abortion. This is the second installment in our two-part series about the history of abortion, and today we're focusing on the UK, where last year the highest number of abortions took place in England and Wales

since the Abortion Act was introduced here in 1967. If you want to hear more about America's abortion history, please scroll back a couple of episodes to hear me chatting to Leslie Regan. Right, let's begin. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs

by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, but beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. The year is 1967. The Beatles have just released their album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band. The first automatic cash machine has been installed with the bank in Enfield. Wimbledon is being broadcast on the TV in colour for the first time ever.

And the Abortion Act has just been passed, legalising abortion on certain grounds which would come into effect the following year. It's perhaps worth noting here that it wasn't until 2019 that abortion was decriminalised and became lawful. in Northern Ireland. But back to 1967. It had been a long and painful road getting the Abortion Act passed. And today I'm joined by two very special guests. Elna Cleggon to talk about the history of abortion in the UK, and Diane Monday, who was a keen member of the Abortion Law Reform Association when the abortion law was changed in Britain in 1967. Diane was there. I hope you find these conversations

as interesting and important as I did. Thank you so much for joining me today, Eleanor Clegghorn. It's a pleasure to have you as always. But we are talking about a very dark history, the history of abortion. This is something that you have written on and researched. Could you tell us a little bit about the history of abortion in the UK? Of course. Thanks for having me, Kate.

We're at a time now, sadly, where we're having to reckon with the very real possibility that women in the United States, United States might be robbed of their right to choose what happens to their bodies. Abortion in the UK has a very long and very complex and very fascinating history. For many centuries, abortion was a private matter, was a matter that really depended on a woman's privacy and sort of circulated around her own feeling of, for example, the quickening. So the feeling that the feeling that the baby was, you know, moving. And abortion wasn't necessarily criminalised for many centuries, but seen as a private matter within families. But there have always been moments in our history

where lawmakers have intervened in what women should do with their bodies and what happens if a pregnancy is terminated either by women herself or by an act of nature or by something that happens to her bodies. One particular moment in the history of abortion in the UK that I am fascinated by, happened around the 1930s in response to changes to the Infant Preservation Act of 1929. Various women who were involved in socialist birth control movements were beginning to come together to discuss the urgent need for women to have access to contraception, access to information about how to limit their families, because they were recognising the unbearable burden placed especially on working class women of having many children and not being able to control their fertility.

And it really fascinates me that it was socialist women advocating for the rights of working class women who were often at the forefront of agitation for abortion rights to be returned to the choice of women and not placed under the jurisdiction of law. So around the 1930s, groups of socialist feminist women, including F.W. Stella Brown, who was an activist and advocate for sexual rights and freedom for contraception for reproductive choice, formed a society called the Abortion Law Reform Association. And they wanted the government or the Ministry of Health, as it was then, to really investigate the burden of disease, death and ill health. that was being caused by the fact that women were being forced to find ways of aborting their babies that were unsafe, that were dangerous, that were risky to them. They wanted abortion to be a choice that women could make, and they wanted abortion to be as safe and accessible as any other medical procedure.

So between 1936 and 1939, the Ministry of Health underwent a program of research under the proviso of the Burkett Committee. and the Berkett Committee included experts all across the field, so experts from medicine, from law, even from the churches, to put forward their theories about what abortion meant in a social, medical, legal and cultural context. And what could be done to improve this situation for mainly working-class women who had been forced

to seek out illegal or dangerous abortion just to manage their families and control their health? And of course, abortion was absolutely a class issue at that time, as it is today. In 1938, the reasons for changing the Infant Preservation Act and allowing women to have abortions legally was brought really starkly to light when a case called The Case of the Horse with a Green Tail, as it's known. Okay. A 14-year-old girl was walking along Whitehall with some friends one evening, and she was approached by a horse guard at the barracks there, who enticed her to the stable by promising to show her a horse with a green tail.

Once inside the barracks, she was brutally gang raped by five of the horse guards and taken to a police station where she was examined by a female police officer and in the wake of this terrible rape, realized that she was pregnant. Oh, my God. Under the law at the time, under the Infraint Preservation Act, she would only have been able to have illegal abortion if her health was mortally in danger, as in if she would have died if the pregnancy continued. Her parents were of course desperate for her to be allowed a therapeutic, as it was called then abortion. But as the law stood, she was not because she was deemed perfectly healthy.

Her parents took her to see a gynecologist who refused to perform the procedure because she may have been carrying a future Prime Minister of England. Oh, Christ Almighty. Her parents then got in touch with Joan Mallison, who was a birth control advocate, a doctor, and one of the women involved in the socialist cause for birth control abortion law reform, who put them in contact with a prominent and sympathetic gynecologist named Dr. Alec Bourne, who agreed to perform the abortion for this poor young girl, and in doing so to help bring about this in real need, desperate need for legal abortion. especially in cases of sexual violence.

Dr. Bourne performed the termination, and he then turned himself into the police and said, I have emptied the uterus and I want you to arrest me. Oh, my goodness. The ensuing case where Bourne was tried resulted in a slight shift of the law, which meant that from that point on, doctors had the discretion to perform therapeutic abortion, not just if a mother's life was endangely.

but if her physical or mental health was at risk of pursuing the pregnancy. So although this wasn't a direct shift in the law, it didn't exactly return rights to women, it did mean that the scope of reasons why an abortion could be performed by a doctor in a safe hospital were broadened. So it wasn't quite a watershed moment, but it was a very important step towards legalising abortion, or at least to broadening the scope of. of why abortion is needed, but still it was not up to women to decide. It was still placed at the discretion of doctors, which, of course, under our law today, abortion still requires two doctors' signatures.

What happened to Dr. Boyd? Was he found not guilty? Was he acquitted? He was, yes. But I've read that he then went on to become very anti-abortion further on in his career, that he did a real U-turn. But yes, he was. And the result of, actions was that the law was slightly amended because of this case. But some of the opinions that came up during the trial, such as, you know, women always lead men on or how can we be sure that a case of sexual assault or rape really happened. I mean, questions of women as legitimate witnesses, women as unreliable when it came to reports of sexual violence, were really, you know, alive and well in this trial. And many people called to witness,

believe that if abortion laws were relaxing it anyway, it would just encourage more young women to so-called loose conduct. So it's an incredibly complicated case and it's not a cut and dried win for women at all, but it's certainly a very important snapshot of a range of different attitudes towards what women should do with their bodies and towards women's responsibility as reproductive at that time in history. But we also see this really important emergence of socialist left-wing thinking, which is saying, look, women should have the right to choose

because, and I love this opinion by F.W. Stella Brown, that often for working-class women's sexual pleasure and enjoyment was so bounded up with fear and that contraception being so inaccessible for so many women at that time, that they were not allowed to fully enjoy or inhabit or embody their physical selves because they were terrified of what another pregnancy would mean for them, either to go through with it or to try to end it. And the idea that we have that the right to abort pregnancy

is tied to your right to personhood, your right to live in your body and to enjoy your body, was so important then. And I think for an argument that was unraveling in the 1930s, it still feels really radical to me to connect abortion rights to the right to live in your body as you want to and to enjoy that body

and to not be punished for that enjoyment and pleasure that you can take. I think that still feels like a hugely radical argument. Dr Elizabeth Cleggone, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me today. Thank you. Thank you so much, Kate, for having me. I'll be back with Diane Monday

after this short break. Move over Rome, move over Greece. This month on the ancients, we're heading to the Americas, north, mezzo and south. Join us every Sunday this August as we explore this area of the world's extraordinary distant past

with leading experts. From the rise and fall of Teotihuacuan to the mysterious Nazca lines. A journey through the ancient Americas every Sunday this August on the ancients from history hit. So today joining me betwixt the sheets, I am so thrilled and honoured to have with me, Diane Monday. Diane was one of the original campaigners in the UK against the abortion acts.

So you were there in the 60s and 70s in the UK fighting to have abortion legalised. That's right. I mean, that's an amazing battle that you were part of that has benefited not just women, But people, I mean, what's that feel like to have been there at that time? At the time, it felt quite normal now all these years after, when it's sort of history, feels rather weird. You mentioned how many women are being benefited. Yeah.

And in fact, I think something that is often forgotten is the benefit it brought. women who have never needed abortion. I had been stuck over the years when people thank me for what I did. How many of them, and it's probably more than half, have said to me, I've never needed. but my life has been changed and made so much easier by knowing that if I did become pregnant without wanting to be pregnant, the act was there as a backstop. So I didn't have my whole future destroyed or at least changed by the fact I was pregnant. I've never actually thought about it like that, but all the choices that I've ever made in my life have been with an unconscious knowledge that if I were to get pregnant, I wouldn't have to drop out of university, I wouldn't have to give up my job. I'm not even consciously realising it, but knowing that pregnancy wouldn't destroy my future hopes and ambitions.

That is precisely what it can and indeed does do for many, many women. So you joined the Abortion Law Reform Association in 1962. I'm still a member. Oh, well. Do you mind me asking you what made you become interested in fighting this fight? What brought you to fight for abortion reform? So you're only 1960s for a time when the word was never mentioned. It wasn't written.

It wasn't said. It was hidden under a 30 years. corner of a carpet that was never looked down. I first became aware of it during my third pregnancy when I was offered the drug for Lidamide, which was the drug that was given to pregnant pregnant women to help you to sleep. I'm diabetic. I had quite difficult pregnancies and very, very large babies. And that third pregnancy, I was not sleeping. I was unclean. I was unclean. I was unclean. I was comfortable and the doctor actually prescribed a lot of life and I never took it.

That prescription, that's all my manned because I had, whether it was instinctive, a feeling that any drugs could affect a pregnancy or receive wisdom at that time was that the placenta filtered out any coisness or noxious substances, as they're described in the old abortion law. And I never took it. And a number of women I knew who were pregnant at the same time had very severely affected limbs, abnormalities.

And I knew then, if I knew I knew I was carrying. a fetus that would result in a child with huge deformities. I would want to end pregnancy and start again. And without that time, a letter appeared, I think it was the Sunday times from the then Morrievartan, abortion or reformist sensation, which had come into being in the mid-1930s, got off to a very good start with a parliamentary inquiry. I think it was 1928. But after the war, much more polite social issues needed addressing housing education.

And abortion disappeared into the background. But I joined the almost defunct association at that time, because the impact of the litterment had really made me think about it for the first time. So I joined and I wasn't very active, but I did go along to meetings. And I had discovered I was pregnant for the fourth time. Controception was very crude in those days. There was no pill. and the strength of my feeling that I would not have another child.

I had three sons all under the age of four. Wow. Not a natural mother. I had to work quite a part of it. And I just knew that I had reached my limit. And that led me to a theory which I still held, that abortion is an extension, the drive for abortion, and it is a drive. When I look at these mainly men praying outside abortion clinics,

think that they're telling women something they don't know when they try to prevent them having an abortion. Women knew they risk their lives. But the strength of that drive to not bring a child. into the world or another child that they knew they couldn't properly careful means abortion will always take place legal and safe or illegal and dangerous. And I've never ever forgotten the strength of that drive, an instinctive drive, to end the pregnancy. And that is there with all the women now who need an abortion.

Absolutely. It's really powerful to hear you say that. And I think that that's, I want to say that it's brave to hear you say that, but it's kind of, it's an experience that so many women face. I think it's more just to hear it articulated out loud that you knew you didn't want another baby. You had three children under four, couldn't provide for them as you would like to, and that's enough. We could have afforded another child. We won't well hope if I had a good marriage, good husband, and we had enough money.

It's nothing to do with that, though certainly to change for many women's years, the number of women I've heard say, we just can't afford another child. And it was in fact something like that that led me to recognise how many, women had abortions. I'd never heard of it until I was in my only 20s and I knew a young woman who died. Oh my God. She was in the same situation, I was married three young children. She was a local dressmaker in those days when I had dresses made and I was due to go to her for a fitting and my mother for you, her mother, said to me, you can't go, she's dead. And there was a young woman, three young children, leaving a husband to bring them up,

children with no mother. And that stuck in my mind. That was the only time I came across. But I was doing research at one of the London teaching hospitals, and I maintained it. with a group of young doctors I was working with. And they said to me, where have you been on your eyes, stay behind Friday night.

And in fact, wards were put aside because Friday was painted Friday and Saturday nights for the results of backstreet abortions that had gone wrong. And so I was very aware of the impact and that this was happening. And the first time I spoke in public,

I said there was a group of very respectable with ladies, ladies and there's a lot, in township and girls, or bringing home-made cakes in wearing hats and gloves, very respectable. And I actually said, I have had an abortion. And during that tea break, they came off to me, one after the other,

and said something like, I've never told anybody who thought, dear, only my husband knew I had an abortion, and it happened wherever I went. It suddenly impinged on me. This was women's common. experience. I had a cousin who was training as a midlife in London and she actually went and worked at the hospital that's what became they called the midwife's difference. Wow. Oh. She went there as a midwife and she had been totally opposed to a hospital and she said to me

Every people are these buildings, and they, with a big slum, has its knitting needle law. Jesus Christ. That was well known to everybody. And so I built on that knowledge that it was women's experience. I was so delighted when two years ago they changed the law in Ireland, because I believed the decisive fact that that change was the women who came out and said, I have had an abortion. And I thought, yes, I helped give you the courage to say that.

You did. I'm just trying to take it all in, that there were hospital wards set aside on Friday and Saturday because it was payday and because that's when women would be accessing. unsafe abortions, that there was in the tenement slums a knitting needle nora. That's so... Women's common knowledge. Never mentioned. Never said it.

And you had the courage to say it in the 60s. But if you don't mind me asking, how did you access an abortion in the... Because it wasn't legal then, so what was your story? At that time when I was pregnant in 1965, I think there was a route to abortion because of what had been a very well publicised case of a girl who was raped by a number of gods in London. and she actually had an abortion because the judge, very brave man at that time, said the doctors were entitled to save lives. That was their own. It was very difficult to draw a line between health and bad, healthy and death. And therefore, if continuing of the pregnant,

would put the ones life at risk, then it was legal. It was never made a statute, but that was a precedent. And therefore, what I called, the Harley Street trade helped up. I started when the pregnancy was less diagnosed, going to one of the London teaching hospitals, whose professor was on the medical legal advisory of the abortion association. And I saw a psychiatrist because clearly the only way that doctors could sign a certificate saying that woman's life was contention was if she was threatening citizen.

He informed me though a pretending question me. My whole life was mess. what I'm needed for psychiatric support, go home and have the baby, and they're sleeping twice a week in their psychiatric development. Now, as if my first mile from London, I by then would have had four children under the age of five. And I looked at him and said, well, how do you think? I am going to get from half a six years of London twice a week with four children under the age. For when I'm telling you, I can't cope with another child, even if I'm not coming to London. You were diagnosed as being mentally unwell, as well as pregnant?

Yes. Wow. I'm angry for you. I feel so crass. I had asked around because I already knew that they were women and I'd been given the name of a Harley Street gynaecologist who did abortions for Martin. I looked him up, he'd been a consultant, I came straight out of university college, having seen the young, wet behind the years to catch him. And I phoned his number. And he said, are you in London? I said, can I see him speak now? I went to see him and it didn't help because I got into me its office.

And he said, may you look at him? He exonerated. I got bottle of gin out of the drawer of his desk. And of course, all the stories were about women taking gin and hot baths. Mother's ruin. Mother's ruined. Exactly, and that's where the great thing. It was the typical one. Anyway, he said, yes, he would send me to a psychiatrist, which would be 10 years,

which, as I think my husband was earning 600 pounds a year, which was quite a lot of money. And the operation at the 120, that was a year's salary. I remember saying to him, well, I will want anything to eat. I'll take sandwiches. Yes, I can remember that. He said, hang on, I'll do some totally around. He came back and he said, happily 9.40. Can you manage 90?

I said, we'll manage it somehow. Huggling. Interestingly, many years later, when I, was running the abortion law and well as a age. I went back to him for some money for the association and I actually said to him

you've made enough out of abortion for years. We're struggling for a thousand ice that check. And? He gave him one. Damn right he did. But I said to him, what made you start doing this? You were a senior

consultant with a good job, a good reputation. He said, when I was a very young doctor, a young woman came to me, said that she'd kill herself. If she didn't have an abortion, she just couldn't have the baby. I told her to go home, have the baby, and when she'd love it. And that nine, she killed herself. He said, and that has stayed with me. Oh, my God. I felt, and still. as surely as it might take the gun and shot her that I killed that woman and that I would use my skill to stop that happening. So that was the situation then and indeed it was very clear that with legal abortions were dropped. And I by that time was working with the British pregnancy of the Irish service as a public relations person and parliamentary advisory.

And I produced a yearly statistical review and I looked. There was at that time a consortium, I suppose you'd call it, but they published figures. And I actually got their figures for admissions to London hospitals for Miss Cattwich. Oh, my God. And the year after abortion became legal, those numbers dropped absolutely from Lackham, which helped the fact that kindly doctors, when people were admitted, they did. desperate trouble once I've seen on the Friday and Saturday nights. Those numbers were dropping and dramatically dropped. They went down to about a third of what they knew. And these were

the consistent statistics collected for quite a different purpose over a number of years. And it was clear that when these women were admitted, the admission certificate, the admission certificate said miscarriage and of course an abortion is a miscarriage it's an induced miscarriage but it is a miscarriage so there was the first figures showing that legal abortion had done what we intended to do which was reduced at street abortions I've just put in because you said that for your abortion you were originally charged 140 pounds. And I've just put in an inflation calculator that 140 pounds in 1962 in today's money

is over 2,100 pounds, which is that it's a colossal sum for somebody to produce. So there was some access to a safer abortion, but it was prohibitively expensive for many. Yes, my ability to waive a checkbook in Harlem Street bought my life. They've brought my children about that. My husband and wife, whereas the young woman that I know, who didn't have a checkbook to wave in Harlan Street done, as did thousands of other women. I did want to ask you about, you must have experienced a lot of resistance to this.

because, as you said, the anti-abortionist movement, the forced birth movement, is very strong. And how have you dealt with that since 1962? With anger. That's a fabulous answer. I've had death threats. I've still got letters that were sent to me. I had red paint poured over the bullets of my car with a note under the windscreen. This is the blood of the Bayesian murdered.

But for a period of some years, my telephone rang during the night. And I had an available mother in sheltered housing living very near. And I dared not know on the phone because it could be her wanting help. And it was a recording of what sounded like me, very like an almost newborn baby, crying and a voice saying, Mama, this is the baby you heard. And that went on during the nine years on the end. I think they had it on some kind of automatic.

I went to meetings where everybody stood up and chanced at murderer. I had people interest in them cross the road if they saw me coming in the village. I lived in because most of them were people who I had helped or their children had held, young pregnant daughters. And I understand they felt that if anybody saw them talking to me, they'd need you in things she helped them out of abortion. The local supermarket, they refused to take my money because one of their stops, that's the money she owns,

from doing abortions on her kitchen table. Diane, I just, where do you find a strength? Oh, it was anger and bloody none, you know. I'm so grateful that you did fight that fight. And it's so bizarre that it's still ongoing today. wouldn't think in 2022, but it's still here. When the third reading of the abortion act went through the House of Commons, and in the early hours of morning, they realised we were going to win,

still had to get the Queen's consent, but it would go through. And we were sitting there at morning on the terrace. It was a very hot morning. I hadn't eaten in the best, and we were drinking champagne and eating strawberries. And I can remember when you did pour in my glass of champagne,

I said, I only want half a glass of champagne because this job is only half done. Wow. Until women make the decision for themselves, not to do it. until the women of Northlandia have the same privilege. That job is not done. I will drink my other half-class of champagne

when abortion is outside the criminal war. Have you ever drunk that? I've still not had my half-dust of champagne, but I think the recent victory in enabling us to keep the rules that were put in temporary. the pandemic, that is that women can take the pills at home. We're on the way. On the way.

I'm 91 now whether I'll have my other glass of champagne, but I'm hanging on now. 91. Diane, I hope that you get to drink the other half glass of champagne. But one thing I do know is you have a lot of people who will join you because the fight isn't over, the fight is still on, and there are people mobilising right now to fight for their rights. And what advice would you have to women coming to this fight now as someone who's been fighting this since 1961?

Keep fighting. Oppose all the untruths and the lives that are still being turned. Look around you and think one in three of these women, have had or will have an abortion. It is nothing to be ashamed of. I did what was necessarily, and I will do it again. You have been incredible to talk to. Thank you so much for giving me your time today.

And thank you for all the work that you have done. That's nice. It still makes me have a nice, warm feeling. Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Eleanor and Diane for joining me and for all of the work that you do. If you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. We have lots of other episodes that you might find interesting in our back catalogue, including the first part of this episode, abortion in the US, and episodes on the history of bras, beer and virginity. Join me again, betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit.

This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.