It was during the autumn of 1920 that Elizabeth Beattie, a twenty-nine year old domestic servant, was charged with concealing a pregnancy. Elizabeth already had a child, a twelve year old son who was in the house when she gave birth to her second child alone one night but she didn’t ask him to go for help because he was afraid of going out in the dark. It was the following morning she wrote a letter to her doctor –
“Will you come soon as I have just had a baby this morning, and I am myself?”
The baby was found to be dead and it was not clear when death occurred. Elizabeth was told she was lucky not to be charged with its murder, only the concealment of a pregnancy and she was sentenced to five months imprisonment.
About the same time a serial bigamist who got a young woman he illegally married pregnant then abandoned her on discovering she was carrying his baby was sentenced to just two months jail.
In 1927 a midwife called Mary Rennie or Patten was charged with conducting an illegal operation at a house on Union Street in Aberdeen that resulted in the death of a waitress, Mary Donald. The case in the High Court attracted much attention – the court was packed, mainly with young women, while hundreds more were left outside during the three-day trial.
Mary Patten was accused of providing drugs to Mary Donald that caused her death. Patten told the court that Mary had twice come to her to plead for help to terminate her pregnancy and on one occasion she had urged the young woman to get married and have the child. The young waitress called again on Patten telling her she was “sick with the bile” and Patten advised she “take castor oil”. The inference being that Mary Patten was reluctant to become involved but castor oil was also sometimes used to induce labour. She denied accepting money to abort the baby and denied using any instrument on Mary Donald.
At the conclusion of proceedings the Lord Constable reminded the jury they were not judging the accused on her morals for –
“ if they were there would probably be others in the dock, and certainly one would be Linton Souter”
Souter, a young man from Peterhead, was evidently the child’s father who was regarded as a scoundrel by the Lord Constable for deserting Mary Donald when she needed help. It took the jury only twenty minutes to find Patten guilty, by majority not unanimous decision.
A collective “Oh” swept across the courtroom when the fifty-four-year old widow and mother of three children was sentenced to three years in jail.
The medical profession was as divided as society over terminations but the law was unambiguous and doctors adhered to the law making it near impossible for a woman to obtain an abortion legally. One doctor on the side of women who was determined to push for change was Dr Joan Malleson. She suffered intolerable sexism as a young medical student earlier in the century but persevered and went on to work in the field of fertility, reproduction and sexuality. Malleson was unusual in providing birth control advice to her women patients at a time of great ignorance over contraception, especially among the working classes. Any unmarried woman who got pregnant was judged to be immoral and her life often ruined. Married women faced over twenty years of one pregnancy after another that might ruin their health and family life. Malleson recognised the anguish that accompanied unplanned children in families living on the breadline and in overcrowded, insanitary housing. It was Dr Malleson who wrote to a prominent London gynaecologist and obstetrician, Mr Aleck Bourne, to ask if he would terminate the pregnancy of a 14-year-old girl who had been savagely raped by a group of Royal Horse Guards officers. Malleson wanted this prominent surgeon to carry out the termination above board in a hospital knowing he would face prosecution – as a test case to open up debate and extend the grounds that qualified a woman (or girl) for a termination.
Bourne was courageous in taking on the challenge for he was risking both his reputation and career. Having successfully carried out the termination of the girl’s pregnancy Bourne contacted the Attorney General inviting him to take action against him and he was duly charged with performing an illegal operation on a girl at St Mary’s Hospital in London in defiance of an 1861 Offences Against the Person Act that stated –
“Whosoever, with intent to procure a miscarriage on any woman, whether she be or be not with child, or unlawfully uses any instrument or other means whatsoever with a like intent, shall be guilty of a felony.”
“she might be carrying a future prime minister” and “that anyhow girls always lead men on.”
Bourne referred to an Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929 which specified a single reason for termination of a pregnancy – danger to the life of the mother. Bourne told the court that the girl had suffered physical injuries during the attack which he believed could have serious implications for the safe delivery of the child’s baby and he sought to broaden the definition of danger to the life of the mother to include the girl’s future physical and mental health. Other rape cases were discussed, one involved incest and in both cases the young women went on to experience dreadful mental health damage as a consequence of their experiences.
Whether or not it was his standing in society that persuaded them the jury took just forty minutes to find Bourne not guilty of the charge. People in the public benches rose to their feet as one and a buzz of approval ran through the court and when the news was broken at a conference of the British Medical Association in Plymouth doctors attending also stood up to cheer the verdict. It is clear that the laws relating to pregnancy lagged behind public opinion.
An interesting addendum, however, in that Bourne was not an uncritical supporter of terminations and he was a co-founder of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children in 1966, a pressure group that opposed the 1967 abortion act that enabled doctors to decide whether a woman could have a termination and so legally operate on them.
At the other end of the UK the equally distinguished gynaecologist and obstetrician, Dugald Baird, was pursuing a similar path. Baird was appointed Regius Professor of Midwifery in Aberdeen in 1937 and he went on to establish the first free family planning service in Aberdeen. Baird had seen enough suffering among the poor in Scotland to understand how devastating it was for women that others had more control over their bodies than the women themselves; devastating for them and their families. In a reference to US president Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms – of speech, worship, freedom from want and fear – Baird added a fifth freedom – from the tyranny of excessive fertility on women –
“to relieve women of the burden of multiple pregnancies”
Secret Aberdeen p 73
“Scots law allowed terminations to be carried out if regarded as being in the interests of the mother but it seems only in Aberdeen was this practised to any extent”
Secret Aberdeen– p 77
As the Lord Constable observed in 1927 and Dr Joan Malleson and Mr Aleck Bourne tested in court there was a great deal of hypocrisy lurking over the UK and its laws regarding women, their sexuality and right to control their own bodies. Aberdeen was fortunate in having a group of enlightened doctors determined to provide as much care for women as the law permitted and Dugald Baird’s fifth freedom, the socio-economic justification for abortion, became the key to the 1967 abortion law but even here nothing was straightforward. Laws made by men protected men and as we’ve seen in the Bourne case, protected the middle and upper classes in particular. Only men can get women pregnant but women were and are often left alone to deal with the consequences – life changing ones. Today contraception is easily obtained as is advice on family planning but this was not so in the relatively recent past. For the majority of women and as we’ve seen, girls, who became pregnant there was no legal means to terminate that pregnancy and so desperate women and girls risked their lives in seeking help from abortionists, often a nurse or midwife, working illegally with all the inherent dangers that involved. All risked prosecution under callous and unsympathetic laws. It wasn’t always so, however.
Back in 18th century Scotland a foetus was held to be part of a woman’s own body and not a separate being – a rational and humane position and one in tune with the Scottish Enlightenment. But this changed in the Victorian era steeped as it was in hypocrisy and misogyny condemning both the pregnant woman unwilling to complete her pregnancy and her abortionist (but not the man who made the woman pregnant). An Act of 1828 toughened the law surrounding concealment of the birth of a child by a parent meaning all births had to be reported, stillbirth or death shortly after birth. Previously this applied only to unmarried women but the Act applied to any woman, married or not. Charged with murder of her child it was up to a jury to decide the mother’s guilt or innocence where evidence was lacking.
“…in cases where children were still-born, a woman should not be permitted to hide her shame…”
The 1861 Act stated that a woman guilty of causing her own miscarriage faced penal servitude for life or at least three years (penal servitude replaced transportation and was served in a large prison operating a brutal system of enforced labour). Extenuating circumstances might reduce a sentence to a maximum of two years with or without hard labour and/or solitary confinement. For anyone supplying drugs intended to cause a miscarriage the prison term was penal servitude for three years or prison up to two years with or without hard labour. Similar sentences were issued to anyone involved in concealing a birth. This act was repealed for Scotland, England and Wales in 1967 and astonishingly only in 2019 in Northern Ireland.
Arabella Hopton might have expected this level of punishment when she, a nurse, was prosecuted in Gloucester in 1920 for using an instrument with the aim of causing miscarriages in six women and her involvement in a further two abortions. She had been earlier charged with the wilful murder of a woman but no evidence was provided and this charge was dropped. She pleaded not guilty to the other charges. It was clear the Crown prosecution was determined to enforce the law and decided that proving Hopton used an illegal instrument to carry out terminations was a way of ensuring they got her for the wilful murder of one woman. However, the judge refused to sanction picking and choosing bits of the case and so the murder charge was dropped and the nurse was tried for providing drugs to induce abortion as well as using an instrument in some cases.
The evidence was too graphic for one man on the jury who fainted. The Crown accused her of encouraging young women to have sex in the knowledge they could always seek an abortion (as if this was straightforward and safe) and painted a picture of her being an evil abortionist. Hopton’s defence lawyer described her as a kindly woman, a widow and mother to three children as well as a nurse and midwife who had delivered up to 4,000 babies over her working life who wanted to use her expertise to help desperate women. It took the jury ten minutes to return a guilty verdict and Hopton was sentenced to 7 years in prison.
Nine years later when Marjory Gammack from Aberdeenshire told the man who made her pregnant of her pregnancy he left the country. She gave birth to a boy alone in a house in Logie Buchan. When the law caught up with her she said she was unwell following the birth and remained in bed till the following day when she realised the child was dead and she buried the body in the garden. She admitted to her crime and was given a light sentence of three months in jail by the sheriff.
The following year Aberdeen sheriff court tried Mary Gillies charged with giving birth to a female child, failing to call for help and smothering the child. Gillies pleaded guilty to culpable homicide not murder. She had also been abandoned by the child’s father on discovering she was carrying his child. She also gave birth alone then placed the body in a drawer until she later buried it at Forbesfield. Found guilty Mary Gillies was sentenced to six months jail.
In 1931 a London coroner criticised nursing home officials and nuns in a convent for their refusal to help a young woman who had just given birth and asked them for help. Patricia Mahon, a children’s nurse, had moved to London from Bournemouth on realising she was pregnant and went to live at a convent until the birth was imminent and had arranged to go into a nursing home to have the child. Before that could happen the baby arrived and she collapsed during the birth while alone in her room, regaining consciousness with her baby lying on the floor. She went to the nursing home for help and was sent back to the convent where the sister in charge told her to get out. So Patricia Mahon packed up her belongings including the body of her baby and left her things at Marylebone station then phoned a friend to ask advice and was told to contact a solicitor which she did. The case was passed to a coroner who asked the nursing home why a woman in need of medical assistance was put out and was told it was because she would have to share a room. The coroner asked,
“So what? She wouldn’t contaminate them.”
When he asked the same question of the convent the nun in charge just shrugged her shoulders at which point the coroner turned on her,
“You are a Sister of Mercy, but was it merciful to treat her like this?”
It was concluded the child died from lack of care at birth but not negligence of the mother and added the only good Samaritan in this case was the solicitor.
Man-made laws (literally) had a devastating impact on women – especially working class women whose circumstances made them especially vulnerable to indifferent and unscrupulous men quick to abandon them rather than face up to the consequences of their reckless lust. It was near impossible for working class women to get information that would enable them to prevent unwanted pregnancies. A single working class woman had to carry the stigma of pregnancy outside of marriage, was labelled as wicked and promiscuous and almost certainly sacked from her work, the shame of being a loose woman following her throughout her life. For married women multiple pregnancies meant providing for another mouth from inadequate wages and in overcrowded and insanitary homes.
I found this one of the most depressing blogs to research. What happened to these women is shocking and unforgiveable. Examples of himpathy if ever there were. Misogyny and sexism have probably always been imposed on women because of their historical subservient position in societies from east to west, north to south. Women told what to wear. Women told how to behave. Women denied education. Women denied abortion. The subjugation of women is and has been created through social and political power structures originally stemming from religion and through time women have fought against the male assertion of authority but it’s a battle not yet won. Not every man is guilty of this. Dugald Baird was himself largely ostracised by his fellow gynaecologists and obstetricians for being overly and overtly sympathetic to the needs of women. But the bigger picture is that both male entitlement and male privilege are parasitic on women’s lives – shapeshifters that will never accept women as autonomous beings.
Lenathehyena's Blog from Lorna Corall Dey 