At least this rant should be an interesting rant
So, in the interest of...not exceeding LJ's word count limit trying to recount the last two weeks, I'll just...talk about a subject I've talked a lot about to anyone who would listen over the last while. Especially since I had to turn of Law and Order: SVU again because oh my god, you people are judgmental. And no, I don't mean about the rapists and pedophiles. Yuck.
But it leads interestingly into my next point.
You know, it takes a lot to push my feminist rage button nowadays, just because there is so much to rage at. But this? This was just special.
Pop quiz, my lovely flist! What historical time period in another country was leaps and bounds more enlightened about abortions and a women's right to control her reproductive habits than we enlightened, modern Americans?
If you said Edwardian era England, then congratulations!
Have a gold star.
What follows are most of my professor's paraphrased words from a lecture two weeks ago.
According to my professor, she spends her summers this way. She hangs out in libraries and browses court cases, medical records, and coroner's reports. Pretty much the bread and butter of any decent historical analysis of a time period. And what she turned up was a great many women dying from what was, at the time, discreetly called "complications of pregnancy."
Which is to say? Abortions. These women were dying from complications brought on by abortions.
Birth control at the time was virtually non existent. It wasn't withheld. Society as a whole, men and woman alike, were more or less clamoring for effective methods of birth control. Condoms were in their latency. The pill hadn't even been contemplated. Even diaphragms were a long way off. The only method that anyone had determined to have any efficacy was withdrawal. And so, as you might imagine, the birth rate was huge. The birth rate was huge and no one could afford that many kids. A lot of people couldn't afford the expense of any kids, but there was nothing they could do. In a high stress lifestyle like many of the lower classes had to live, abstinence was not feasible. And, in a lot of cases, the high birth rate was fighting against stupidly high infant mortality. Parents would just recycle the name of one kid to the next one when the first one died.
Previously? The only solution to a child you didn't want and couldn't take care of in a city environment was infanticide. But as medical technology advanced and the study of the grimier sides of sex and sexuality became less "lowbrow" in British medical society, more and more began seeking out medical assistance so they could safely and quickly end their pregnancies. If they died, death certificates would be faked so that she would have appeared to have died of something innocuous. If she needed further medical attention to survive? She'd get it.
Was providing or seeking to obtain an abortion illegal at the time? Hell yes it was. And people knew it - the Chrimes brothers once pulled off the biggest embezzling scam in history up to that point by offering people fake abortifacients and then threatening to turn them over to the police if they didn't pay them hush money. It worked. A lot.
Did people care? Fuck no they didn't.
The morality rate for an abortion provided by a doctor or midwife in the 1880s was five to ten percent. Women would frequently go back to the same doctor two or three times, sometimes more.
Too many women had known the uncertainty and pain caused by bringing one child too many to term. Too many men had watched their wives, sisters, and mothers suffer without having the slightest idea of how to help them, how to ease the ceaseless pressure on their family. Oftentimes, when a case of illegal abortions was brought to court, juries would outright refuse to convict. In those cases where "abortion as murder" was put forth as a criminal charge, it was because the mother had died on the table through gross medical negligence.
That's when the matter of providing abortions was brought to court at all. Like homosexuality, it actually wasn't as prosecuted anywhere near in proportion to how illegal it was. As long as you didn't let on that you were doing, the police wouldn't sniff around too hard. It wasn't like the fact that an abortion took place would be easy to prove. Because it was pretending to be blind to abortions taking place, or cleaning up dead babies in the streets.
This was a time period that intersected with the period where it was legal to snatch a woman off the streets and hold her indefinitely if she looked as though she had a venereal disease. This was a time period where women had to argue for the right not to have sex with their syphilis ridden husbands. Where a gentried couple needed eight million of today's dollars for a divorce, and a woman needed proof both that her husband had been unfaithful and that he was an unfit husband.
And, in this matter, they were still more enlightened about women's rights than we are now.
You want evidence?
1938, Rex v. Aleck William Bourne. A doctor was brought up on charges for providing an abortion to a fourteen year old gang rape victim. And that only happened because he called attention to himself about it. And he was acquitted in twenty minutes of deliberation.
I'm not saying this was a good time for women. See above point. See the fact that, when they were finally allowed into the police force, women were literally only allowed to police the actions of other women. See the disgustingly misogynist views that endured then and after. Seriously, reading about the author of Lady Chatterly's Lover today, I was appalled. I don't care how you try to dress it up, guy was a latent pedophile.
But in the midst of all that horror and degredation, Edwardian era England still managed to provide women the right that so many people in power in our nation are fighting tooth and nail to deny them.
Makes you think, doesn't it? Or at least, I really hope it does.
But it leads interestingly into my next point.
You know, it takes a lot to push my feminist rage button nowadays, just because there is so much to rage at. But this? This was just special.
Pop quiz, my lovely flist! What historical time period in another country was leaps and bounds more enlightened about abortions and a women's right to control her reproductive habits than we enlightened, modern Americans?
If you said Edwardian era England, then congratulations!
Have a gold star.
What follows are most of my professor's paraphrased words from a lecture two weeks ago.
According to my professor, she spends her summers this way. She hangs out in libraries and browses court cases, medical records, and coroner's reports. Pretty much the bread and butter of any decent historical analysis of a time period. And what she turned up was a great many women dying from what was, at the time, discreetly called "complications of pregnancy."
Which is to say? Abortions. These women were dying from complications brought on by abortions.
Birth control at the time was virtually non existent. It wasn't withheld. Society as a whole, men and woman alike, were more or less clamoring for effective methods of birth control. Condoms were in their latency. The pill hadn't even been contemplated. Even diaphragms were a long way off. The only method that anyone had determined to have any efficacy was withdrawal. And so, as you might imagine, the birth rate was huge. The birth rate was huge and no one could afford that many kids. A lot of people couldn't afford the expense of any kids, but there was nothing they could do. In a high stress lifestyle like many of the lower classes had to live, abstinence was not feasible. And, in a lot of cases, the high birth rate was fighting against stupidly high infant mortality. Parents would just recycle the name of one kid to the next one when the first one died.
Previously? The only solution to a child you didn't want and couldn't take care of in a city environment was infanticide. But as medical technology advanced and the study of the grimier sides of sex and sexuality became less "lowbrow" in British medical society, more and more began seeking out medical assistance so they could safely and quickly end their pregnancies. If they died, death certificates would be faked so that she would have appeared to have died of something innocuous. If she needed further medical attention to survive? She'd get it.
Was providing or seeking to obtain an abortion illegal at the time? Hell yes it was. And people knew it - the Chrimes brothers once pulled off the biggest embezzling scam in history up to that point by offering people fake abortifacients and then threatening to turn them over to the police if they didn't pay them hush money. It worked. A lot.
Did people care? Fuck no they didn't.
The morality rate for an abortion provided by a doctor or midwife in the 1880s was five to ten percent. Women would frequently go back to the same doctor two or three times, sometimes more.
Too many women had known the uncertainty and pain caused by bringing one child too many to term. Too many men had watched their wives, sisters, and mothers suffer without having the slightest idea of how to help them, how to ease the ceaseless pressure on their family. Oftentimes, when a case of illegal abortions was brought to court, juries would outright refuse to convict. In those cases where "abortion as murder" was put forth as a criminal charge, it was because the mother had died on the table through gross medical negligence.
That's when the matter of providing abortions was brought to court at all. Like homosexuality, it actually wasn't as prosecuted anywhere near in proportion to how illegal it was. As long as you didn't let on that you were doing, the police wouldn't sniff around too hard. It wasn't like the fact that an abortion took place would be easy to prove. Because it was pretending to be blind to abortions taking place, or cleaning up dead babies in the streets.
This was a time period that intersected with the period where it was legal to snatch a woman off the streets and hold her indefinitely if she looked as though she had a venereal disease. This was a time period where women had to argue for the right not to have sex with their syphilis ridden husbands. Where a gentried couple needed eight million of today's dollars for a divorce, and a woman needed proof both that her husband had been unfaithful and that he was an unfit husband.
And, in this matter, they were still more enlightened about women's rights than we are now.
You want evidence?
1938, Rex v. Aleck William Bourne. A doctor was brought up on charges for providing an abortion to a fourteen year old gang rape victim. And that only happened because he called attention to himself about it. And he was acquitted in twenty minutes of deliberation.
I'm not saying this was a good time for women. See above point. See the fact that, when they were finally allowed into the police force, women were literally only allowed to police the actions of other women. See the disgustingly misogynist views that endured then and after. Seriously, reading about the author of Lady Chatterly's Lover today, I was appalled. I don't care how you try to dress it up, guy was a latent pedophile.
But in the midst of all that horror and degredation, Edwardian era England still managed to provide women the right that so many people in power in our nation are fighting tooth and nail to deny them.
Makes you think, doesn't it? Or at least, I really hope it does.