and the silent isle embowers the lady of shalott

[lotesse]

So Downton Abbey recently did an abortion storyline. Edith, the Unlucky Third Crawley Daughter, gets herself Pregnant Out Of Wedlock when she shags her Hot Older Boyfriend Who Keeps Promising To Marry Her, But Then Promptly Disappears Once She Gives Up The Goods. The capital letters are justified by the absolute hackneyed predictability with which the plot unfolds. Edith confesses all to her Red-Haired Unmarried Aunt, who pushes for a termination of her scandalous pregnancy. Edith wants the baby, for Sentimental Reasons, but doesn't want the social pariah status that its production would inevitably entail. She makes it all the way to the Abortionist's Scary Office, populated with herself, her accomplice, and another sad lady who serves as an Awful Lesson. Edith declares that she won't do it, and makes plans to give birth in hiding and give away the baby.

First: does this story EVER not get told this way?! I know a number of women who have had or contemplated abortions, and in none of their stories is this the way things end up going down. This is not, ime, the way that women's decisions to terminate or continue their unexpected pregnancies looks like. It's certainly not what my own (thankfully few and false) pregnancy scares have been like. But you sure wouldn't know that from the movies, who can't seem to conceive of the scenario playing out any other way. Isn't it pretty much the most boring of all the potential narrative directions you could take? Edith isn't changing or growing; she isn't making the choice to stand by her love and her desire to keep her pregnancy, nor dealing with the Obvious Reality of her lover's jackassitude, nor even getting angry with her circumstances and refusing to play with the bad hand she's been dealt. She's just sad, pious, waiting, doe-eyed, trustful, victimized. WhatEVER.

Secondly, though, the storyline's not even very historically accurate. DA is in the 1920s now, and as recent oral history research has shown, English women in the 1920s approached the abortion of unwanted pregnancies through very different frames than our own. Instead of debating whether or not to kill their babies, the framing of the decision that's become socially dominant in recent decades whether we like it or not, Englishwomen in the '20s would have been able to send away for patent medicines meant to bring on and/or regulate menstrual courses. Early pregnancy was framed as an irregular cessation of the menstrual cycle, making its restoration a logical measure to take in the attempt to keep the body regular and thus healthy. Many women in the '20s, in fact, took various sorts of abortifacients on a regular basis as a preventative medications, in order to ensure that their cycles would continue to be unimpeded. Instead of waiting nervously for months and months, never showing a bit (seriously, what is it with the Crawley women's impossible tininess during pregnancy? Lady Mary was the littlest nine months I've ever seen, and Edith at five months is still completely able to hide her Delicate Condition; the hell?), Lady Edith would likely have taken something when her first period failed to come, or soon thereafter, rendering the whole Scary Abortionist thing unnecessary.

Many, many women think of their abortions in unemotional terms of necessity; many women are relieved and joyful about their abortions, especially when they know that the time isn't right for them to have a child. You don't abort a baby, or even a fetus; grammatically speaking, you abort the process of pregnancy, a process of and in a woman's body and thus completely under her control, by her self-evident right to bodily sovereignty. It's a problem when we allow current discourses about abortion to distort our awareness of the practice's history, of the times when the Catholic Church itself held that termination before quickening was not an act of killing, of the times when abortifacients were advertised in Victorian newspapers in pretty scrolly illustrated ads that promised to bring on the courses or regulate your cycles, of a time when posed photographs of dead post-term babies posed, lit, and photographed as if they were in the womb had not yet been held up as evidence that Abortion Was Murder.

It makes me feel awfully tired with Downton, and I must say really increases the attractiveness of Call The Midwife, which has all the history!yay without the bizarre puritanical representations of the Reproductive Body In Peril.

Comments

[delfinnium]

(hi, here from a flist of a flist)

I get so tired of abortion/pregnancy story lines where for some reason the pregnant person never ever makes the decision to abort. As if there is never any circumstances where someone might be happy to!

And as you've said, modern day attitudes to pregnancy and abortion is not the same as in the past - I believe in some time in the past if the 'quickening' hasn't happened yet, the woman isn't actually considered to be pregnant. And for the most part, if the woman doesn't give birth yet, the baby isn't considered to be alive, i think, or rather not a person yet.

So for the first three months, at the very least, when only the woman herself would know that she has missed several courses, half the time unless she's extremely hopeful of a baby (or terrified of one) , would she not take measures to make sure she's 'regular'.

Though I've read 'Below stairs', the memoirs of a domestic servant, where a fellow servant had been dismissed because she'd gotten pregnant, it's just before WW2, I think; so it's not unlikely women of certain statuses could not afford not to have a child, perhaps? those kinds of abortificants probably just aren't available to the servant class, I think, maybe?

[oursin]

Those products would have been just about within the reach of the servant class - but what happened - it was just SO sleazy - would be that they would take the cheapest, and nothing would happen, so there would be an attempt to upsell them on the pricier 'stronger' (still ineffective) pills. There was also the case of the businesses that were selling these things by mail-order and then sending blackmail letters to the women who bought them.

'Backstreet' abortion was widely available and some practitioners were very skilled: they just didn't have the backup if anything went wrong. Prices varied considerably but many women who did this saw it as 'helping out' unfortunate other women 'in trouble' - cf the movie Vera Drake.

There is a weird passage somewhere in Parade's End in which Edith-Ethel fears she has fallen pregnant by her lover and demands help from Valentine, on the grounds that the latter has worked as a servant and therefore Has Knowledge.

[legionseagle]

The blackmail letter thing explains a line in Gaudy Night, about Lord Peter being sent pills of which the first five "would neither make nor mar you" but the sixth was strychine, full lethal dose. And on coming out of jail the person "tries to blackmail him on the strength of the pill correspondence". Not, obviously, abortifacients, but the original pills were intended "to cure lassitude and debility" which presumably has a male code, just as "blockages and irregularities" has a female one.

[oursin]

Impotence. Or possibly Ye Syph.

[delfinnium]

Oooh I see! The author of the book i mentioned did say that they all triedall sorts of ways to help her abort the baby - stop the pregnancy. there was very little condemnation of her and her morals - not like how it would be TODAY - with a strong disapproval for the guy who had made the girl pregnant. And a :( about the fact that the servant's employer, the guy's aunt, would of course discharge the girl instead of helping her, because the employer herself wouldhave suspicions as to who had made the maid pregnant.

The fact that sleazy people would take advantage of women who needed this is just argh.

But the mindset of women who WANTED an abortion is very different from how media seems to see the abortion story line.

[legionseagle]

Oh, I'm so glad I baled on DA after the second series; one of the things which was already becoming depressing was the no cliche unused approach to plotting of Julian Fellowes, and also the "definitely no tension" - if in doubt, issues will always be resolved in the course of an episode.

So I could have predicted how the abortion storyline would play out, even though it's absolutely not the way it played out in contemporary life or for that matter literature: a friend has pulled together a summary of abortion storylines in literature from the 19th century onwards.

One thing worth noting, though, and it's something I had to research when writing a historical detective story where fear of pregnancy and attempts to procure (home remedy) abortions was a plot point, and that is that the pills in question, however widely advertised, were almost always ineffectual and/or dangerous to the mother's health. Common ingredients were violent purgatives or included ergot. So I suspect she'd have ended up looking for a surgical remedy (probably a D&C)even if Fellowes had attempted to apply a bit of historical realism to the whole thing

[oursin]

I was about to make that point about the abortion pills, which were a sleazy commercial racket. Mostly they were sugar pills with added bitters. They might invoke trad herbal ingredients (tansy, apiol, etc) in the name but wouldn't have contained effective doses - and just as well, as the line between 'effective' and 'lethally toxic' was very fine.

For some contemporary literary accounts of women seeking and getting abortion, and biographically attested instances of actual women of the period, see here.

Should also mention, there were orally circulated (among working women mostly) folk remedies, some of which were effective (diacholon ? sp ? - lead) but dangerous.

[legionseagle]

My mother always said that when she came into the foundry (this was during her munitions making days) and smelt pennyroyal tea, she always knew why. Though the incident which made both her and me lifelong proponents of safe, legal abortion involved irrc a bodkin (because it happened in the women's toilets, the men insisted only my mother, then aged 19 or so, was able to go in and deal with the aftermath of the situation)

[lotesse]

Do you know how classed this was? I had always sort of assumed that the patent medicines would be bunk, and the folk remedies we know to be effective but unsafe - but would the daughter of an earl had access to better/safer stuff by the '20s? Most of what I've read is about middle/working-class women and pregnancy control.

[legionseagle]

No idea, I'm afraid. Though some of the stuff I've read about debutantes in the War and so forth suggest that aristocrats daughters were on the whole less well informed than others.

[lotesse]

Oh dear, I suppose that does makes sense. I was thinking along the lines of illegal abortion in the US in the 50s/60s, which was more available more safely to richer women/girls than poorer ones.

[legionseagle]

I certainly believe the latter was true in the UK also; however, I believe that the difference (as well as antibiotics existing in the 50s/60s, which makes a huge difference in survivability of any surgical procedure) was that the high end were using trained medical professionals with a knowledge of aseptic procedures and the ability to use proper instruments, and the lower end had none of the above.

ETA that is, while Edith would have had a much greater chance of surviving a surgical abortion without undue complications, I don't think that would have translated at the date into better chances of avoiding the procedure by having access to earlier medical procedures; that wouldn't have been for a couple of decades later, I think.

[selenak]

Call of the Midwife is splendid in any case, but one of the rare exceptions to the tv treatment of abortion storylines happens on Six Feet Under. Wherein Claire gets pregnant, is nowhere near ready to have a child emotionally, nor is the father (her soon to be ex boyfriend), and after thinking about it has an abortion. Her brother's on again, off again girlfriend goes with her to the clinic, which is presented like your avarage clinic (i.e. quite populated), and while the abortion has an emotional impact on Claire, she is still convinced she did the right thing. Nor does the show punish her for it (this happens in s3 out of five seasons, and with one exception, the fact she had an abortion in not mentioned again in the next two seasons, wherein Claire's main storyline is her development as a photographer). I must admit, though, this is the only American tv series I can think of which uses an abortion story like this.