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.