Alice Jenkins was one of the three founders of the Abortion Law Reform Association in 1936. This short book of 86 pages was recently donated as part of the Alice Jenkins archive to the Pamela Sheridan Resources Centre of the Birth Control Trust by Alice Jenkins’ daughter, Mrs Muriel Ward-Jackson. On the flyleaf of my copy, Alice Jenkins wrote in her own hand that she had had this booklet privately published and distributed at a cost of more than £60 in 1938 - the equivalent of more than £2000 today. It wonderfully reflects the preoccupations of feminists of this period and is a document of the Woman’s Movement that has hitherto been truly “hidden from history”.
The Foreword was contributed by Dr Joan Malleson, a family planning pioneer, who was the doctor in charge of the municipal birth control clinic in Ealing that Alice Jenkins had fought so hard to establish in 1933 (Simms, 1993). She was also the doctor who set in motion the famous Bourne case when she referred a fourteen year old girl who had been raped by two soldiers to Mr Aleck Bourne at St Mary’s Hospital for termination. This case was to prove the first step in the reform of British abortion laws, though it was still in progress at the time that Joan Malleson wrote this Foreword. In it, she points out that it is well known that at least 90,000 women had illegal abortions each year:
“If this is a crime, one must conclude either that there is something terribly depraved about the mothers of our nation, or that an archaic law is failing to meet the reality of present day conditions.”
She notes that abortion can be performed painlessly and safely in the early weeks of pregnancy, and remarks on the paradox that society does not allow a doctor to help a patient who needs an abortion, “though if injury befalls her he may set about repairs”.
The main part of the book by Alice Jenkins deals with maternal and child welfare, the churches and birth control, abortion and sterilisation, and the whole issue of the decline of the birth rate and the ‘Depopulation Scare’ which was such a pervasive political issue in Western Europe in the thirties.
Alice Jenkins examines the various public reports issued in this period and shows how timidly these evade the central issue of contraception and abortion for fear of upsetting their sponsors. She is an acute observer. She notes that the two maternity hospitals with the lowest maternal mortality rates in London habitually had their beds booked eight months ahead. These patients “are those who have not made, and do not make attempts to terminate their pregnancy ... Each one is likely to be a voluntary mother.” This contrasts with an example quoted at the 1934 conference of the Maternal Mortality Committee, of an industrial town very well provided with maternity services, where 23 mothers died in childbirth in one year “not one of whom had availed herself of the prenatal treatment provided to make her confinement as safe as possible.” She concludes, rightly, “a grave inference may be deduced from this fact”.
Alice Jenkins draws attention to the row that broke out at this 1934 conference when a delegate moved a resolution calling for the provision of more birth control clinics. “The response from the platform was a strong appeal for the avoidance of any action which might destroy the non-sectarian front of the Maternal Mortality Committee which had been appointed to ascertain why motherhood is a fatal risk of 1 in 250.” In spite of this lead from the platform, the resolution was not only put to the vote, but was carried by a large majority. This fact was however suppressed in the subsequent policy document published by the Maternal Mortality Committee. “There was”, observed Alice Jenkins, “not a single reference to that spacing and limitation of births which is recognised as being of fundamental importance to maternal health.”
She quotes from the medical journals and the annual reports of medical officers of health of the mid-thirties to demonstrate that unskilled and illegal abortion was already widely recognised as responsible for the large numbers of maternal deaths that took place at that period. She also shows how widespread abortifacient drug taking was at this time, with its trail of chronic ill-health for women. She says that since there is no actual law against sterilisation, this method should surely be recommended immediately to all women who have had all the children they want. She gives examples of women being blackmailed by medical and non-medical abortionists alike. Many preoccupations of that time are reflected in her writing including the dread of another war, a fear fuelled by vivid memories of the First World War which had only ended twenty years earlier and which she could clearly remember: “Young mothers do not intend to breed numbers of children in readiness for wholesale slaughter.” She also speculates that although slum clearance is urgent, it will not improve the quality of life for the poor unless it is accompanied by family limitation. She denounces the abject poverty faced by so many working class families and inveighs against the poor training in obstetrics given to both doctors and midwives, and the widespread lack of good ante-natal care.
In a chapter devoted to population issues, Alice Jenkins shows how inaccurate population forecasting has always been, and how little success financial inducements to have more children have had in other countries in Europe. In view of massive unemployment all over the continent, she cannot understand why some people are so anxious to add to the population merely to increase the total of unemployed. She also, perhaps rather oddly to our ears, denounces traffic accidents as a major cause of child death. Many present day readers will not be aware of the high incidence of road deaths in the thirties even though there were so many fewer cars than today:
“Overcrowding of roads could at once be reduced by a better service of publicly owned vehicles”.
As we stand at the frontiers of road pricing, this view will find many echoes in contemporary Britain.
Her chapter on abortion makes it quite clear that by the mid thirties the public health professionals from the Chief Medical Officer to the Ministry of Health downwards were perfectly well aware of the dire effects on women’s health of repeated attempts at abortion and self-induced abortion, though reluctant to discuss this issue outside the pages of professional journals. She expresses the opinion that a good many of these attempts, though unsuccessful in procuring abortion, resulted in the birth of a “weak, crippled or mentally defective child”. She says there is no chance of improving this state of affairs until “the complete principle of voluntary parenthood is recognised.”
She is aware from Russian and other experience that early abortion is a perfectly safe operation if performed legally by doctors in good conditions. When this view is challenged, she retorts with relentless logic that appendix removals would also now be considered highly dangerous if the operation for appendicitis “had been carried out for the last thirty years under the shadow of criminal proceedings.”
What this fascinating but little known book demonstrates very clearly is that virtually all the intelligentsia knew and accepted that illegal abortion as practised in Britain at that period was a killer and maimer of women and destructive of family life. Doctors, judges, writers, philosophers, MPs. scientists, women’s organisations are all quoted in the Appendix in support of changing the law. Despite this it took thirty years, a whole generation, before we were able to override the objections of a small but highly organised group of religious fanatics in order to bring the benefits of safe abortion to working class women, which their middle class sisters has so long enjoyed by the simple expedient of being in a position to purchase safe if surreptitious abortions from medically qualified persons. The recent ferocious attacks on abortion clinics by religious bigots, and the long-standing daily attacks on the Brook birth control clinic in Belfast show that bigotry and anti-feminism are alive and well and need still to be challenged by Alice Jenkins’ present day successors, hopefully with the same clarity, persistence , vigour and courage that she herself so signally displayed both in her life and in her writing.
Reference: Simms, M. (1993). Sixty Years Ago - Birth Control Controversies in the Queen of the Suburbs. Brit. J. Fam. Plan. 1993:19:204-205
Madeleine Simms