Farewell To The East End

duck?’ he said kindly, ‘do you good.’ Hilda forced a smile, ‘A cup o’ tea would be nice. And Bill, thanks. Thanks for everything.’ The children slept on.
    It took about three weeks for Hilda to recover her strength. The bleeding stopped within a few days, but the shock, the pain and the general weakness kept her in bed for most of that time. Mrs Hatterton was good to her. She came in daily and saw the bigger children off to school. She cared for the toddlers, and did the washing, shopping, cooking and carrying of water up and down stairs. Mrs Prichard was not seen again. Her professional services did not include post-operative care.

BACK-STREET ABORTIONS

    A woman’s right to control her own body is so taken for granted now that younger people can scarcely believe that abortion used to be a criminal offence in the UK punishable by a prison sentence for the woman and the abortionist. The Criminal Abortion Act of 1803 was law for 165 years. It was only repealed in 1967.
    There have always been women who wanted or needed an abortion. For rich women it was relatively easy – a clandestine visit to a secret address, often abroad, where a doctor working in an unregistered clinic would operate illegally, and usually successfully, leaving little damage to the woman. Sometimes it was possible to procure an abortion legally if two doctors, one a psychiatrist, would testify that the woman seeking the abortion was mentally and physically incapable of carrying the pregnancy to full term. It cost a lot of money, but the risk of prosecution was removed.
    For poor women it was a different story. Most working-class people lived in a perpetual state of poverty, the whole family crowded into one, two or at most three rooms, with not enough food, lighting or heating. Contraception was inadequate, and women had too many children, far more than they could decently house or feed. Another baby was frequently a disaster. For single women pregnancy was a catastrophe, and many preferred suicide to the stigma of bearing an illegitimate child.
    So millions of women sought an abortion. The first method attempted was usually a simple vaginal douche. But this was unlikely to work, because the fluid has to enter the uterus to be effective. If a caustic solution was used it caused chemical burns to the vagina and cervix.
    Thousands of women tried medicinal ways of evacuating the uterus. Violent purgatives, such as a pint of Epsom Salts, were used. Gin and ginger, turpentine, raw spirit, aloes and sloes were also employed. None of them worked. Disreputable newspapers and journals advertised what they called ‘cures for menstrual blockage’ for a sum of money. These were poisonous and sometimes fatal. Quinine was common, and some ‘cures’ even contained arsenic or mercury.
    ‘Wise women’ have known for millennia that the black fungal growth on rye grain will induce an abortion. It was called ‘ergot’, and was also known to cause the deadly disease commonly called St Anthony’s Fire. When I was a young pupil midwife doing my theoretical training at a teaching hospital, a colleague was having an affair with a doctor and she became pregnant. She stole a bottle of ergometrine from the ward medicine cupboard and took the tablets over a period of days until she aborted. She became terribly ill, but such was her desperation that she continued working throughout. If Matron had discovered that she was pregnant, my colleague would have been dismissed, and if it had come to light that she had been stealing ergometrine, her name would have been removed from the register (she was an SRN) and very likely reported to the police for prosecution under the Criminal Abortion Act.
    Some women tried violent methods, such as falling downstairs, or half drowning, or taking a scalding hot bath, in the hope that they would provoke a spontaneous miscarriage. If the woman survived, she would usually still be pregnant, because one would virtually have to kill the mother before the foetus could be destroyed.
    Driven to extremes by despair, women would go to unbelievable lengths in trying to make themselves miscarry. Knitting needles, crochet hooks, metal coathangers, paper knives, pickle spoons, curved upholstery needles, spokes of bicycle wheels have all been forced into the uterus by desperate women who preferred to do anything rather than continue the pregnancy.
    How any woman could push an instrument through the closed os of her own cervix is more