References in literary texts and texts about (mainly) literary women, to women procuring abortion. Many thanks to correspondents on the Histsex, Modernism and Victoria e-lists, Lisa Diguardi, Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, Gita Panjabi, Angela Bryant, Carol Dyhouse, Chris Willis, Angelique Richardson, Emma Jones, Marna Nightingale, Susan Hall, Lawrence Rainey, Farah Mendlesohn, Tanya Evans, Jennifer Gustar, Fran Bigman, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Keith Hindell, Barbare Green, Sharon D Engbrecht, Michael Barrett, Alisha Palmer, Karen Weingarten, the participants in the discussion on abortion and abortifacients on Victoria in October 2014, and one or two nameless correspondents for suggestions. I have become aware of Abortion Book Club: 'every month, we read one abortion-related book; critically examining depictions of abortion in fiction.' (so far, these mostly look to be US-based and fairly recent). Please e-mail me with any additional contributions.

'[B]oth of us relied on and contributed to Lesley Hall’s brilliant Literary Abortion website' - Interview with Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, author of A Woman’s Right to Know: Pregnancy Testing in Twentieth-Century Britain.

Useful reading on the legal, medical, social and political background: for the UK, Barbara Brookes, Abortion in England, 1900-1967 (London: Croom Helm, 1988), and now available in paperback, Keith Hindell and Madeleine Simms, Abortion Law Reformed (1971); for the US, Leslie J Reagan, When Abortion was a Crime: Women, medicine, and law in the United States, 1867-1973 (Berkeley, Ca., University of California Press, 1997).
I have a chapter on the important Rex v Bourne case of 1938 in this volume: Women’s Legal Landmarks in the Interwar Years: Not for Want of Trying
For contemporary historical background to the British 1967 Abortion Law Reform Act (the David Steel Act), the transcript of the July 2001 Witness Seminar is available for free as a downloadable pdf from the Centre for Contemporary British History website at King's College London
And on the path-breaking legal decision in the USA: see here for the judgement in Roe v. Wade, 1973*

On older history in the UK, my own Abortion on the Victorian Web: Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Age of Victoria

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society: Victorian Abortion & Birth Control: Ep. 133 Friday, July 28, 2023: podcast

I produced a memorandum (PDF 58K) of evidence on the history of abortion in the UK for History and Policy submitted to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology enquiry into Scientific developments relating to the Abortion Act 1967 (September 2007). Their report (downloadable pdf).

And a site on the History of the Pregnancy Test

Recently drawn to my attention: the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database entries for Abortion - entries seem predominantly but not exclusively US, and mostly fairly recent, and include fiction, non-fiction and academic studies. Thanks to Fran Bigman for the pointer.

Still a very useful snapshot of the situation in England and Wales just before the 1967 Act, Paul Ferris, The Nameless: Abortion in Britain Today (1966). Particularly good on the 'Harley Street' system.

The Abortion Pill: What are the facts?

UK: Achieved

Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria, or The Wrongs of Women includes the character Jemima's procuring an abortion

Doreen Thierauf in an article in Victorian Studies (56.3), 2014, suggests a reading of Rosamund Lydgate's miscarriage in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1874) as the result of a deliberate decision to go riding when she knew that she was pregnant and this was widely known to be contraindicated behaviour.

In the pornographic novel The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon (1881, anonymous, attributed to James Campbell Reddie), the protagonist performs an abortion on his lover.

'My life has been a hell, mother': Victimisation and Abortion in George Egerton’s Virgin Soil' and 'The Regeneration of Two', by Emma Burris-Janssen,in The Latchkey, Journal of New Woman Studies, Vol. VIII (Winter 2016/17)

In Menie Muriel Dowie's Gallia (1895) there is a brief and easy-to-miss episode in which a young woman nearly dies from the complications of an abortion, apparently induced by furious dancing, "Bein' no stairs to come up and down", according to the charwoman who discovers Cara Lemuel in a collapsed and delirious state.

Thomas Hardy's poem A Sunday Morning Tragedy involves a herbal abortifacient and botched abortion.

Elizabeth Robins Votes for Women (1907) published in novel form as The Convert, turns partly on the history of an abortion, used to blackmail a politician into support for the suffrage

A horror tale by Walter de la Mare (as 'Walter Ramal'), 'A.B.O',written in the mid-1890s, but apparently not published until 1971, involves the digging up of a chest which turns out to contain an aborted foetus, with gruesome outcome. Transcript of the full tale in this blogpost; it is discussed in this article by Thomas Cole,Abortive Avoidance: The Victorian Medical Profession, Reproductive Rights, and Obscenity,, which also includes references to several pornographic texts of the Victorian era which allude to abortion and abortifacient practices.

Harley Granville-Barker's play Waste (1907) centres on the ruin of a politician's career following the death from abortion of a married woman he had a brief fling with. It was denied licensing for public performance by the theatrical censor and never actually produced except in a club performance by the Stage Society until 1936.

'Richard Dehan' (Clothide Graves), The Dop Doctor (1911), set in South Africa during the Boer War, includes abortion among its melodramatic themes.

Biographers of Katherine Mansfield appear to differ as to whether she had an abortion/abortions during the period 1908-11.

Amelia Edith Barr, The Measure of a Man (1916) - have been informed that Barr was an American, rather than British, novelist. However, this novel has a British setting, c. the 1860s. In context of the protagonist's wife not wishing to have any more children, there is the report of the funeral of a local woman, married, with a baby, and working in the factory, who became ill at work and sent home with the doctor called. Her husband, summoned from work, cries out 'So you've been at your old tricks once more, Susanna! This is the third time'.

In Volume 1 of her autobiography, Journey to the North (1969), the novelist Storm Jameson mentions 'a miscarriage I brought on myself, by inconceivable means' which she refused to detail. Elizabeth Maslen in Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography (2014) places this in 1916, when Jameson already had a very young infant and was in a deeply unhappy marriage.

Annie Vivanti Chartres, Vae Victis (link to Italian version at Project Gutenberg (1918) (published in USA as The Outrage) - set in Belgium at the outbreak of the First World War, one of two characters raped and impregnated by the invading Germans chooses to have an abortion and prevails upon a British doctor to operate.

ASM Hutchinson, This Freedom (1922): misogynistic and anti-feminist novel in which mother more interested in career than children, is punished by, among other things, the death of her daughter (who I guess is also being punished for taking too much advantage of WWI freedoms for women) from illicit abortion

TS Eliot, 'The Waste Land' (1922): the pills Lil took to bring it off.

According to a review of John Campbell's If Love Were All: The Story of Frances Stevenson and David Lloyd George (2006), during the course of their long association Stevenson had 3 abortions.

According to Rene Weis's non-fictional study of the famous Thompson/Bywaters murder case of 1922, Criminal Justice, the fact that Edith Thompson had tried to self-administer an abortifacient was considered too dreadful to be mentioned in evidence during her trial for the murder of her husband in collusion with her lover, Frederick Bywaters. Her husband ate the porridge she had put it in and complained of the taste: without the explanation this underlined the prosecution's case that she had already attempted to poison him before Bywaters stabbed him. There have been several fictional studies of the case: in F Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to see the Peepshow (1934) the Edith-character Julia undergoes a backstreet abortion from a woman living over a newsagent's shop. Weis suggests that Edith Thompson was pregnant early in 1922 and either had a miscarriage or an abortion. There is some indication in the later case of the 'Fetter Hill mystery' and the trial of Beatrice Pace after the death of her husband from arsenic poisoning (she was acquitted), as recounted in John Carter Wood, The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity, and the Trials of Beatrice Pace (2012), that her abusive husband had administered some kind of abortifacient to her more than once during the course of their marriage and she had also taken them herself, but this was not brought up in court. (The author fails to mention, when detailing his future career, that her defence counsel, Norman Birkett, chaired the Interdepartmental Committee on Abortion, 'the Birkett Committee', in 1938/9.)

Michael Arlen, The Green Hat (1924): at one point Iris is in a Paris nursing home with 'septic poisoning', this may be the outcome of an abortion gone wrong or there is also some implication (recollection of a relative's experience) that it is the result of a stillbirth. Iris Storm was based on Nancy Cunard, with whom Arlen (like many others) had an affair: in 1920 she had a 'curettage' in Paris for reasons unspecified, but de Courcy, in Five Love Affairs and a Friendship (2023) notes that this was was how abortions were often euphemised; complications were succeeded by a hysterectomy, which was followed by further complications and serious infection.

In Daisy Dunn's Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford between the Wars (2022) it is stated that the classicist ER Dodds' wife Bet, whom he married in 1923, had two pregnancies which 'had to be terminated' because she developed severe eclampsia. This probably alludes to inducing labour at a late stage of pregnancy, which is when eclampsia usually manifests, rather than what is normally considered abortion and would probably have been considered normal obstetric practice in this emergency, eclampsia being life-threatening for the mother.

In Naomi Mitchison's historical novel Cloud Cuckoo Land (1925), set in classical Athens, one of the characters, Moiro, dies after trying to induce the abortion of the child of an adulterous liaison (see below for Mitchison's deployment of abortion in a contemporary setting).

According to Jane Dunn's biography of her, early in 1924 Antonia White became pregnant as a result of her first act of intercourse (her first marriage had only recently been annulled), when a house-guest at her parents' house crept into her room one night. Surprisingly, she persuaded her devoutly Catholic father to lend her the money to obtain an abortion (though she had just returned home after her famous period in Bethlem - 'Bedlam' - mental hospital, which might have influenced his attitude towards the situation). She got advice from a worldly painter friend, who put her in touch with someone who could give her the name of an abortionist, who gave her 'injections' which cost ten shillings each. In great pain and danger of blood poisoning she was admitted to a nursing home. While she did not at the time appear to find this traumatic, and continued to practice her religion, it is noteworthy that her sequence of strongly autobiographical novels (always written against recurrences of writer's block) stalled when it reached this point in her life.

Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train (1926). Denham, unwillingly pregnant and loathing it, disobeys medical orders and continues her normal strenuous activities, leading to a miscarriage.

The singer, nightclub entrepreneur, actress and filmstar Elsa Lanchester had an abortion in 1926 while she was performing in the revue Riverside Nights at the Lyric Hammersmith, allegedly without even missing a performance. She was assisted in finding someone to carry out the procedure by the American actress Tallulah Bankhead. Lanchester had a second abortion around 1928 when she was already involved with Charles Laughton, whom she subsequently married. Laughton later claimed that their marriage was childless due to a botched abortion undergone by Lanchester in her vaudeville days, but it is not entirely clear whether this was the case or whether she was just averse to maternity, or whether her discovery of Laughton's homosexuality had a bearing.

In her memoirs, Time Will Tell (2003), the writer Yvonne Kapp recounts how during the 1920s she became pregnant less than two years after having her first child. Her husband, the artist Edmond 'Peter' Kapp 'declared quite firmly that we "couldn't afford" another baby.' She 'went for an abortion to a doctor friend of ours' but although she 'liked and trusted him' and the abortion per se was successful, 'things went horribly wrong and septicaemia set in' (though she did survive this).

The artist (Dora) Carrington, member of the Bloomsbury Group and life companion of Lytton Strachey, got pregnant by Bernard 'Beakus' Penrose in 1928, aged 35, and chose to have an abortion, as he wanted a commitment from her that would have meant leaving her life with Strachey.

In Ethel Mannin's 1928 novel (described by one critic as 'A Saga of Sex'), Crescendo, the protagonist. Gilbert Stroud's. wife, the aristocratic Lady Isabel, has an operation in Paris 'for appendicitis', which is revealed by her to have been an abortion - they are on bad terms and she claims that it was because he earlier claimed that he was marrying her 'to breed from good stock'. It later turns out that she has been having an affair with her married cousin Rex, whose wife is proposing to divorce him, and tells all this to Gilbert. Letters from the bohemian novelist herself to her friend and former lover Douglas Goldring c. 1930 (among the Goldring papers in the University of Victorian British Columbia) talk of being 'legally curetted' with two doctors' certificates (providing she can get them - she mentions the names of various doctors who might be persuaded to help) but also implies that she could get it done in Prague with less trouble, apart from the inconvenience of going there. She also tells him that his wife, who may be pregnant. could be 'curetted, legitimately'.

In Mary Borden's novel A Woman With White Eyes (1930), the narrator contemplates, but does not undergo, abortion when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock around the early 1900s. 'Wigmore St' rather than the adjacent Harley Street is mentioned as the locale where medical abortion is likely to be procurable. Later, after the Great War, she assists her best friend in obtaining the services of a 'sage-femme' in Paris, with lethal results.

According to Timothy D'Arch Smith's The Frankaus: Prejudice & Principles Within a London Literary Family (2015), in 1930 the novelist Pamela Frankau went to Berlin for an abortion arranged by her father, the novelist Gilbert Frankau. There is a very elliptical reference to the incident in her Pen to Paper (1961): that this is what she is implied by 'the dark adventure' is indicated in D'Arch Smith's footnote to be substantiated by a letter from Frankau's husband to her cousin and intending biographer.

Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark (1934) ends with a pretty disastrous abortion (predictably so for a Rhys heroine).At first Anna takes 'the Abbe Sebastian's Pills, primrose label, one guinea a box, daffodil label, two guineas, orange label, three guineas' imagining that as a result 'if I had it, it would be a monster.... No eyes, perhaps...' A friend knows of somebody: 'But whether she'll do it for you is another question. It's a thing that can happen to anybody, but you really ought to have done something about it before. I could have told you that all that business of taking pills is no good.' The amount is initially said to be 'about fifty', and then 'forty pounds. She says she must have it in gold'. Anna manages to get the money from a man (not the father). The operation is done by a Mrs Robinson', 'French-Swiss', in the bedroom of her flat, who then sends Anna away to wait for the outcome. This is clearly fairly horrendous and eventually a doctor is called, and told she 'had a fall', something about which he sounds extremely cynical. This was based on an earlier (pre-War) version, and founded in Rhys' own experiences.

Simon Blumenfeld's 1935 working-class novel Jew Boy includes a chapter in which Ettie, an older married woman, who 'had had some experience of these things', helps Olive to access an abortion. Olive has tried hot baths, strenuous exercise and Epsom salts without any effect. Ettie, knowing how dangerous the operation is and how painful, tries to dissuade Olive without success, but 'living as she did, she didn't dare have a baby' and insists on going ahead. The woman abortionist lives in a big house, and takes the money first. Ettie stays with Olive during the operation. Afterwards, Olive stays in bed for three days and rejects suggestions that she should see a doctor; on the fourth day she feels a little better, gets up and goes back to work.

Geoffrey Trease, 'The Lovers', short story in collection The Unsleeping Sword (1934): Mary and Jim are planning to marry, until Jim loses his job. Mary becomes pregnant after they make love during an outing but though a good girl, refuses to be forced to marry on the dole, and gets an illegal abortion which goes wrong (but she survives). A doctor 'damn[s] the system which let the quacks smash first, forbade the hospitals to do more than patch the wreckage.' The blame is largely laid on the capitalist system. His novel Only Natural (1940) also contains allusions to 'the illegal operation'.

Vera Brittain's Honourable Estate (1936), includes an attempt in the earlier generation by Janet, unhappy suffragette wife of a clergyman, to terminate a suspected pregnancy: she writes to her friend. 'I have had reason to believe that I am again confronted with the prospect of motherhood I am terribly upset about it. For several days I resisted the temptation to take medicines to stop it but at last I gave in, and for the past two days have been doing everything I could think of to prevent it going further. I have done this deliberately, knowing it to be a sin', This appears to succeed, as she has a miscarriage, but it is implied that afterwards she finds some means of contraception to prevent further offspring.

Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets (1936): Olivia aborts pregnancy by her married lover. Her raffish cousin Etty knows the address of a suitable doctor (‘He’s a what d’you call it--manipulator or something.... He’s got a more or less respectable practice. This is a side-line’), and reveals that she too had once had need of such information and that another friend who had also used him had referred her to him. This episode was based on Lehmann's real-life experience, as described by Selina Hastings in her biography, Rosamond Lehmann (2001). Her first husband had a passionate distaste for fatherhood, and when she became pregnant, her socialite cousin knew the man to go to for an abortion. This was a Mr Osborne, a successful physiotherapist in the West End, who ran a 'flourishing practice on the side for fashionable ladies.' The cost was (as in the novel) £100. For this the service was somewhat basic - after the 'little intervention' in his consulting room, Lehmann was sent home to await the miscarriage.

In Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza (1936), the protagonist's married lover, Helen Ledwidge, procures an abortion from a 'sage-femme' in Paris and nearly dies (a surgeon has to be called in).

In the Nigel Strangeways mystery by Nicholas Blake, There's Trouble Brewing (1937), Dr Cammison reveals that he performed an abortion upon his sister-in-law, pregnant by her lover: 'I don't approve of abortion, as a general rule.But I happened to discover that there was insanity in Kate's young man's family, so of course I did it for her'. The loathsome owner of the local brewery was holding the knowledge of this over him to avoid being accused of major health and safety violations on his premises.

According to Mary S. Lovell in The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family (2001), at least two of them (Diana and Jessica) had abortions, and their maternal grandmother, Jessica Bowles (nee Gibson) apparently died from an abortion undertaken by her doctor because he thought that her four-month pregnancy with her fifth child would prove fatal. Diana had an abortion in 1935 when she was living with, but not yet married to, Sir Oswald Mosley, to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy and scandal which might harm Mosley's political career. This was very likely with all the benefits of a Harley St nursing home. Jessica ('Decca') had a termination in very different circumstances in 1938, while she was living in the East End with her first husband, the Communist Esmond Romilly. Not expecting her family (from whom she was anyway estranged as a result of her runaway marriage) would be likely to have 'useful ideas', she went to a Bohemian woman acquaintance, who gave her an address 'deep in the East End slums' where for £5 'an ordinary middle-aged Englishwoman' injected soap into her uterus, which was horribly painful, and warned her not to call a doctor - account published in Harpers, 1992. Decca did call a doctor and did survive (and had further children). Lovell finds her decision to terminate the pregnancy (shortly after the loss of their much-loved first child from measles) curious: but in 1938 the Romillys were surely anticipating imminent war and its potential dangers for committed left-wing activists such as themselves, and the additional threat that pregnancy and an infant child might add, or at the very least felt that it was 'no world to bring a child into', a not uncommon view of the time. In Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love (1947) we learn that it is not happenstance that Fanny is the only offspring of her mother The Bolter: when Fanny and her cousins are discussing the idea of 'back to the womb' in the Hons' Cupboard, she says:

'... I imagine the one I was in wasn't very comfortable at the time you know, and nobody else has ever been allowed to stay there.'
'Abortions?' said Linda with interest.
'Well, tremendous jumpings and hot baths anyway.'
'How do you know?'
'I once heard Aunt Emily and Aunt Sadie talking about it when I was very little, and afterwards I remembered. Aunt Sadie said: "How does she manage it?" and Aunt Emily said: "Skiing, or hunting, or just jumping off the kitchen table."'

Barbara Hedworth, How Strong is your Love (1938 - published by Mills and Boon!). The heroine's father, the village doctor, 'helps out' a young girl in trouble, but the girl dies of a blood clot, and the doctor shoots himself. This made the banned list of the Irish Government (according to Joseph McAleer, Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon, 2000)

The plot of Ruth Adam's I'm Not Complaining (1938) kicks off with the narrator, Madge, a teacher in an elementary school, being told by a hostile parent that her colleague Jenny has been seen at 'a certain little chemist's shop' in the local slums where one can 'buy forbidden goods' (abortifacients), a well-known practice in the area - the narrator, who is aware that it is a crime for which she mentions the sentence of 7 years, also knows that the local hospital usually just administers a stern warning and does not inform the police, given the high level of poverty and unemployment in the community. Jenny admits that she went there. Madge asks to see the bottle, and pours the contents away, having heard from a nurse friend at the hospital about a women who died unpleasantly after taking the same thing. She exhorts Jenny to tell her married lover, one half of a self-consciously progressive couple, who turn out to have 'a medical friend who will put it all right' and even arrange for Jenny to recuperate at their home.

In the 'Sally Bowles' section of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin (1939), first published separately in 1937, Sally has a dubiously licit abortion: this was based on the actual experience of Jean Ross in Berlin in 1931, when according to Peter Parker in Isherwood (2004) she had an illegal and unskilled abortion after which she nearly died. But as both the real and the fictional operations took place in Weimar Germany, perhaps do not say much about abortion in the UK at the time.

In Mary Renault's first, contemporary, novel, Purposes of Love (Promise of Love in the US) (1939) the central character is a nurse and has access to the steroid stilboestrol (it is possible that the substance in question was actually ergot) when she finds herself pregnant. In her second novel, Kind Are Her Answers (1940), the doctor protagonist says to the young woman with whom he is having an extra-marital affair 'if anything does go wrong, you're not to mess about with these patent poisons, or go to some crook or other. Promise that. You'll come straight to me.... There are lots of perfectly safe things if you don't leave it too late.'

In Nicola Beauman's The Other Elizabeth Taylor, biography of the novelist of that name, we learn that while appearing to be a respectable middleclass wife of a provincial sweet-manufacturer, during the 1930s she was a member of the local Communist Party and had an affair with a younger comrade. She had a pregnancy scare for which she took a boiling hot bath and 5-6 grains of quinine; it is not clear from the text if this turned out to be the spring 1939 pregnancy about which she wrote to her lover 'I shall go up to London & fix things next week', leading to an abortion in a London maternity home (this raises unanswered questions about how she found the details of a sympathetic doctor and was able to afford an upscale operation while presumably keeping this all a secret from her husband).

The group of young women (the focus is on Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parlade but several others appear) associated with the literary journal Horizon and its editor Cyril Connolly and his associates (most of them a good deal older than the women in question), as described in DJ Taylor' s Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature: 1939-51 (2019) nearly all seem to have had at least one abortion (Barbara Skelton had several). These do at least seem mostly to have been in nursing homes, which suggested that that the men were paying up for them.

According to Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001) during World War II Murdoch helped an 'impoverished, distressed civil service friend' to obtain a termination, it is claimed out of a 'regard for the freedom of women'. Abortions also feature in a couple of Murdoch's novels but in a somewhat negative way. In A Severed Head (1961), the narrator Martin Lynch-Gibbon's clandestine lover Georgie had become pregnant some while before the beginning of the story: 'there was nothing to be done but get rid of the child', but it is described as a 'hideous business', a 'catastrophe', a 'nightmare' that Georgie negotiated with considerable grace; however they find it exceedingly difficult to discuss, at the time and subsequently. Martin describes the episode as 'uncannily painless' and has a 'sense of not having suffered enough'. In The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) Violet alleges that her daughter Tamar was only born because she could not afford an abortion in the days when it was 'illegal, secret and expensive'. In the context of an elaborate web of relationships involving the older characters in the novel, the young girl Tamar becomes pregnant from a single encounter which she wishes to keep entirely secret, so wants to have an 'entirely private abortion', and is given a recommendation by one of the older women in her circle. She then, however, suffers extreme guilt and a sense of being haunted by the 'murdered child', and undergoes a religious conversion under the influence of the priest Father McAlister, who performs a ritual with her for the dead child which he thinks of as an exorcism.

In prototypical 'bodice-ripper', Kathleen Windsor's Forever Amber (1944), set in Restoration London, protagonist terminates several pregnancies by drinking noxious potions and being driven in a carriage over cobblestones.

The Mass Observation diary of Olivia Cockett (edited by Robert Malcolmson), Love and War in London, A Woman's Diary, 1939-1942 (Wilfrid Laurier Press, Waterloo, Canada, 2005): had an affair with a married, older man she met at work and had two abortions ('forced draughts') although she was desperate for children, while waiting for him to get a divorce (which he never did). Used contacts with doctors through work to obtain advice on contraception and abortion, also wrote letters to her aborted foetuses.

According to the biography by Patrick Marnham, Wild Mary (2006), the woman who, very late in life became the novelist Mary Wesley, in 1945 became pregnant by her lover while her divorce from her husband was still not absolute. At first eager to bear the child, the pressure of circumstances determined her on an abortion - she later suggested that this was partly through fear of her parents' anger at an illegitimate grandchild (the rupture of her marriage had already created family dissensions) and partly through the desire to give a child the very best start. She took the advice of 'worldly friends' and had an operation under 'local anaesthetic', prformed by a 'central European' doctor - possibly a refugree who was not yet UK-qualified. She went home from his block of flats opposite a police station by taxi. In her 1985 novel, Harnessing Peacocks, the protagonist Hebe, as a pregnant 19 year old overhears her grandparenta and older siblings planning to procure her an abortion, and runs away to bear her child, which she supports in an unconventional fashion as a single mother.

Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950): 'I had to tell Charles I was awfully sorry but there seemed to be another baby coming. He was simply horrified and said he just couldn't bear the idea of any more babies and I must do something to get rid of it'. They try a range of folk remedies, including drinking port and quinine, but eventually they hear of a doctor who will do the operation for £25 -'it did not work at all as it should. I couldn't go to hospital, as we would all have gone to prison if I did.' She feels disgusted and cheated and wishes she had not gone along with her husband's wishes.

Monica Dickens' My Turn to Make the Tea (1951), based on her experiences as a cub reporter on a provincial newspaper, includes a gruesome scene at the boarding house where she is living, when one character, a married women, aborts what is subtextually indicated to be an extramarital pregnancy. Dickens's One Pair of Feet (1943), based on her experiences as a nurse, includes mention of the women brought into the gynae ward following backstreet abortions gone wrong, and indicates that this made her reconsider her position on legalisation.

In Josephine Elder's The Encircled Heart (1951), the central character, Marion, a doctor, during the Second World War is besought by her friend Philippa, a pathologist who has become pregnant by her fiance who has just been killed, to provide her with an abortion. Marion refuses, but Philippa obtains one anyway: however the result is sepsis and haemorrhage, and in spite of sulphonamides and blood transfusion Philippa dies.

In Antony Powell's A Buyer's Market (1952), Vol 2 of A Dance to the Music of Time (set in the interwar years), Widmerpool reveals to Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, that he 'was induced to do an almost insanely indiscreet thing about the girl you introduced me to', the bohemian Gypsy Jones. '"A doctor was found".... He spoke in a voice hollow with desperation.... "I believe everything is all right now," he said. "But it cost a lot of money. More than I could afford. You know, I've never even committed a technical offence before".'

Elizabeth Jane Howard, in Slipstream: A Memoir (2002), mentions, but without much detail, two abortions she had around the early 1950s. In the case of the first, her then lover took her to a doctor 'and in no time I was on a table, unconscious, then conscious again. "Please get on with it." "It's done."' Needing another abortion when she became pregnant by Arthur Koestler, 'I thought again about the last time: he had been a Polish doctor and had done me no harm. I'd go to him.' For some reason, not entirely clear from the text, she had to wait until she'd reached three months. However, then 'Everything went smoothly at the nursing home, where officially I had a D and C - a respectable euphemism for abortion.' Abortions are present at least as a recurrent background in the Cazalet Chronicles sequence, set just before, during and after World War II: in The Light Years (Book One) (1990) Villy, unexpectedly and unwillingly pregnant in her early forties has no idea how to go about procuring an abortion: her doctor is not at all sympathetic and she is not confident of the discretion of the friend she thinks might know. She looks back to her days as a ballet dancer when 'a backstreet abortion would have been regarded as simply another hazard of the life', but she has long left that society behind after her marriage. Ironically, in Casting Off (Book Two) (1991), her sister, Jessica, manages to organise a 'D&C' in 1941 for her daughter Angela who has become pregnant by her married boss at the BBC. In the same novel when Diana, Edward's mistress, reveals that she is pregnant and that the timing means it will be known not to be her husband's, abortion is discussed, but then events occur which make this unnecessary. In Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 (1995): set in 1946/7) Clary becomes pregnant by her married bohemian and rather pretentiously intellectual employer who immediately ditches her, and has an abortion, facilitated by older family friend and confidante Archie who has acquaintances with the requisite knowledge: she subsequently thinks back to 'lying on the high hard table while a small, obscenely merry little man assaulted her deftly in his rubber gloves'. In the final volume All Change (Book 5) (2013) Teddy Cazalet has a brief episode with a very young Irish barmaid while he is working at the Cazalet family wharf at Southampton,He persuades her to find out what a friend of hers did, and 'Annie did know someone. They wanted four hundred pounds for it so he had pawned his watch and his gold cufflinks, and just about scraped up enough'. In her 1972 novel Odd Girl Out Arabella is just recovering from an abortion when she goes to stay with the Cornhills.

Backstreet abortion in the 1950s: oral history interview with Agnes in the feminist magazine Spare Rib, no 50, September 1976, about her own experiences and those in her community around 1951 - published in the anthology Spare Rib Reader (1982), but the relevant issue of Spare Rib is included in the British Library Spare Rib Online Project.

In A S Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden (1978, set in 1952-3). In the course of the production of the play that is central to the plot, Anthea, a schoolgirl, is made pregnant by Thomas Poole, a married lecturer at the local teacher training college. Marina Yeo, a professional actress taking part in the play 'said that her career in the past had depended on knowing reliable doctors with reliable nursing homes, and that she considered it a public duty to pass these names on'. Thomas anticipates some difficulty in finding the money on his salary: 'Marina Yeo moved in the best circles, gynaecological as well as in other ways'. Anthea has 'to convince Mummy and Daddy I've got a good reason for going to London for a week or two' and expects Marina to help with this.

Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958): the hero's married lover's gin, hot baths and old woman episode

Susan Miles, Lettice Delmer (1958), novel in verse set in the period 1912-1920s: Lettice becomes pregnant by a friend of her brother and has an abortion arranged with brother's help

Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (1958): respectable middle-class woman discovers her daughter at Oxford has become pregnant. 'There's a old woman in Cowley charges fifty pounds and that's just with a catheter or something'; the man involved also says 'I've got a friend [?medical student - the one who confirmed the pregnancy perhaps] who says he'll give her an injection'. The sum of £100 is mentioned (this seems to have remained the standard sum for a medical abortion for several decades). The mother, through friends, obtains the name of a doctor in London ('Fickstein.... perfectly sweet and does the whole thing almost legally, it's all very smart and will cost the earth') who appears to be based in Maida Vale. Interviewing the daughter, the first thing Dr Fickstein says is 'Abortion... is illegal'. He is emphatic that nothing can be done until he has a psychiatric report advising termination. He is presented as an immigrant doctor from Vienna; 'Every time he helped one of these unhappy girls he risked his career. In the private nursing homes he was treated with contempt, even with insolence. His patients were given the worst rooms, neglected by the nurses, despised by the Matrons'. The abortion is done in a nursing home where the 'labour ward becomes the operating theatre' at night.According to the section on Mortimer in Anne Wellman's Angry Young Women (2020), this was based on Mortimer's experience with the unmarried pregnancy of one of her own daughters. In Mortimer's most famous novel The Pumpkin Eater (1962): the narrator, a multi-married, many-childed woman is persuaded by her husband to abort her latest pregnancy and undergo sterilisation. While in hospital recovering she discovers he is having an affair. This apparently reflected similar occurences in Mortimer's own contemporaneous marriage to John Mortimer. the playwright. Wellman indicates that this was so: she also recounts that when they first met, Mortimer was pregnant by another (married) man who had disappeared, Mortimer suggested getting rid of it - Penelope, in spite of her personal horror (although a supporter of the principle) agreed to 'go and see a woman in Chelsea' who 'would do it "for a reasonable fee"' but bolted before going through with the procedure. In the short story 'Little Mrs Perkins' in the collection Saturday Lunch with the Brownings (1960), the narrator, recovering from the birth of her child in a private nursing home, observes the young woman in the curtained-off next bed, on strict bed-rest to save her pregnancy, forbidden to undertake a planned holiday abroad, silently and secretly doing bicycling exercises to induce a miscarriage.

Diana Athill, Alive, Alive Oh - essay in Granta Magazine, May 2010, recounted in third person, later incorporated and rewritten in first person in her late memoir of the same title, 2015, alludes to her having had abortions pre-1967:

In her experience it was not a profoundly disagreeable thing to have. The worst part of the operation, performed under a local anaesthetic, was the grotesque position into which one is trussed on the table.... There is this humiliating ugliness, and there are sounds, and for a few moments there is a dim sensation of pain. If the doctor is businesslike and kind, treating one (as hers had done) like an ordinary patient, there is no sinister or shaming atmosphere to contend with. One is simply having a quick little operation for a sensible reason.... No, she did not feel that murder is committed during that operation. She would go so far as to say that she was sure it was not: no separate existence, at that stage, was being ended, any more than when a sperm was prevented from meeting an egg.

In Colin Spencer's Anarchists in Love (1963) there is a considerable amount of detail about how Sundy goes about acquiring an abortion (from a doctor, through a connection by way of her gay friend Steven, which means she does not have to pay) and experiencing it. The doctor first gives her 'some stuff called Oestrogen.... a bit stronger than you can get on the market' as an initial resort, and when that doesn't work, she has to wait a month and then go to his practice in the East End of London, where he uses what must be utus paste ('a brownish paste. It smelt of iodine.'), after which she goes back to the hotel where she is staying and eventually delivers the foetus in the lavatory there. In the third volume of this novel sequence 'The Generation Quartet', Lovers in War (1970) at one point Gwen, mother of Jane, who has married Matthew, Sundy's brother, and has just announced her pregnancy, remembers the 'the miscarriage she had provoked' after the birth of her second child: 'It was just before the war and they were very poor. How could they afford three children?.... She'd jumped from the back steps into the concrete yard again and again.... Oh, the agony of that week.'

Bill Naughton, Alfie (play 1963, novel 1966) (again, hero's married lover)

Nell Dunn, Up the Junction (1963): backstreet abortion using a syringe - has to be repeated several times. Tony Garnett, who produced a BBC Wednesday Play based on the book in 1965, had a tragic personal story - his mother had died from a backstreet abortion - that influenced his depiction of the abortion scene and his determination to make the film and not cut this episode, which he actually made more emphatic (see Wellman's Angry Young Women). An abortion (of a friend of Joy's, at which she assists) also features in Dunn's later novel Poor Cow (1967).

In Doris Lessing's short story, 'Between Men' published in A Man and Two Women (1963), Peggy admits to 'several abortions' and Maureen confesses in return, 'I've had five abortions and one of them was by one of those old women'.

In Simon Raven's The Rich Pay Late (1964) (set just before the Suez crisis), first in the 'Alms for Oblivion' sequence, Jude Holbrook 'knew, having himself provided Dr Le Soeur's address, all about the abortion which Groves had arranged three years ago for Vanessa Drew': this enables him to put pressure on the solicitor over a dodgy deal. Subsequently, Vanessa, having married Donald Salinger, seeks Dr Le Soeur's services again as she is unsure of the paternity of the child she is carrying and fears it may not be plausibly passed off as her husband's. In The Sabre Squadron (1966), the Squadron's Medical Officer 'having made a corporal's wife pregnant. was reluctantly compelled to abort her', which renders him amenable to pressure to betray a comrade. In Morning Star: The First-Born of Egypt: Volume 1 (1984), it is remarked that 'Vanessa's interior had been much meddled with in its day, and she was almost certainly... incapable of conception': the Salinger daughters Carmilla and Theodosia are adopted. In reflection of the passage of time, in a later section Jeremy Morrison pleads to Carmilla Salinger that if she got pregnant (she is resisting his advances) 'these days it would be very easy to get rid of it' (she is not persuaded). In Before the Cock Crow: The First-Born of Egypt Volume 3 (1986), Milo informs Tessa that 'Abortions are ten for tuppence these days' and that with his connections she could probably have one 'on the house' from Dr La Soeur. Who has been in the business a very long time: in New Seed for Old: The First-Born of Egypt Volume 4 (1988) Canteloupe (formerly Detterling) and Giles Glastonbury are reminiscing: 'Talk of La Soeur reminds everyone of something... generally an expensive late abortion or a nasty clap'.

In Margaret Forster's Georgy Girl (1965), Georgy's glamorous and promiscuous flatmate the violinist Meredith has had several abortions before the pregnancy that persuades her boyfriend Jos to marry her.

Sean Hignett, A Picture to Hang on the Wall (1966): set in contemporary Liverpool; a young man arranges an abortion for his pregnant girlfriend.

In an excerpt from her autobiography, An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals (2023). in The Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee describes becoming pregnant as a teenager:

This was still before abortion was finally legalised in 1967. But I was lucky, again. My family’s GP was a disreputable and amenable practitioner, who we always thought made extra money on the side by dispensing more or less anything anyone wanted, and so he prescribed what were then illegal abortion-inducing pills: after two days of great pain, to my immense relief, that was the end of the pregnancy.

Judith Grossman, Her Own Terms (1988): another abortion at Oxford during the late 1950s story, but this time it's a working class girl from London. The narrative takes the form of an extended flashbacks over her life to date, framed by her journey to London from Oxford, and concludes with the actual miscarriage in her college room after her return, and her feeling of 'glad to have got away'. First she tries the traditional remedies of gin, hot bath and quinine, without effect. The nurse girlfriend of a male acquaintance provides 2 tablets of ergot, but nothing happens apart from a few slow mild contractions. She is given an address by 'the radical ex-wife of the Regius Professor of Philosophy', who knows abortionists 'for all pockets, from the five-pound address of a pub to the sixty-pound doctor with the Russian name'. The one she is able to afford (with help from friends) comes to thirty pounds, and is performed by a 'Nurse' - who turns up in uniform, leading to the conclusion that she really is one - at the house of a bohemian woman painter in Kensington. While they are waiting for the nurse to arrive an older friend of the artist mentions that her own 'latest count is seventeen', and recalls a woman practising during the war who 'used to do it by massage - she could draw it out of you'. This time the nurse performs it (soap and catheter method) in the bathroom, hands her sanitary towel, and trots off, telling the protagonist that she can expect the pains to start in 8 to 12 hours.

Andrea Newman, A Share of the World (1964): novel of life among students at unnamed college of London University, probably Bedford College when it was still in Regent's Park. In spite of much passing on of information about contraception and doctors who will supply it, one character becomes pregnant and has an abortion. In her 1966 novel The Cage the narrator's best friend mentions having been given abortifacient pills by her boyfriend but tells the narrator that they have to be taken as soon as a period is missed, which is too late for her. Abortion plays a significant role in the plot of her A Sense of Guilt (1989). It also features in her Another Bouquet (1978) and An Evil Streak (1977). There is probably a thesis to be written on unwanted pregnancy and abortion in the fiction of Andrea Newman. Maybe there already is?

In her column 'A Glass of Wine in Gyney' about a stay in a gynaecological ward some time between 1963 and 1966, reprinted in Only on Sundays (1966), Katharine Whitehorn mentions as among the other patients 'One girl... in following an attempt - incredibly, a successful attempt - done with a syringe at four and a half months' and receiving the same sympathy that pervaded the interactions of the patients. This was not the first time that Whitehorn had addressed the question: in an article 'Against the Poor', published in The Spectator and collected in Roundabout (1962), she addressed Aleck Bourne's claim that the law needed no alteration, in the light of her reading of Alice Jenkins' Law for the Rich (1960): 'For the law as it stands does not keep women from abortion, It simply forces them to resort to skewers amd packing needles and ergot and gin; or a psychologist's certification and a weekend in a nursing home, according to their stations'.

Account by Ian Jack (2011) of him and his girlfriend seeking and achieving abortion as students, just prior to the 1967 Act.

The first novel by the renowned Canadian novelist Marian Engel, No Clouds of Glory (1968) reissued as Sarah Bastard's Notebook, contains fleeting allusions to an abortion (?more than one) in the course of her affair with her Italian brother-in-law: 'the resulting abortion was expensive and demoralising'; 'I went to Montreal and had you, like my tonsils, out'; 'I was always in debt to airways and abortionists'.

In Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede (1969) the nun Dame Philippa's former secretarial assistant Penny is persuaded by her ambitious husband (against Philippa's endeavours to convince Penny to go ahead with the pregnancy) to have an abortion for financial reasons, although she wants the child - it is presumably pre-1967 Act as a former girlfriend of his is said to have provided the necessary contacts. Penny becomes desperately ill afterwards: the nuns pray for her. She recovers (and eventually has a child).

In Paul Scott's The Towers of Silence (1971), set in India during World War II, Sarah Layton becomes pregnant following a one-night stand with an officer at a party; subsequently her mother discovers this and orders her sister-in-law to make arrangements to "get rid of it" by "booking her into an expensive clinic in Calcutta for a D&C". The abortion is successful and Sarah has children subsequently (according to the related novel Staying On (1977)

Richard Gordon's The Medical Witness (1971, but set in 1936) features Dr Rumbelow, an arrogant forensic pathologist (possibly modeled on Sir Bernard Spilsbury - does a lot of grandstanding featuring in court as a Crown witness). His wife remarks to him that 'It's simple compassion. A lot of things which happen outside the law deserve that, not punishment.... look at some poor miserable unmarried girl, procuring herself an abortion. She's a criminal, because she doesn't want to give the world an unwanted life. But the law doesn't think twice about taking one.' Rumbelow however has strong views on abortionists, both old women with knitting-needles and those who are members of his own profession. He is a prosecution witness in the case against the suave gynaecologist, Dr Elgin, for causing a young woman's death through abortion. It comes out in the course of the case that the young woman in question had already feared pregnancy during an earlier relationship and 'took some drugs. Something a friend gave her'. Elgin is acquitted, and defends his position to Rumbelow as 'the social service I perform'. Later, when Rumbelow's lover becomes pregnant while he is still waiting for his wife to give him a divorce, he goes to Elgin who refuses to help them. Instead, Maria goes to Switzerland, but returns already suffering from post-operative septicaemia, from which she dies. While Gordon himself was born in 1921 and thus would not have been studying or practising medicine in the 1930s, presumably he heard stories from somewhat older doctors.

Several of the post-war Agatha Christies feature passing mentions: Elephants Can Remember (1972) and Postern of Fate (1973) have 'illegal operations' in the backstory to the immediate mystery. There is also a brief passing allusion (the context is a member of a French dance company having possibly borne a child), in 4.50 from Paddington (1957): 'these girls, all -- all of them know a useful address to which to go'. At Bertram's Hotel (1965) has a peripheral unnamed character who is a former doctor, struck off for 'helping out girls no better than they should be'.

In Fay Weldon's 1971 Down Among The Women, set in the 1950s, Wanda tells her pregnant daughter Scarlet who says that 'other girls in my position would have had an abortion' that she 'had three abortions in my time.... I feel quite bad about them, if that makes you feel better'. Another character, Jocelyn, alludes to 'hot baths and gin' and an 'abortionist down the Fulham Road [who] does it for £50'. Weldon herself had a (legal) abortion in 1971, finding herself pregnant six months after the previous birth and with an existing large family predominantly dependent on her earnings: according to Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem (2022), based on a citation to Weldon's own Mantrapped (2004)

In John Braine's The Queen of a Distant Country (1973), the protagonist/narrator as a young man gets his girlfriend pregnant: the sophisticated older woman novelist who has been acting as his mentor is able to organise an abortion (£100, pre legalisation).

In Margaret Drabble's The Realms of Gold (1975), Joy, the wife of Frances' lover Karel, is embittered about an abortion she had before her marriage, and considers Frances' mother 'Mrs Ollerenshaw (who happened to be a gynaecologist much in favour of abortion) as part of a conspiracy to sterilize the lower classes'. Frances herself is somewhat critical of her mother's enthusiasm for 'population control and abortion law reform - she wanted more abortion not less. She spent much of her time now telling others from the lecture platform that they ought not to have more than two children per family [Frances has 4].... her tone...was particularly unfortunate - upper class, patronizing, shrill and dogmatic'. In The Middle Ground (1980), Kate, successful journalist, approaching 40, single mother of teenagers, finds herself inadvertently pregnant by her married affair partner. She decides to keep the baby, but then tests reveal spina bifida and she is strongly advised termination: 'The event itself was trival enough, and the hospital staff were kind, sympathetic, helpful'. Nonetheless she experiences considerable emotional suffering in the aftermath.

In Cosey Fanni Tutti's memoir, Art Sex Music (2017), she recounts finding herself pregnant at 18, with meagre means of support and unable to go home to her family; girls she knew suggested 'various solutions to my problem – someone they knew could ‘do it’, with slippery elm or maybe quinine'. She knew this was risky and went to her (Catholic) family doctor who referred her to the local hospital - this was just after the 1967 Abortion Act: 'I was given rough, insensitive treatment during my consultations with the doctor and a psychiatrist to ‘qualify’ for a termination' but she was given one.

In Stella Gibbons, The Yellow Houses (published posthumously, 2016, written, from internal evidence, around the 1970s) the morally vacuous waif Sylvie tells Mary on their first encounter that 'I been done' - 'I started something and I had it took away' - 'I didn't want no kid. It wasn't my day, that was all. Might have happened to anyone' at just 16, pregnant by a boy of no more that 17. The implication is post-1967, legal, NHS.

Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield (1977): the middle-aged Anne remembers, apropos of her brother, 'When Graham was twenty-four and I two years younger there was that business, that ghastly business, with the pregnant girl. I never, in fact, knew her name. That, he said, was neither here nor there, not really the point. What was very much to the point was the lolly, the cash, the wherewithal. He does not, in fact, still owe me twenty-five pounds (my Post Office savings, all but five quid) because he did, in fact and rather to my surprise, pay it back. Where he got the other seventy-five I’ll never know, or if he paid that back.'

In Antonia Fraser's Jemima Shore mystery, A Splash of Red (1981), the victim, Chloe, is said to have had 'at least one abortion, possibly two' in her past, but this has no particular plot relevance (it is well post-legalisation) except as a marker of Chloe's somewhat chaotic character, and to suggest that her state of pregnancy at the time of her death was purposeful.

In Verity Bargate's Tit for Tat (1981) Sadie is unknowingly infected with gonorrhoea by her fiance. When he forces her to have an abortion as a condition of marriage, the result is that she becomes infertile due to sepsis.

Irish author Dermot Healy's short story 'Reprieve', collected in Banished Misfortune and other stories (1982), is a vignette of a woman who has come to England for an abortion.

Graham Swift, Waterland (1983): features a horrific abortion by the local ‘witch’ which leaves the young girl infertile.

The artist Tracey Emin has famously used her experience of traumatic abortions in her artworks.

Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love (1995) - but set in the 1970s. Another pregnancy among university students: although set after legalisation, the pregnant girl is lent the money by a better-off friend to have a private termination. 'The operation cost one hundred guineas.... It is a depressing fact about the women of my generation: name them a year, ask them the fee for an abortion,and they'll be able to tell you.... And if they don't know, it's because they repress and refuse the memory: you may be sure that they knew at the time.'

Deborah Moggach, You Must Be Sisters (1978): Laura, the sister at university, becomes pregnant in spite of having herself fitted with a Dutch cap: however, a quick visit to a clinic terminates the inconvenient pregnancy with little regret.

Julia Hamilton, A Pillar of Society (1995) - abortions achieved and contemplated in the back-stories of Marjorie and her daughter Chloe. Chloe (implicitly after legalisation) has an abortion at Rupert's urging when she accidentally becomes pregnant while he is still married to his first wife - Rupert invokes the expression 'right to choose' in conversation with Lucy, who is a Catholic and shocked. Marjorie became pregnant by her Dutch officer lover Hubert during the War, while her husband was a prisoner of war: her friend Babs gives her an address and admits that she had 'used him'. He practises from a 'large, gabled, suburban house in East Sheen' with a dentist's brass plate by the front door, but Marjorie decides not to go through with it. Abortion is also discussed between Rupert and Lucy when she becomes pregnant during their affair, but she refuses to have one, on religious grounds and also, it is indicated, from her desire to have a child while she can.

In Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole: The Cappucino Years (1999), the ever-hapless Adrian, supporting his sister by driving her to the clinic, inadvertently outs her to the family by enabling their mother to trace his phonecall asking for directions. Her standalone novel Ghost Children (1997) is in more serious, even grim, mode and the plot deals with abortion (apparently with some basis in her own experiences)

Michel Faber's neo-Victorian The Crimson Petal and the White (2003) includes the prostitute Sugar's endeavours to terminate a pregnancy.

Sarah Waters The Night Watch (2006), set during and just after the Second World War, includes an episode of one of the characters undergoing an illegal abortion.

Neil Bartlett's 2007 novel Skin Lane is set in 1967 at a manufacturing furriers. The 16-year-old nephew of the owner, who is working as an apprentice there, impregnates 17-year-old Christine, one of the machinists who sew the linings for the fur garments. She is seventeen. The nephew asks the main character (the fur cutter who has been teaching him) to fix this. The main character asks the head of the machinists to take care of it. She collects £35 from him in cash and takes Christine away at lunchtime a few days later. We're not told what happens, but later find out that Christine marries someone else and has two children.

The recent, 2016, biography of the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, reviewed here, mentions the 'most fascinating revelation.... a young woman, Anne Lindholm, who got pregnant by Austin Davies [Bainbridge's philandering husband' and had an abortion (a trauma for the Catholic she was [another review implies that the trauma and subsequent enduring guilt and misery led to her conversion to Catholicism]. Extraordinarily, she later resurfaces in Bainbridge’s life as Anna Haycraft, Duckworth’s fiction editor'.

At the beginning of Polly Williams The Rise and Fall of a Yummy Mummy (2006), Amy, the pregnant protagonist, mentions an abortion within a previous relationship and alludes to all her friends having had them.

Charlotte Greig, A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy: philosophy student at Sussex in the 1970s in complex relationships, becomes pregnant, abortion is legal by this date but nonetheless for reasons of time she books an appointment in a local private clinic, then spends a lot of time angsting and trying to use the philosophers she is studying (all male, of course, at this period: one feels that de Beauvoir might at least have been on her radar? but only Germaine Greer gets namechecked) to make the decision whether to go through with it before she finally does.

Janice Galloway. All Made Up (2011), memoir of her teenage years (1970s), includes becoming pregnant, her memories of hearing older female relatives talking about 'getting rid as far back as I could remember', and the doctor becoming much more sympathetic to her desire for a termination when she discloses her ambition to go to university and become a teacher.

Sarah Moss, Night Waking (2012): immediately after taking a pregnancy test which is positive, goes to a clinic: 'Given my history, it was not hard to persuade two doctors that my mental health would be jeopardized by a third child'.

In Zadie Smith's NW (2012), Leah has an abortion, concealed from her husband.

Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests (2014), set in 1922, includes a self-induced abortion

In Sarvat Hasin's, The Giant Dark (2021), there is an almost 'blink-and-you'll-miss-it' reference to Aida having an abortion during her early affair in London with Ehsan.

Lucy Burns, Larger Than An Orange (2021): memoir about having an abortion and ambivalent reactions to the aftermath: article about why she felt compelled to write it.

UK Contemplated

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722): 'one time, in discoursing about my being so far gone with child, she said something that looked as if she could help me off with my burthen sooner, if I was willing; or, in English, that she could give me something to make me miscarry, if I had a desire to put an end to my troubles that way; but I soon let her see that I abhorred the thoughts of it; and, to do her justice, she put it off so cleverly, that I could not say she really meant it, or whether she only mentioned the practice as a horrible thing.'

It has been suggested (Helen Bradford, "Olive Schreiner's Hidden Agony: Fact, Fiction and Teenage Abortion," Journal of South African Studies, 1995, 21.4) that the pregnant Lyndall's ride in a roughly jolting cart in Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm (1883) may have been intended to induce miscarriage

In Edith Ellis's 1898 Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll, Loveday takes green tea as an attempted abortifacient: 'I’ve been goin’ a bit too fur wi’ Snowball Jack and - and - - do ‘ee reckon there’s much good i’ takin’ green tea fur to git clear agin? I’ve drunked pints o’ it sin’ last month when I were sure.'

In his autobiography, Whatever Happened to Tom Mix (1970), Ted Willis (Baron Willis of Chislehurst) (1914-1992), television dramatist and playwright, described the endeavours of his mother, wife of a Tottenham barrow boy, to terminate her pregnancy with him: gin, scalding hot baths, running up and down stairs, and eventually gunpowder, all to no avail.

In Ford Madox Ford's Some Do Not (1924: setting is just before the First World War) Edith Ethel Duchemin asks her friend Valentine Wannop, ''How do you get rid of a baby? You've been a servant. You ought to know!', but we never discover the outcome of this request.

Marie Stopes, 'The Vortex Dammed' (play, ms. held in Brit Lib)

Beverley Nichols' 1929 play, The Stag, produced at the Globe Theatre Shaftesbury Avenue, included a scene in which a young women, pregnant following seduction by a cad, is advised by him to consult a certain shady but skilled doctor. The Daily Mirror's critic (2 April 1929) considered this an indication of how broadminded the Censor had become (since the case of Waste.)

In Robert Eustace and Dorothy Sayers' The Documents in the Case (1930), Margaret Harrison writes to her lover, the artist Lathom (Document 44), 'Darling, something dreadful has happened.... I've tried things, but it's no good', precipitating the murder.

Winifred Holtby's South Riding (1936) includes a passage in which a women who's got an unwanted pregnancy contemplates an illegal abortion but is too scared to proceed. (Book 5, Chapter 1). Her need for an abortion is underlined by the situation of her neighbours - a large, motherless family whose mother died in childbirth, after being warned that having another child would kill her. In her non-fiction study Women and a Changing Civilisation (1934) Holtby voiced a passionate plea for the legalisation of abortion, beginning 'The control of parenthood does not stop at contraception', laying emphasis on the importance of the mother's choice.

Naomi Mitchison, We Have Been Warned (1935): Dionne, married with several children and concerned about the uncertain political future, wonders whether it is self-indulgent to have another child,contemplates abortion, but eventually decides to go ahead and have the child - her discussions with her husband indicate that the procedure would have been to go to Paris. There is also a graphic scene of an abortion being performed in a hospital in Soviet Russia, and a number of discussions on the subject between various characters, Includes several mentions of the futility of the pills purveyed by chemists and a very fleeting reference to 'old women who did things'. In a much later interview Mitchison revealed that she and others connected with the North Kensington Women's Welfare Centre had occasionally assisted women in accessing abortions in the 1930s with their knowledge of doctors who were prepared to do these illegal operations: 'The amount of prison sentences that I could have accumulated!'. In her 1962 science fiction novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman the narrator, who becomes pregnant during the traumatic events of a disastrous exploration expedition, remarks that she would have terminated the conception under normal less fraught circumstances.

Pamela Frankau, The Devil We Know (1939): the protagonist spends an anxious time investigating the possibilities in early 1930s London on behalf of his cousin, pregnant by her young man in Air Force who is not in a position to marry. She has already tried 'Steel and apiol and iron and aloes.... from a chemist in the Charing Cross Road'; 'All those medicines that don't work'. He finds that 'There were... two methods for procuring an abortion in London. The first method cost a hundred pounds and was safe. The second cost from ten to twenty pounds and was all right': 'A man in Hampstead.... he's been at it for years'; 'A man in Shaftesbury Avenue. A woman at Putney'; 'They are usually nasty little men and it is such fun for them to realise that there are times when decent people do need nasty little men'; 'I used to help those little Communist girls of hers sometimes'. He tells her, about the one recommended to him, who used to help the Communist girls 'you would be scared if you saw the room; it is an ordinary consulting-room, very shabby and rather dusty and there is a black couch with a white towel over it. And his hands aren't clean'. Ultimately he borrows £100 from their wealthy relatives under the pretext that he has himself got a girl pregnant, but his cousin's young man realises she is pregnant and is determined that they shall marry in spite of everything. In her later The Winged Horse (1953) there is a fleeting mention of one character's second wife having died as the result of an abortion, possibly or possibly not her husband's child.

In Evelyn Waugh's Unconditional Surrender (1961, but set during the Second World War), Virginia Troy finds herself pregnant out of wedlock. When informed of the pregnancy she says '"Dr Puttock, you must doing something about this". "I? I don't think I understand you," said Dr Puttock icily.' Her friend Kirstie then goes to try and persuade him, and he concedes '"She won't find it a cheap operation". That rather gave him away. I said "Come off it. You know there are doctors who do this kind of thing," and he said "One has heard of such cases - in the police courts mostly"'. Finally Kirstie softens him up to the point where he admits 'he did know the name of someone who might help, as as a family friend, not as a doctor, he might give me the name.' Dr Puttock gives her a piece of paper (having first cut his name and address off it) and makes her write down the details, adding '"If your friend wants an appointment, she had better take a hundred pounds with her in notes." However when Virginia goes to the address she finds that the site has been bombed. Kirstie then asks the charwoman who '"knows just the man. Several of her circle have been to him and say he's entirely reliable. What's more he only charges twenty-five pounds. I'm afraid he's a foreigner." "A refugee?" "Well, rather more foreign than that. He's black."' And he turns out to be on (seriously spooky) government service and not in the old business. Mrs Bristow has '"a friend says she can give me another doctor as might help your friend."' who turns out to be in Canvey Island, a location completely off Virginia's mental map. In the end she persuades Guy Crouchback, her former husband, to remarry her (in full knowledge of the situation).

Edmund Crispin, Frequent Hearses (1950): the young film starlet who is murdered was pregnant, and it is remarked by other characters that she would have had an abortion in the interests of preserving her career - 'such things are done' - even though novel is set at time when abortion was illegal, but obtainable

Christianna Brand's murder mystery London Particular (1952) is about a girl who tries desperately to get an abortion at a time when it was still illegal

In Muriel Spark's The Bachelors, the creepy medium/conman Patrick Seton tries to persuade his pregnant diabetic girlfriend Alice to 'see the specialist and have something done before nature takes its course', but she refuses. This leads him to concoct an elaborate plot to murder her using her medical condition and need for regular insulin injections, seeking information from Dr Lyte, whom he has been blackmailing for some time, as a result of mentioning at the one seance that Lyte attended an 'incident in 1932' involving 'Gloria', This is later revealed to have been an abortion he performed as a medical student.

Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room (1962): gynaecologist assumes that the protagonist, pregnant out of wedlock, is looking for an abortion. In Wellman's Angry Young Women (2020) she indicates that this novel was completely NON-autobiographical, which led to some embarrasment for Banks when it was assumed that it was. Also several mentions of 'pills' and other expedients.

Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage (1964): including futile jumping off kitchen table, hot baths, etc.

Margaret Drabble, The Millstone (1965): central character has no idea how to find an abortionist, and fails miserably at the hot bath and gin routine - friends arrive unexpectedly and drink most of the gin, and the temperamental hot water geyser produces a freezing cold bath. Includes tale of her friend who also failed to persuade a doctor to give her an abortion, but miscarried anyway.

In Angus Wilson's As If By Magic (1973), when one of the two main point of view characters, Alexandra, falls pregnant, one of her two partners, Rodrigo, moots an abortion 'It'll be easy enough to arrange.... And it won't be sordid like it is in books' although the other, Ned, seems more in favour of her having the child. She also claims that her parents are going to take her abroad to force her into an abortion - her gay uncle points out the melodrama of her vision - 'A hideous cackling old crone, a Harley Street man who once held his head high now struck off and shaking with D.T.s... the polluted instruments'. (Alexandra's mother Zoe is active in the family planning movement and runs a birth control clinic, and this is set post the 1967 Abortion Act, but this demonstrates lingering motifs arounds the subject.) Alexandra chooses to continue the pregnancy.

According to the biography of LP Hartley by Adrian Wright, Foreign Country (1996), in his 1970 novel My Sister's Keeper, one of the characters is impregnated by a scoundrel who deserts her and considers an abortion. This seems rather surprising as a topic for Hartley to even mention but then one considers that he had numerous society women friends, some of whom may have had or at least discussed abortions.

In Molly Keane's Good Behaviour (1981 but set between the wars) there is a very oblique indication that one of the Crowhurst girls has been trying gin and a hot bath, and her sister mentions that they are about to take a trip to England.

Kingsley Amis's You Can't Do Both (early semi-autobiographical novel, published 1994) includes account of seeking abortion in the late 1940s, based on his own experience.When the protagonist discovers that his girlfriend is pregnant, another male character instructs him in the requirements and responsibilities of the situation. The couple try various expedients including gin, and 'things' borrowed from a nurse, and finally discover that the girl's apparently genteel and respectable lower-middle-class landlady can put them in touch with a doctor who, for a large fee, will do safe abortions. The doctor is in Cardiff and she knows of him since her late husband was a chemist in Pontypridd.

UK: Other references

In this article, For Good or for Evil": Abortion and Reproductive Ethics in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Emily K Cody suggests a subtext in Mrs Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) concerning the herbalist Alice Wilson, with various allusions to plants traditionally used to regulate menstruation or bring on miscarriage.

The character 'Mother Jezebel' (beautician, abortionist and blackmailer) in Wilkie Collins' Armadale (1866) (which also includes a Doctor 'Downward' who provides abortion) is based on the real-life Madame Rachel Leverson, discussed in Richard Altick's The Presence of the Present (1980)

In her semi-autobiographical novel, Lark Rise to Candleford (1939) set in the days of her youth, Flora Thompson mentioned the herb corners of cottage gardens and that 'the women had a private use for the pennyroyal, though, judging from appearances, it was not very effective'.

Natalie Linda Jones explores abortion tropes in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson in her PhD thesis 2013, 'The abortion trope: a study in contemporary criticism and nineteenth-century poetics'

In Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895),'female pills' are among the spurious remedies purveyed by the itinerant quack doctor Vilbert.

In his autobiography My Father and Myself (1968) J.R. Ackerley mentioned his mother's attempt to obtain an abortion when pregnant with his brother in 1895, confidentially consulting doctors, and trying 'homely remedies' to produce a miscarriage, without success.

In the rather unlikely context of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Making of a Marchioness (1901) (aka Emily Fox-Seton), it seems that Ameerah, the Indian servant of the Marquis's heir presumptive (who is deeply embittered by the Marquis's surprising marriage) has some expertise with native drugs, including abortifacients. There is a rather encoded incident involving servants' hall gossip about a local 'cottage scandal' to do with a village girl in 'trouble', followed by the dramatic scene in which the pregnant Marchioness is only just prevented from drinking milk doctored by Ameerah. This motif of Indian servants with a somewhat sinister competence with abortifacients crops up also in John Masters' Nightrunners of Bengal (1951), set just before and during Indian Mutiny (the ayah of the protagonist's wife has apparently prepared a ergot mixture for her mistress on at least one occasion). Abortion in the Indian context also features in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust (1975) - in the historical part of the dual narrative Olivia's pregnancy by the Nawab is terminated by Indian midwives by a traditional method involving a twig and the juice of some plant, a method which is known to, and discovered by, the local British doctor when Olivia miscarries; in the present-day narrative her step-granddaughter is offered a traditional abortifacient massage, but decides to continue with the pregnancy.

KJ Charles' historical mystery Death in the Spires (2023) is set in 1905 and abortion features in the plot; it is a bit wobbly on the state of the law (it's really unlikely that a young woman successfuly procuring a miscarriage would have been prosecuted) and 'female pills' were a scam rather than poison. The medical student humanely assisting at illegal operations is just about plausible, however.

Robert Roberts' The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (1973), mentions the resort to various quack remedies and women throwing themselves downstairs, and the local backstreet abortionist, who never specifically mentioned a price, but expected to be paid in gold, i.e. at least a half-sovereign. Walter Greenwood's memoir, There Was A Time (1967) about his own early life. also in Salford, has a mention of a woman taking 'Bottle after bottle o' pennyroyal... but it hasn't worked'.

Modernist poet Mina Loy (British by birth, lived for extended periods in continental Europe and eventually became American citizen) includes an interesting abortion image in Songs to Joannes (1915-1917): "Once in a mezzanino The starry ceiling Vaulted an unimaginable family Bird-like abortions With human throats And Wisdom's eyes Who wore lamp-shade red dresses And woolen hair..."

In Margaret Leonora Eyles' novel Margaret Protests (1919) the protagonist/narrator, a young widow with children to support, is driven by poverty to set up in business with a friend marketing an abortifacient preparation (aided by her friend's medical student boyfriend). This is very profitable but she increasingly suffers the pangs of conscience and eventually gives it up to make a new start

John Galsworthy's short story "Late-299", 1923 concerns the homecoming of a doctor jailed for performing an abortion: but is largely about his alienation from his family.

In EM Delafield's A Messalina of the Suburbs (1924) (rather loosely based on the recent, 1922,Thompson/Bywaters case mentioned above), Elsie's friend Ireen mentions 'these doctors that can stop it for you.... mind you, it's an expensive business and a jolly dangerous one. Why, the doctor can be had up for doing it, I believe'. After Elsie marries, Irene 'undertook the purchase of certain drugs which she declared would render impossible the calamity [pregnancy] dreaded by her friend... [who] trust implicitly to the efficacy of the bottles and packages'.

In Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Cloud Howe (1933, second book of A Scots Quair: Chris Colquohoun 'raises a row' in the Women's Rural Institute, when she is the only member to support an offered visit from a 'socialist creature' offering to 'lecture on birth control': which in the small Scottish town of Segget is considered 'just murdering your bairns afore they were born, most likely that was what she herself did'.

Dame Alix Meynell, in her autobiography, Public Servant Private Woman, mentions that for the unmarried sexually active woman of the interwar years (like her) the possibility of needing an abortion was always on the cards - £100 in a discreet nursing home. (Lehmann also indicates that this was the usual price)

Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), taking a cynical look at the masculine proponents of free love: 'But obviously you can’t be so-o-o free and easy unless you are prepared as a point of honour to stand by with slap-up abortion service free for the asking. Oh no, otherwise it won’t do at all..... Mr Bosch [her exemplar of the prophet of free love] is in favour of constitutional pressure being brought to bear on the legal pundits. But meanwhile the motto of the free and easy school is: Carry on as before. Carry on old girl, carry on, it’s all such fun and the risk is really negligible, you shouldn’t let yourself think so much about it, it is hampering and definitely morbid, and it’s your risk anyway. Abortion? My dear, don’t get that way. Damn it all of course not, it’s a criminal offence; no I wouldn’t touch it, besides it’s all against my principles, it’s definitely vicious, babies are good for women, it completes them you know.'

AJ Cronin, The Citadel (1937): passing allusion to fashionable Harley Street society doctor making a good deal of his income from 'curettage' -'nothing but a damned abortionist'.

In Doreen Bates' Diary of a Wartime Affair (the affair in question, with a married colleague in the Tax Office where she was employed, actually began in the early 30s ), entry for 24 Nov 1936 mentions a delayed period and 'I decided not to have an abortion if it is a baby' (later entries indicate that her doctor was Joan Malleson, one of the founders of the Abortion Law Reform Association and a key figure in setting up the Bourne case).

Another mention of medical attitudes as a passing reference in H G Wells, Star Begotten (1937): 'Like every practising obstetrican Dr Holdman Stedding knew all the faint intimations of a tentative to abortion, and knew how to nip any such suggestions in the bud'. The twist here is that it's in the context of a conversation with the expectant father - who gives the doctor a 'queer feeling that a less reassuring reply [about his wife's state of health] would have been more acceptable. For obscure reasons--sub-reasons rather--it seemed that Davis did not want the child'.

There is a mention in Grahame Greene's Brighton Rock (1938) of pills, suspected not to work, to end pregnancy, in a conversation between the gangsters Pinkie and Dallow. There are also a couple of mentions in his much later Travels with My Aunt, by the young American woman Tooley whom Henry Pulling meets on the train: 'I drank brandy and ginger ale in Paris because at school they said ginger did the trick. And I had sauna baths too. It’s funny when all you really need is a curettage’: later on she tells him ’The curse. I’ve got the curse. I was right, you see. The jolting of the train, I mean - it did do it. I’ve got a terrible belly-ache, but I feel fabulous. I can’t wait to tell Julian [the young man who made her pregnant].’

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941), has Isa reading The Times report of the Bourne case which led to a common law judgement theoretically enabling doctors in England and Wales to perform abortions if continuing pregnancy posed severe threat to a woman's physical or mental health. For further details see Stuart N. Clarke, 'The Horse with a Green Tail' from Virginia Woolf Miscellany, No. 34 [Spring 1990]

Patricia Hollis, in her biography of Labour politician Jennie Lee (1997), records Lee as having learnt about abortion from a forensic medicine class at Edinburgh University, and passing on the information to a friend that 'even if an accident occurred [using birth control]' it was possible to 'safely evade the consequences' by abortion. She also shocked her sister-in-law, following her marriage to Aneurin Bevan, by saying 'If I had an accident I would have an abortion.... I've got some money by me, a hundred pounds... and I would go to Holland. I know exactly what to do'. While her support for birth control and abortion law reform during the 1920s and 30s seems to have been muted, if not non-existent, Lee did support David Steel's 1967 Abortion Act.

Reference in Noel Streatfeild's Myra Carroll (1944) to her employment of 'a nurse who had been with a friend, and was reputed to have a wider knowledge of who had been operated on illegally and what name they had given to the operation, than any other nurse in London'.

In Douglas Goldring's The Nineteen-Twenties (1945), he mentions a 'whodunnit' in which the hero, Donald Crombie, is a young doctor 'who has been struck off the register for some incredibly noble (but illegal) operation', which one assumes to have been abortion. Goldring indicates that it begins in Switzerland among a fast set including dodgy surrealist artists. I have now (with assistance) managed to identify the work as the prolific George Goodchild's Infamous Gentleman (1938) - the scene shifts to a tropical island, where the disgraced Crombie goes to pursue medical research and is then trapped with the heroine, Allegra, by the outbreak of an epidemic.

Passing reference in Vita Sackville-West's The Easter Party (1953), to where Lady Quarles might go to 'take steps' after having 'a fright'... 'quite easy... if you know how, and if you can afford to pay. It costs about £50.'

According to the biography by Pam Hirsch, The Constant Liberal: The Life and Work of Phyllis Bottome (2010), Bottome's 1956 novel about delinquent girls in a remand home, Eldorado Jane (aka Jane) deals among other controversial issues with illegal abortions 'in a matter-of-fact rather than a scandalised fashion'. This is a very passing allusion to 'gittin' rid of 'em when yer don want 'em before they're born is tough too' by the cat-burglar and general criminal George.

Arnold Wesker's play The Kitchen (1959), includes the taking of pills by the waitresses with unwanted pregnancies and the implication that Monique has had backstreet abortions

Helen Lourie (pseudonym of the pychiatrist and children's author Catherine Storr), A Question of Abortion (1962): features a woman gynaecologist who believes in women's right to abortion and that she is preferable to backstreet knittingneedle operations, and her (female) psychiatrist friend who is charged in court for recommending abortions.

In Charlotte Bingham's Coronet Among the Weeds (1963) the narrator has a conversation with an actress who is insouciant about the process of going to a psychiatrist who will declare her 'unfit to have a baby' so she can get an abortion.

A couple of passing mentions in Jane Gaskell's very odd vampire novel, The Shiny Narrow Grin (1964), set in early 60s Mod youth culture. In one episode a group of Terry and her associates (one can hardly call them friends) go to Betty's: 'It turned out Betty's father was a Harley Street surgeon.' Jeff shows Terry the consulting-room with couch and instruments and remarks: 'This is where the abortions bring the un-stated income of Betty's papa sky-high.' Later Kathy, Terry's naive friend and room-mate, is revealed to be pregnant: Terry offers to get her some pills once she has this confirmed: Kathy says that she has already been sold pills by Bern, which Terry points out are badly disguised Aspro tablets.

In Nicola Thorne's The Girls (1968) about a group of young women in a London boarding house, during the 60s but before the Abortion Act, the more mature and responsible Jacoba exhorts frivolous Honey and Pauline to get fitted up with contraception but they declare they will resort to the 'soap woman' if anything happens. It is Jacoba who, in spite of her precautions, falls pregnant, and she decides to keep the child

Sophie, in Rosemary Tonks' The Halt During the Chase (1972), feels 'terrified' by the women in her lover Philip's set: 'I hadn't had a miscarriage or an abortion, and that marked me down straight away'.

In Angela Carter's dystopic fantasy, The Passion of New Eve (1977), the protagonist has an affair with Leilah, an exotic young African American night club dancer in a corrupted and rotting futuristic New York, and abandons her to an abortion when she becomes pregnant. This begins the protagonist's journey to rebirth. Carter had herself had a (legal post-1967) abortion in the UK after becoming pregnant following a one-night stand (according to Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem (2022))

In David Lodge's Changing Places (1979) set in the period when abortion had been liberalised in the UK but not yet in the USA. Professor Morris Zapp finds himself the only male on a charter flight of women flying on a package deal to obtain abortions in the UK, having bought a ticket from one women who no longer requires it. (While 'abortion tourism' from places with less to those with more liberal abortion laws certainly happened, whether this scenario actually reflects reality? Would welcome feedback on the probability.) This article, What an Archive of Testimonials Tells Us About Abortion Before Roe, on the archives of ARAL, the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws, suggests that Mexico, Puerto Rico and Japan were more likely destinations, with doctors on 'The List' maintained by ARAL.

In Robert Barnard's crime novel, At Death's Door (1988), the actress Myra Mason refers to the fact that she decided to keep her pregnancy by married older successful novelist Benedict Cotteril in the 1960s, just before the David Steel Act: Her half-brother says'I thought it likely that anyone in the acting profession would know plenty of medical men who would get rid of it if necessary' and she replies 'Abortion wasn't much of a problem, even then, and of course, though it cost a fortune, your father would have paid'. But she wanted (allegedly) to have his child.

Irish novelist Edna O'Brien's Down By The River (1996) deals with the predicament (based on a 1992 real life case) of a young woman in a desperate situation trying to get to England to obtain an abortion, at that time completely illegal in Ireland.

US references

There is an extremely useful article by Meg Gillette, 'Modern American Abortion Narratives and the Century of Silence', in Twentieth Century Literature , winter 2012, Vol. 58, No. 4, pp.663-687: , drawing attention to a wide range of literary narratives following the late nineteenth century criminalisation of abortion and preceding the rise of new public debates in the post World War II era. This suggests that abortion was neither a taboo nor deployed as metaphor but that these narratives were creating new meanings for abortion as an experience. It discusses a number of the texts listed below and several others.

See also this new book, Brenda Boudreau and Kelli Maloy, Abortion in Popular Culture: A Call to Action (2023)

Pearl Doles Bell, Gloria Gray, Love Pirate (1914) - apparently in this novel the heroine, a secretary in a long-term affair with her employer, has a frankly depicted abortion.

In Edith Wharton's Summer (1917), 'the young protagonist, pregnant and unmarried, visits a woman abortionist--a very sinister figure--but can't go through with her plan.Instead, she agrees to marry her adoptive father, who had tried to seduce her early in the novel.'

Short story by Genevieve Taggard, 'Engaged' in which a young woman seeks and obtains an abortion, first published in Liberator 5:9 (September 1922), pp.5-10, collected in To Test the Joy: Selected Prose and Poetry (2023)

In Eugene O'Neill's experimental drama, Strange Interlude (1923), Nina, learning the family secret of hereditary insanity from her mother-in-law, aborts her husband's child on this eugenic ground.

Hemingway's story 'Hills Like White Elephants': centers on an abortion, with the couple refusing to discuss it directly. Set in Spain, characters are American (male) and (possibly) English (female)

Both recent biographers of Edna St Vincent Millay, Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty: the Life of Edna St Vincent Millay, 2001, and Daniel Mark Epstein, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St Vincent Millay, 2001, agree that in 1922, while staying in England, Millay, with the assistance of her mother, a nurse and herbalist, procured an abortion 'by a brew concocted from the native flowers and herbs of Dorset'. Milford also claims, based on the oral testimony of Millay's sister Norma, that Millay had earlier suffered a 'botched abortion' while living in Greenwich Village in 1920.

The filmstar Gloria Swanson, in her memoir Swanson on Swanson (1980), opened with the abortion she had during the period before her divorce from her second husband was finalised and she was already pregnant by the man who became her third in 1925: this could have caused a scandal ending her film career since her studo contract included a 'morals clause'. Her first husband had given her an abortifacient, c. 1917, telling her it was for morning sickness,

Abortions feature in two short stories by Dorothy Parker - in 'Mr Durant' (1924) the eponymous character impregnates the stenographer at his workplace with whom he is having an affair - despite claiming to know 'a thing or two' he doesn't actually manage to fix things and she, much to his horror, approaches one of the other secretaries, who finds 'a woman' who will do it for $25. In 'Lady with a Lamp' (1932) a tactless woman is paying a visit to the sickbed of a friend of hers who - it is never mentioned but is the subject of constant allusion - is recovering from an abortion. Hemingway wrote a spiteful poem about Parker nastily referring to her own abortions, as cited in this article by Meg Gillette on abortion narratives of the 1930s.

Vina Delmar's bestseller, Bad Girl (1928), includes a married young white woman contemplating abortion to keep her freedom.

The American modernist writer H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) had an abortion in 1928 in Germany, where it had recently become legal, while she was living there as an expatriate. She was 42 and had had health problems with previous pregnancies and thus qualified on medical grounds (Susan McCabe, H.D. and Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism (2021))

In Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife, published anonymously 1929, recently reissued, Patricia, the protagonist 'is compelled to procure a risky abortion at her soon-to-be ex-husband’s insistence but at her financial, physical and psychological cost' (article here on the book, once a major bestseller, and its subsequent neglect).

An extremely useful article by Julia Cooke: The Lost Abortion Plot: Power and choice in the 1930s novel (The Point Magazine, 11 June 2024)

Margery Latimer's 1930 novel This Is My Body (this is apparently currently available Print on Demand from a firm in India) includes the central character and her friend both having abortions in leftist/bohemian Greenwich Village intellectual circles, pressured by their male partners,and with attention to the material costs: see discussion here in article on Latimer by Joy Casiro.

Tess Slesinger's short story "Missis Flinders" based on her own experience of having an abortion was published in Story magazine, December 1932; and was incorporated as the last chapter of her novel, The Unpossessed (1934). The short story has recently been republished in Time: The Present: selected stories of Tess Slesinger (2022).

Anais Nin's short story 'Birth' which describes a stillbirth, is in fact based on an abortion she had in 1934 (and still implied to be a stillbirth in the first published volume of her Diaries). According to Claudia Pierpont in the chapter on Nin in Passionate Minds, the unedited diaries reveal that, believing herself to be pregnant by Henry Miller rather than her husband, Nin (at that time resident in France) initially sought assistance from a 'sage-femme' (midwife or unlicensed practitioner), without success, in terminating the pregnancy, and only went to a doctor when she was six months along. Nonetheless an operation was undertaken.

Poem, Motherhood, by Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright, Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880-1966).

Langston Hughes' short story 'Cora Unashamed', in The Ways of White Folks (1934) involves the death of the daughter of the family for whom Cora works as a domestic as the result of an abortion they forced her into to preserve their social position.

In the novel Affair, by the prolific Emily 'Mickey' Hahn, set during the Depression, Kay, finding herself pregnant by Jimmy, who is unemployed, chooses to have an abortion.

In 1935 Alice Davey (who later became a science fiction writer under the pseudonyms James Tiptree jr and Racoona Sheldon) became pregnant during the first year of her unsatisfactory first marriage, in which neither partner wanted a child. Her mother, Mary Hastings Bradley, arranged for a legal abortion at a San Francisco Hospital. The operation was in fact incomplete: Alice developed a high fever after discharge and an infection and nearly died. This is described in Julie Phillips's biography, James Tiptree, jr: The Double Life of Alice B Sheldon (2006) Tiptree's short story 'Her Smoke Rose Up Forever' embeds an allusion to a friend of youth who died of septic abortion, mentioned in the Phillips' biography..

In Margaret Mitchell's famous/notorious bestseller, Gone with the Wind (1936), set during and after the American Civil War, after her marriage to Rhett Butler Scarlett O'Hara finds herself pregnant again, much to her disgust: 'I won't have it, I tell you, I won't!.... Oh, there are things to do. I'm not the stupid country fool I used to be. Now, I know that a woman doesn't have to have children if she doesn't want them! There are things - '. Her husband is furious and determined that Scarlett should not take this risk.

In 'The Wild Palms' section of William Faulkner's experimental novel If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939), Harry Wilbourne (a medical student) performs a (successful) abortion on the mine manager's wife where he is staying with his lover Charlotte in Utah on their way to Chicago, but when she falls pregnant and asks him to terminate it she dies of septicaemia. There is also a mention of seeking abortifacient pills in his earlier As I Lay Dying 1930)

In Nancy Hale's The Prodigal Women (1942), Maizie Jekyll undergoes an abortion in Guayaquil on her post-marriage trip. Having got herself pregnant in order to get Lambert Rudd to marry her, she then decides to abort the pregnancy to allay his hostility at having been forced into a marriage he did not want. A doctor in Panama recommends her to try Dr Jackson in Guayaquil: this doctor 'had negro blood' and was a native of Philadelphia, and the reader gathers rather obliquely that he is doing medical work among the locals ('a crying need'). Following the abortion - without anaesthetic, as she has to get back to the boat - Maizie descends into a career of physical and mental ill-health.

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943): the midwife recommends an abortion because Katie and Johnny don't have money to support the child they already have.

In Dawn Powell's A Time to Be Born (1943), set in New York as America is poised on the brink of entering World War II, the scheming novelist Amanda Keeler, who has believed herself to be sterile, finds herself pregnant by her lover, Ken Saunders. Unable to seek reputable medical assistance in case her husband, newspaper magnate Julian Evans, finds out, she seeks help from her former protege, Vicky Haven, in spite of the fact that they have quarrelled as a result of Ken Saunders' affair with the latter. Vicky has no idea (she is a relative innocent in New York from the Mid-West) and asks Corinne Burrows, the divorcee girlfriend of Saunders' friend, Dennis Orphen, 'a warm, obliging creature, [who] was quite free with her information about a certain doctor in old Chelsea who could be obtained by mentioning her name'.
A letter (published in Tim Page (ed.) Selected Letters of Dawn Powell) from Powell to her husband in 1925, while on a family visit, refers to her sister's children getting 'into the ergo-apiol [sic] box in my suitcase, each ate one of these delicious bonbons and then threw up heartily'. It is not clear whether she was employing ergot-apiol for abortifacient purposes as there were other possible uses.

Letter in the Florence Rose papers, Sophia Smith Collection, 10 Jan 1943: she is 'abysmally ignorant when a specific case arises' concerning abortion though 'supposedly "professionally informed"' (as a birth control activist); suggests that 'discussion among women will sooner or later unearth someone talkative who will either have the information you seek or know someone who knows someone who knows someone, etc, etc. The same might be true of a doctor.'

In Christopher Morley's Kitty Foyle (1944), the eponymous independent working girl heroine finds herself pregnant by her upper-crust Philadelphian lover just at the point that his engagement to a suitable girl selected by his family is announced. Her employer, a sophisticated but kind Frenchwoman, arranges an abortion with a doctor who does a 'high-class trade' and turns out 'skilful and decent'. Kitty reports 'I felt sorry, and selfish maybe, and like I'd lost something beautiful and real, but I couldn't feel any kind of wrongness. I did what I had to do'.

In Ben Ames Williams, Leave Her To Heaven (1944) (the 1945 movie with Gene Tierney is better known), Ellen's possessive love for her husband Richard Harland leads her to terminate her pregnancy by him by throwing herself down the stairs.

In Canadian author Martha Ostenso's short story, 'The Doctor's Story', published in the January 1945 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, a young doctor's career is devastated when his care for a woman dying from a (presumed illegal botched) abortion, through the spite of a vindictive woman leads to his conviction as the responsible party.

the mother, 1945, by Gwendolyn Brooks

In Alice Beal Parsons, I Know What I'd Do (1946): Al has returned home from the War in Europe. Local gossip says his wife Sally has been having an affair with his friend Jim. She eventually tells him that it was actually rape, that she is pregnant, and wants money for an illegal abortion.

In Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train (1950) Guy's unfaithful wife Miriam previously aborted a pregnancy by him, and as the narrative opens is pregnant by another man. Bruno speculates that she has had an abortion.

Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman (1951) set in a women's college, has a passing mention that 'An unnamed girl, also in another house, was said to have died in an abortion'.

Failed attempted self-abortion with knitting needle by Cathy in John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1952), detected by Dr Tilson.

Pregnant from contraceptive failure shortly after her marriage, Susan Sontag asks her mother for help. She obtains an abortion (not clear whether her mother was at all helpful in this) - the abortionist worked without anaesthetic and turned up the radio to drown the screams. Sontag was very shortly pregnant again, Account in Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem (2022).

In Mary McCarthy's A Charmed Life (1955), a woman moves with her new husband into a community which includes her former husband and his new wife. The woman and her former husband have sex once (in a fairly rape-like encounter) and when she becomes pregnant she doesn't know if it's his child or her husband's. As she can't ask either of them for the money to pay for an abortion or for information about doctors she has to ask a (married) male friend, involving him in all sorts of lies and embarrassments. Everything is finally lined up and she is about to go away to have the abortion when she is killed in a random traffic accident.

In Pamela Moore's 1956 Chocolates for Breakfast, a character insults the promiscuous Janet with the passing comment: '“How many abortions are you going to have,” Count said to her, “before you finally get married, darling?”'

According to an obituary, John Barth's The End of the Road (1958), 'described ...as an example of "provincial American existentialism"... about a grad-school dropout, end[s] with an abortion'.

Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything (1958) was a pioneer in its day for including an abortion episode among the experiences of young middle class career women in New York in the 1950s. When April finds herself pregnant, her selfish wealthy boyfriend Dexter tells her they'll 'take care of it' - 'he sounded so casual'. Even if, as he claims, he has not had to organise an abortion for a girlfriend previously, he 'know[s] about these things'. He takes her to a discreet place in New Jersey that does not look like a doctor's office, and is rather shabby but does have a nurse in a 'clean starched white uniform'. The doctor is not quite as nightmarish as her imaginings, and she is given a sedative and various aftercare pharmaceuticals. She is cared for in the aftermath by her friend Caroline, She survives, and Dexter dumps her.In Jaffe's family saga, Family Secrets (1974), there is a passing mention of Adam Saffron arranging an abortion 'up in the Bronx' for his sister Becky, married to a bad provider and unable to afford any more children, around the 1920s. Her The Road Taken (2000) is a later family saga of the twentieth century, with changes in medicine and health care constituting significant points in the narrative. During a conversation in the 1920s, between Rose, shortly to marry, and her married sister Maude they talk about the illegality of contraception and the case of Margaret Sanger, 'If all else fails, there’s abortion, but it’s illegal, violent, dangerous, and very nasty, and I hear it hurts a great deal. You could easily die from it if you go to the wrong person.' In the 1930s with the advent of the Depression Maude does tearfully admit to undergoing abortion: 'illegal abortions soared'. Around 1960, career woman Joan is pregnant (for complex plot reasons she wishes to continue with the pregnancy): '"[C]ongratulations," the doctor said, looking considerably relieved. He was a middle-aged man with eyeglasses and iron-gray hair, he had a wife and three children of his own. He did not do illegal abortions, and he did not enjoy sending girls to homes for unmarried mothers because they were always so ashamed and unhappy.' In the late 70s: 'Four years ago the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade. had made abortion legal for every woman who wanted it. Rose remembered when even birth control information had been forbidden, and Margaret Sanger had gone to jail for trying to give it. And she remembered Maude’s illicit abortion during the depression because she couldn’t afford to feed another child. . . . Maude had been lucky she didn’t die right then. All those days of desperation, so long ago, and now there was "a woman’s right to choose."' By the 1980s, Joan reflects: 'And childbirth was still occasionally dangerous too. And the woman had the responsibility. At least a woman didn’t have to ask her husband for permission to have an abortion anymore.' Shortly afterwards, Markie, a young woman of the third generation, gets pregnant and tells Joan: 'I can’t have it, of course. David isn’t ready to help bring up a child. He isn’t even ready for me. He’s a kid. I can’t do it alone. I’m having an abortion on Wednesday and I need you to come with me because someone has to bring me home'. Joan tries to dissuade her but she is determined. Later on, Markie, older and married and having problems in conceiving, feels guilty and wonders if the earlier abortion is responsible for this.

In Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Ruth, wife of Walter, son of the Younger family, finds she is pregnant and contemplates abortion for economic reasons,

Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (1961): at the beginning April is persuaded by Frank Wheeler not to have an abortion, They marry and have two children. She attempts a home abortion for her third pregnancy and dies from the complications.

Gillian Frank has drawn attention to Aaron Bell’s pulp novel The Abortionist (1961): 'oscillating between condemnation and compassion for abortion seekers while giving no quarter to abortion providers. The novel is set in a sleazy world where profit-motivated doctors exploit "women who desperately wanted to get rid of their indiscretions".'

The Abortionist, by Dr X as told to Lucy Freeman (1962), purports at least to be a non-fictional account by a doctor, with a cover blurb by Morris Ernst, 'the famous new York lawyer', best known for his work on such censorship cases as Ulysses.

Dorothy Hughes, The Expendable Man (1963): plot turns on a young woman who has had an abortion and subsequently died either by suicide or murder. A young doctor on his way to an internship in Los Angeles, travelling by way of Phoenix Arizona for a family wedding, finds himself under suspicion at the very least of performing the abortion - which would be disastrous for his career - and potentially for the murder as he picked her up hitchhiking. Novel also features discussion of the abortion underground in the area and a drunken, struck-off, backstreet abortionist.

In John D MacDonald's thriller, Nightmare in Pink (1964), a wealthy and privileged middle-aged woman character reveals in passing to Travis McGee as part of her backstory that when she was eighteen, 'silly and unhappy and reckless.... I had to buy an abortion in Boston, and got septic, and damn near died'. In Bright Orange for the Shroud (1967) there is a passing mention of extracting payment for abortion of a potentially politically embarrassing pregnancy (which is is in fact spurious) as part of an elaborate con.

Jaqueline Susann. Valley of the Dolls (1966): pregnant by singer Tony Polar, and having broken off their relationship but deciding to keep the baby, Jennifer learns from Tony's sister that he suffers from a severe brain disorder likely to be hereditary, so she has an abortion.

Harrowing description in chapter 7 of James Purdy's Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967). (Purdy, postwar American gay writer) Published in UK 1984 by GMP.

Nora Ephron, in her Commencement Address to Wellesley Class of 1996', in The Most of Nora Ephron (2013), mentions, among other contrasts with her time there 1958-1962: 'If you needed an abortion, you drove to a gas station in Union, New Jersey, with five hundred dollars in cash in an envelope and you were taken, blindfolded, to a motel room and operated on without an anaesthetic'.

Joan Didion's Run River (1963) and Play It As it Lays (1970) both include characters who undergo abortions. The Last Love Song: a biography of Joan Didion by Tracy Daugherty (2015) mentions that when she was working at Vogue in the early 1960s, 'there were rumours of abortions [among her colleagues] all of which seemed to have been performed in Hoboken'; and one colleague managed to procure a legal D & C in hospital by turning informer on another matter to the District Attorney. A doctor to whom Didion herself went when fearing she was pregnant told her 'she'd need a ticket to Havana', implying that he could arrange the matter there.

Sally Field recalls her ‘hideous’ illegal abortion at 17: Oscar-winning actor speaks about the ‘life-altering’ operation she underwent in Mexico with no anaesthetic in 1964.

In the back-story of Tony Fennelly's The Closet Hanging (1987), no 2 in the Matt Sinclair mystery series set in New Orleans, Edwina, the female friend of the (gay) series protagonist was a wild member of the same elite social set in their youth in the mid-1960s, and became pregnant. At first she resorted to 'a fistful of Humphrey's Elevens' - a homeopathic remedy for delayed or irregular menses, reputedly containing black cohosh, wind flower and sepia (abortifacient herbs): but if this was a homeopathic preparation, surely in such minute concentrations as to be pointless? - Matt then conveyed her to 'the only expert abortionist on the Delta before abortion was legal', who charged $150.

John Updike's Couples (1970) includes an abortion, arranged via the local dentist by a married man for his married lover (who had recently given birth and was breastfeeding...), and mainly from his point of view.

S J Wilson, To Find A Man (1970) is the story of a rather nerdy young man who is asked by a local popular pretty girl who has never previously paid him much attention to assist her in obtaining an abortion.

In Rita Mae Brown's classic lesbian novel, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), it is Molly's caring for her college room-mate Faye through an illegal abortion that brings them together in her first real romance.

In the creepy 1975 horror short story by Harlan Ellison, 'Croatoan', the narrator, Gabe, has a history of impregnating girlfriends and persuading them into (illegal) abortion, flushing the foetuses down into the sewers. When Gabe is forced to enter the sewers he finds, along with the fabled alligators, a colony of foetuses who acknowledge him as father. Ellison claimed to be pro-choice but that this story was generated by an affair in which the women became pregnant after saying that she was using contraception, and had an abortion.

The title character in Alice Walker's Meridian (1976) has an abortion and her tubes tied. Walker herself had an abortion when she became pregnant while still in college in 1963: friends enabled her to find $2000 dollars and an Upper East Side doctor. In her short story 'The Abortion', a woman describes this as 'a supreme coming of age and a seizing of the direction of her own life': Account in Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem (2022). She had a second during a state of deep depression in the early 70s.

In her humourous work of social observation, Wasp, Where is Thy Sting (1977), Florence King alleged that pre-Roe, her archetypal middleclass WASP mother Mrs Jonesborough's 'vast knowledge of the etiquette of illegal operations was impressive, to say the least.... knowing where to find an abortionist was Mrs Jonesborough's version of the male Wasp's old boy network. Just where and how she acquired such information was never revealed, nor did the Wasp daughter ask.... The wink, the curt nod, the muted, confident-sounding phone-call from the den, and all was "arranged".... On her way to the club, she stopped at the travel agency for some brochures about Puerto Rico'.

In Vonda McIntyre's sf novel Dreamsnake (1978), the world has undergone a nuclear holocaust but a new kind of society has evolved in the aftermath. Much of modern medicine has been lost - the novel centres on the wandering healer Snake - but people are taught methods of individual bioregulation, including for the purposes of birth control and abortion. The latter needs careful instruction and there is an incident in the novel where a young girl who has not been fully taught nearly dies when trying to induce a miscarriage.

In Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (Tales of the City #1) (1978) the socialite DeDe Day (nee Halcyon) finding herself pregnant from her fling with the grocery boy, contemplates abortion but decides against (it is not explicit whether the gay gynaecologist Dr Jon Fielding provides this service himself or refers patients on).

In Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights (1979), novel drawing on her own experiences: 'I have left out my abortion [New York ? around the 1940s].... I ended up with a cheerful, never-lost-a-case black practitioner, who smoked a cigar throughout. When it was over he handed me a card. It was an advertisement for the funeral parlour he also operated'.

In Marta Randall's science fiction novel Journey (1979), the theocratic planet Greogry 4 eschews the developments in reproductive medicine common throughout the rest of the Federation: it is thus a 'treasure house' for Hart Kennerin's skills, including 'sub-rosa abortions'.

In Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) Ciel terminates a pregnancy in hope of preserving a relationship.

In Eve Babitz's autofictional novel L.A. Women (1982): claim that Lola had had four abortions by the time she was nineteen in the 20s/30s; and several mentions by narrator Sophy in connection with herself or friends of the possibility of a trip to a clinic in Tijuana, 60s/70s. Lili Anolik's Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. (2019) expands on these hints with the accounts of Eve's sister Mirandi's experiences: about to graduate highschool, she became pregnant: “The whole family drove down to Tijuana. Dad and Evie went shopping to make it look like any other vacation, while Mother and I headed to the clinic. Abortions were illegal in Mexico in that Mexican way—like, Who do I have to bribe to make this happen?” In 1964 there was a second abortion: 'Not in the Tijuana clinic, which had been shut down, in a motel room in Ensenada..... stark and terrifying....The procedure was, unsurprisingly, botched.' The procedure was concluded as a matter of life and death back across the border when she started haemorrhaging.

Chris Kraus's biography After Kathy Acker (2017) records that Acker's letters indicate that she had several abortions (a 'past-life regressionist' also told her that her mother had tried to abort her before she was born). Abortion featured in her works Blood and Guts in High School (1984) and Don Quixote (1986).

'The Princess' (1982) in Ursula Le Guin's Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989) is an account of the abortion she had during her college days. In spite of the difficulties she describes herself as having been 'privileged' - her parents were supportive and active in assisting her, they had connections who were able to provide them with contacts, they could afford a 'slick outfit' in New York with a reputation as the highest-class abortionist in the city. In her fictional work of 'future anthropology' Always Coming Home (1986), set in a possible future in Northern California, the Kesh are said to practice abortion by curettage assisted by herabl treatment; in the interwoven narrative of Stone Telling, at one point she procures herself an abortion by obtaining an abortifacient (which she indicates was easy in the society in which she found herself) when her husband, one of the Condor People, raped her 'when I told him I did not want him and though I had no contraceptive'.

In about 1952 in New York City, Audre Lorde had an abortion, which she describes in chapter 15 of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1983). She knows of a doctor who will do them, but the police are preventing him from working. Another doctor is too expensive ($300). She attempts "castor oil and a dozen bromo quinine tablets," "mustard baths," and "jumping off a table" without effect. She has a friend who is a licensed practical nurse, whom she asks for "ergotrate from the pharmacy, a drug which I had heard from nurses' talk could be used to encourage bleeding." Her friend refuses because this could kill her with hemorrhaging, but finds another nurse whose mother does "An induced miscarriage by Foley catheter. A homemade abortion. The narrow hard-rubber tube, used in post-operative cases to keep various body canals open, softened when sterilized. When passed through the cervix into the womb while soft, it coiled, all fifteen inches, neatly into the womb. Once hardened, its angular turns ruptured the bloody lining and began the uterine contractions that eventually expelled the implanted fetus, along with the membrane. If it wasn't expelled too soon. If it did not also puncture the uterus. The process took about fifteen hours and cost forty dollars, which was a week and a half's pay." Lorde describes the insertion and what happens next. It is very painful but she survives without any further medical care.

There are allusions throughout Sara Paretsky's VI Warshawski thrillers (1983-present) to the protagonist's involvement in the feminist abortion underground during her time at the University of Chicago, which was when she met series recurring character Dr Lotty Herschel, and to abortion issues generally: Bitter Medicine (1987) includes an attack on Lotty's clinic for poor women by anti-abortion activists, In Blacklist (2003) there is reference to the historical practice of the upper-crust of Chicago's Gold Coast sending wayward daughters pregnant out of wedlock to Swiss sanatoria for discreet abortions (though not so discreet that gossip columns would not make coded allusions). Fire Sale (2005) has a wealthy family of born-again Evangelical Christians who vociferously support anti-abortion causes, but nonetheless arrange an abortion for the out-of-control young grand-daughter when she falls pregnant out of wedlock.

In Gail Godwin's A Mother and Two Daughters (1983), the elder daughter, Cate, approaching middle age, finds herself pregnant after an unexpected affair. She has a (legal) abortion but this is preceded by an encounter with a spooky woman who haunts the clinic with a mission to dissuade women from having the operation. In her later, 1991, Father Melancholy's Daughter, there is a passing mention of the narrator's mother Ruth, when a senior at boarding-school, accompanying Madelyn, the drama instructor with whom she had developed an intense friendship, when the latter went to have an illegal ('in those days') abortion, with allusions to the possibility that Ruth's promiscuous elder sister had had several. In the sequel, Evensong (1999), there is a character attempting some kind of evangelical millennial revival in the town where the narrator is now an Episcopal pastor, with a background in anti-abortion activism - making appointments at clinics and then pretending she'd seen the error of her ways and imploring the other women in the waiting room to leave with her. This did not end well, when one of her converts then changed her mind and had a late-term abortion that went badly.

Cider House Rules (1986) by John Irving deals heavily with abortion before it was legalized in the US. At the back of the book he makes notes to where he got specific incidents. His grandfather was a gynecologist and gave him many stories which he used in the book, including toxic methods women used to induce abortion.

Impassioned speech by Tonya in August Wilson's King Hedley II, one of the plays in his Century Cycle, written 1999, but set in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, in which she counters her husband's desire for a child. The daughter she had as a teenager is now pregnant herself, and furthermore, Tonya refuses to bear a child into the violent and oppressive circumstances around her.

In Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (1987), she recounts a conversation with her mother about their abortions, hers in around the mid-1960s,and presumably still illegal, since it was performed in a Manhattan apartment some distance from the doctor's actual consulting-room (though at least with some form of painkiller), and her mother's three during the Depression for $10 in the basement of a Greenwich Village nightclub by a doctor who molested his patients.

the lost baby poem, 1987, by Lucille Clifton.

In Jonathan Carroll's fantasy novel, The Bones of the Moon (1987), Cullen James has a failed love-affair leading to an abortion: while it is an easy choice in the circumstances and getting it seems non-problematic and the process non-traumatic. she then sinks into despression, leading her to write to the old friend (widower of her best friend) whom she subsequently marries and has a child with. She begins to have vivid narrative dreams of the fantastical world Rondua, where she encounters a small boy, Pepsi, who turns out to be the child she aborted. The two worlds begin to bleed into one another.

In the mystery novel by B.J. Oliphant Dead in the Scrub (1990), the protagonist encounters anti-abortion picketers outside the women's clinic in the local town early on in the narrative - this piece of local colour eventually turns out to be significant to the murder plot.

Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital (1994), includes an episode in which the adolescent narrator helps her friend who is seeking an abortion (implied pre-Roe-v-Wade)

Lucinda Ebersole and Richard Peabody, Coming to Terms: A Literary History of Abortion (1994) includes short stories and extracts from novels and memoirs on the topic, largely by mid to late C20th US authors, although there is one early C20th Russian (Fyodor Sologub), and 1 UK author (Zoe Fairbairns). The authors included are Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Langston Hughes, Babs H Deal, Ellen Gilchrist, Richard Brautigan, Caroline Thompson, Audre Lorde (from Zami, as cited above), Gloria Naylor, William Faulkner, Kathleen Spivack, and Amy Hempel.

In Carolyn Wheat's Fresh Kills (1995), the narrator and protagonist, lawyer Cass Jameson, taking on a private adoption case involving a mother and baby home run by a prominent 'right-to-life' doctor, interviews the young woman: 'as though she could see just from looking at me that I'd marched for the right to choose.... And maybe... could see a newly graduated lawyer sitting in a waiting room at Planned Parenthood....sobbing into her pillow after the procedure, thanking God it was legal.... Telling herself it was a simple medical choice, not an end to a life-in-being'.

D. B. Borton, Six Feet Under (A Cat Caliban Mystery) (1997). Contemporary mystery, set in Cincinnatti. The former foster-mother of a young woman who has ended up in prison says 'When she had them first two babies at sixteen, I had me a conniption.... I wanted her to go to the midwife, even offered to pay for it. Not that I hold with killin' babies, I don't, but the way I saw it, she could either kill it quick or kill it slow, kind of life she was livin'.' Given the age of the character and her children at the time of the story, this must have been well post Roe v Wade, but suggests that more traditional recourses were still resorted to in some communities.In another mystery by Borton, (as Della Borton) Fade to Black (A Movie Lover's Mystery) (1999), a fatal, though medically-performed, illegal abortion (reported at the time as an operation for a 'ruptured cyst') features as part of the backstory to the crimes in the present. In Eight Miles High (Cat Caliban #8) (2007), the veteran Women Air Service Pilots who were stationed in Texas in the Second World War, on hearing that one of their number had become pregnant out of wedlock, remark that they could have helped her to obtain a Mexican abortion. In Nine Lives (2022) the assertions by one character that his (Catholic) cousin had in the past had an abortion create grounds for suspicions around him rather than her.

Lucy Ferriss, The Misconceiver: A Novel (1997) is near-future dystopian fiction about a woman who 'at night performs illegal "misconceptions" in her basement' following the repeal of Roe v Wade.*

Percival Everett, Erasure (2003) the protagonist's doctor sister is killed by an abortion protester at her women's health clinic

In Marge Piercy's autobiography, Sleeping with Cats (2002), she describes performing self-abortion as a college student in the late 1950s. This formed the basis for a similar episode in her novel Braided Lives (1983). A friend (cousin in the novel) died from what was probably an illegal abortion in her 20s. See also the title essay in her My Life, My Body (2015)

Jane Haddam's mystery, The Headmaster's Wife (2005) includes passing mentions of abortion as a routine possibility.

Elisabeth Hyde’s The Abortionist’s Daughter (2006) is a murder mystery which begins with the abortion doctor found dead and numerous suspects personal and ideological.

Hillary Jordan, When She Woke (2011), set in a fundamentalist dystopia, in which the protagonist is punished by visible physical stigmatisation for her illegal abortion.

Cathleen Schine, Fin and Lady (2013), has an unwed pregnancy 'taken care of' in the backstory, but although this would have been a time when this would not have been an easy thing to do, there are no details, just the indication that the woman in question did so rather than marry the father.

Kate Manning’s My Notorious Life (2013) is a historical novel set in nineteenth century New York, based on the life of the notorious midwife/abortionist 'Madame Restell'.

The short story 'A Book of Martyrs' in Joyce Carol Oates' 2014 collection Lovely, Dark, Deep deals with a visit to an abortion clinic (including pro-life protestors outside).

Rachel Urquhart, The Visionist (2014) historical novel set in 1840s New England includes character inducing an abortion of pregnancy from incestuous abuse.

Gloria Steinem's My Life on the Road (2015), includes a dedication to Dr John Sharpe of London who in 1957 took the risk of referring her for an abortion when she was on her way to India at the age of 22.

Jane Smiley, Early Warning (Last Hundred Years Trilogy 2) (2015) includes an allusive dialogue in the 1953 section, between two women, one of whom is having an affair, concerning their mother's question to whether she knows where to find Queen Anne's lace and its difference from poison hemlock: 'Everyone knows the difference who was raised on a farm'. In the subsequent volume, Golden Age (Last Hundred Years Trilogy 3)(2015), there are two allusions to abortion: the character Nadie tells Riley, who is pregnant and not sure whether to have another abortion, that her mother 'lived in a much more horrifying world than you do [Soviet Russia], and abortion was routine there' but nonetheless had Nadie. The devoutly Catholic Loretta contacts Janet, her sister-in-law, whom she supposes may know more of the matter, when her son Chance's girlfriend, who is said to be eighteen but it is implied is younger, becomes pregnant - 'Everyone knew that everyone knew that women had abortions, had always had abortions' - there is an allusion back to the 'ancient days of Queen Anne's lace'. It is arranged to send Hanny to Janet to undergo the procedure at Loretta's expense. This appears to be the right thing all round.

Lucia Berlin's short story 'Tiger Bites', describing a visit to an abortion clinic in Mexico (and decision not to go through with the abortion) was included in the 2015 posthumous collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories.

Brit Bennett, The Mothers (2016): young girl in an African-American church-going community in Oceanside, California becomes pregnant by the pastor's son, has a secret abortion, and leaves for college. The novel depicts the repercussions when the secret leaks out.

Joyce Carol Oates, A Book of American Martyrs 2017) deals with the assassination of an abortion-providing doctor by an ardent Evangelical and its percussion on their families.

Leni Zumas, Red Clocks (2017): near-future dystopia with abortion outlawed and other reproductived rights banned

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere (2017), set c. 1998, has Lexie Richardson falling pregnant while in the process of both she and her boyfriend applying for college - she goes to a clinic and there is very little hassle involved in obtaining an abortion, but nonetheless she gives a false name, that of her school friend Pearl Warren (who is involved with Lexie's brother Trip and has her other brother Moody yearning after her), who has actually accompanied her: this leads to plot repercussions further along.

Jodi Picoult’s A Spark of Light (2018), set in a reproductive health services clinic invaded by a gunman who takes all inside hostage.

The protagonist in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018), trying to decide whether to have a child, recalls (without guilt) a past experience of abortion.

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & the Six (2019), though set in rock music circles during the 1970s, includes just one, plot and character significant, abortion.

Romance novelist Jackie Lau tweeted about including abortion back stories in three of her books and the part it played: Not Another Family Wedding (2018); Pregnant by the Playboy (2020); The Ultimate Pi Day Party (2019)

Jenni Hendriks & Ted Caplan, Unpregnant (2019): apparently this is a comic romp road-trip of a high school girl driving 900 miles with her former best friend to the nearest (!!!) abortion clinic after her boyfriend sabotages a condom. This, along with the other 2019 YA novel Sharon Biggs Waller, Girls on the Verge, is discussed in an article by Olivia Engle and Cordelia Freeman. ‘All this way, all this money, for a five-minute procedure’: barriers, mobilities, and representation on the US abortion road trip in Mobilities, along with two movies on the same theme, to suggest that the decision to have an abortion is no longer the focus but the barriers to obtaining one create the dramatic narrative.

Raven Leilani, Luster (2020): the narrator had an abortion when she was sixteen in high school: her father drove her to the clinic and back home - ' the memory of my first abortion, which I don’t think about regularly and occasionally even forget' - considering an abortion when she finds herself pregnant during the story in the present.

Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife (2021), sf thriller. The narrator, an ambitious female scientist, has an abortion when she becomes pregnant because this seems the obvious course of action to her in view of her career ambitions, without informing her partner. This action has significant plot consequences. There are no details given, in what appears to be a near-contemporary US setting, except she went to a clinic and returned 'unsteady on my feet and nauseated'.

Megan Abbott, Beware the Woman (2023): in this Gothic thriller the narrator is revealed to have had an abortion previous to the events of the story, and it is recounted in flashback; also repercussions in the story's present.

Extracts from Britney Spear's memoir, The Woman in Me (2023), published before its release, reveal 'an abortion she reportedly had while dating Justin Timberlake' at his instigation, c. early 2000s.

Ann Rower's If You're A Girl (Revised and Expanded Edition) (2023) includes accounts of her own abortions, illegal pre Roe vs Wade (had to go to Puerto Rico) and legally in New York in the 1970s, as well as mentions of other peoples' experiences.

Historical mystery, Barbara Hambly's Saving Susy Sweetchild (2024), set in 1920s Hollywood in silent era, has a doctor on film company payroll a significant part of whose duties is performing abortions for the female stars, and the company has a small hospital for this (and drying out drunks).

*2022: A Covert Network of Activists Is Preparing for the End of Roe: What will the future of abortion in America look like?; Out of the Alley: by Lux Alptraum and Erika Moen. April 4, 2022. How self-managed abortion looks today.; Lara Freidenfelds, The Family Roe and the Messy Reality of the Abortion 'Jane Roe' Didn’t Get, review of The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager. What an Archive of Testimonials Tells Us About Abortion Before Roe indicates that Mexico, Puerto Rico and Japan were destinations, with doctors on 'The List' maintained by the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws.; Nursing Clio's Syllabus of Resources on The History and Politics of Reproduction, Before and After Roe

Last Updated 6 November 2024 © Lesley Hall