#education for choice
I don’t know about you but I am totally obsessed with Call the Midwife, each Sunday we have to sit down with a cup of tea and watch an hour of pencil skirts and placentas. I think it comes with the territory of having a midwife for a mother, anything remotely baby orientated we have to watch. But its not just her, I love this little snapshot into an obstetric past.
But the really interesting thing to me is that how lucky we are to live such in a fortunate time period and place, in terms of the health care available and the free contraceptives. Not only that, but we now live in a time when we have the freedom to make our own choices of how we wish to live our lives.
In the show we have seen the lengths that women have gone to when they have found themselves pregnant in a time when they really couldn’t afford to be. In Episode 3 [Spoiler Alert] of the latest series, an unmarried teacher finds herself pregnant by her married lover. In these times where it was taboo to a single mother, she felt the need to perform an abortion upon herself to disastrous affect. Instead of carrying it out successfully she pierced her uterus and had to have a hysterectomy.
In 1960, when this episode was set, abortion was still illegal, to the degree that the women who did this to themselves were questioned by the police. Originally outlawed in Lord Ellenborough’s Act (1803) and later the Offences against the Person Act of 1828,punishment was so severe that there was the rusk of death penalty. It feels shocking in modern society that a women could receive such punishment after coming to such an agonising decision.
It wasn’t until 1967 that the Abortion Act was passed in the UK, in which the government decreed that to reduce the rate of disease and death associated with illegal abortion that the procedure should be legalised on the grounds that if a continuation of pregnancy would cause either: physical or mental injury to the woman, to her existing children, or if the child was likely to be severely handicapped. This was all to be provided free of charge as part of the service of the NHS which was established in 1948. At this point the abortions could still be performed until 28 weeks, in 1990 it was amended to 24 weeks.
In England, Scotland and Wales we are lucky that these laws were passed, as only across the Irish sea other women do not have this choice. Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013 ensures that they can’t, apart from where continuing the pregnancy would pose a severe risk to the pregnant persons life. These irish women have to plan trips to travel to the UK, in order to have an abortion carried out, if they should decide to.
The actions of the Abortion Act became part of the sexual revolution and gave people a freedom of choice. Any woman who felt that she could not cope with a child at that point or that the baby would end up living a andicapped life could safely have an abortion. The backstreet, unsanitary conditions of abortions of the past are no longer, no one will die in preventable circumstances because they had to resort to unsafe methods.
