While knowledge about contraception was systematically suppressed, knowledge of abortion techniques that would interfere with a pregnancy going to term were also increasingly subject to control in the nineteenth century. Although before 1800 it was a common-law offence to abort a foetus after the stage of quickening or ensoulment (after approximately eighty days) it appears that no one was ever convicted of such an offence (Sauer 1978). Thus it was during the nineteenth century that the criminal law was increasingly deployed to stop this practice and, ultimately, to make abortion a crime at any point during a pregnancy. The refusal to differentiate between before and after quickening marked a vital transition in both religious and folk understandings of the meaning of abortion. As McLaren (1992) points out, until this moment it was not unusual for church leaders to regard contraceptive practices as worse than early abortion.
After the introduction of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, the focus of criminal law was directed against the pregnant woman whereas before it had been focused on the abortionist. This marked another important shift away from an ‘official’ understanding of the problems facing women who were unwillingly pregnant to an active criminalization and stigmatization. What were therefore seen as practical remedies to an unwanted condition became redefined as criminal acts deserving harsh punishment.
This ‘escape route’ from pregnancy was therefore rendered more difficult, and the inevitability of the supposedly natural chain of sex — pregnancy-birth became increasingly inescapable by the end of the nineteenth century. By this time a whole range of sexual acts that were not heterosexual or penetrative had also been criminalized or actively pathologized (for example, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1885, which criminalized all forms of male homosexuality). Contraception was condemned and abortion made a criminal act. One can begin to understand how motherhood became increasingly unavoidable while at the same time being increasingly hailed as women’s greatest goal and most natural of vocations. The rise of this pervasive ideology at the same time as the closure of the ‘escape routes’ is highly significant and I shall return to this point below.