by Ann Rossiter
Women Against Fundamentalism demo outside the Irish Embassy, London, 1990. Credit: Joanne O’Brien Ref#: 1990/JO/1
I remember my back-street abortion well. How could I forget? I’ve told my story many times, but while the response in Britain has been sympathetic, in Ireland and amongst the Irish in Britain it has, until recently, often elicited no more than an embarrassed silence. I suppose some have found it prurient, likening it to the act of a hunger striker, or even a suicide bomber whose body is used as a political weapon. Less dramatically, some may have seen it merely as a kind of attention-seeking ploy on my part; others may have just found it unbelievable. But it is all true. Looking at it from the point of view of the many thousands[1] or more in Britain who had recourse to the backstreet before the 1967 Abortion Act became law, I was normal. If numbers were what counted, we would surely be viewed as Everywoman, as normal as the girl next door.
I remember my abortion because, funnily, it’s been one of those life experiences that has made me what I am. The story is all too familiar. Girl meets boy. Both are lonely in a strange place. They fall in love, and she gets pregnant. She panics and quickly falls out of love when he fails to understand her dilemma. The details are a little more unusual. I was an Irish student cum-odd-jobber in London in the early 60s, having fled an Ireland I rather grandiosely thought was too small for me. He was a Nigerian law student intent on returning home to do lofty things. He didn’t see anything unusual in a woman in her early 20s having a baby. After all, women in his family had several by that age, and he had offered to take her back to Nigeria to join them. I liked the idea of travelling – to Nigeria and beyond – but not enlisting in a very extended family. And I wanted a life before babies. In any case, what would my own family say about a mixed-race grandchild, whether in Africa or Britain? How would I provide for it if I remained in London, or worse, returned to Ireland? How would mother and child deal with the stigma so prevalent at the time?
The story goes on. I cut myself off from the law student and began a search lasting months for an abortion in a London not yet swinging or even remotely liberal when it came to things like that. It was all too like Ireland, really. Finally, a friend-of-a-friend found a nightclub owner who knew about such things. The abortionist I stumbled on at long last was not quite the ‘wise woman’ of lore. She botched the job several times when the carbolic mix was either not strong enough or the rubber douche she employed failed to find its mark. I dreaded the return to the ‘wise woman’s’ dingy basement flat in sight of the Oval Cricket Ground in south London. I’ve never liked cricket since! Finally, the extra bars of Sunlight soap worked, and I returned to my bedsit alone to wait.
A massive hemorrhage resulted in me being whisked dramatically in a blaring ambulance to St. Mary’s Outpatients in Praed Street, Paddington late that night. The young doctor who admitted me was polite – just. He seemed keen to establish precise medical details I may or may not have supplied through the fog of pain, but he did manage to stem the worst of the bleeding. He followed legal procedure to the letter in respect of what was deemed a criminal activity under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 by reporting a backstreet abortion to the police. Two policemen duly arrived at the Outpatients and questioned me, unsuccessfully, about the abortionist’s personal details but, surprisingly, did not charge me. Those were the days before the 1967 Abortion Act.
On admission to a large gynecology ward full of women who seemed elderly to my youthful eyes, I was cordoned off in a cubicle at the far end of the room and handed a bedpan on which I was told to sit. I sat and I laboured throughout an endless night punctuated by my groans and the tut-tutting commentary of fellow patients. I suppose I should have been grateful I was not put on the maternity ward as I was later to learn had happened to others like me. Mouthfuls of bitten bed linen did something to muffle my intrusive noises. My early morning delivery coincided with the changing of the medical and nursing guard, one of whom informed me that I had to shower and undergo an internal examination. Somehow, I managed both. I was told I was suffering from septicemia, a damaged uterus, and considerable loss of blood. Worse, I was told I had been a ‘very silly girl’. I told them I had had enough and marched out unsteadily like a drunken sailor.
Looking back on the girl who tottered out of St. Mary’s onto Praed Street that morning, I remember that I was too numb to think of anything but immediate survival. In time, all the usual cliches about life never being the same again came true. I changed, I got angry, I spoke out, telling my story and saying ‘the unsayable’. I encountered many who had survived such an ordeal and were intent on abolishing the Victorian Act. I joined them in their endeavours and became a feminist.
* A version of this story appeared in Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora: the abortion trail and the making of a London-Irish underground, 1980-2000, Iasc Publishing, London, 2009.
[1] It is estimated that the annual number of illegal abortions for each year of the 1960s performed on women resident in England and Wales was between 80,000 and 110,000. Paintin, D., A Medical View of Abortion in the 1960s, in Lee, E., (ed), Abortion Law and Politics Today, Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, 1998.