'A survival... of stoning, branding, mutilation'
Stella Browne's fight for abortion law reform in Britain, 1912-1955
In the scrapbook kept by Janet Chance, one of the founders of the British Abortion Law Reform Association (1936) and an early advocate of this measure, there is a chronology of the history of British laws ...
(Show more)'A survival... of stoning, branding, mutilation'
Stella Browne's fight for abortion law reform in Britain, 1912-1955
In the scrapbook kept by Janet Chance, one of the founders of the British Abortion Law Reform Association (1936) and an early advocate of this measure, there is a chronology of the history of British laws on abortion and the struggle to amend them. Between 1861 (the Offences Against the Person Act), and the early 1930s, when women's organisations began to pass resolutions demanding access to legal and medically safe abortions, there is one line: 'STELLA FIGHTS ALONE'. During a period when even birth control was a contentious issue, and its pioneers almost unanimously posited it as a beneficent alternative to the epidemic prevalence of illegal abortion, Stella Browne (1880-1955) publicly and loudly argued for safe legal abortion as essential to any meaningful birth control programme. In evidence to a Government committee investigating the subject, she admitted that she herself had undergone abortion. She did not simply regard it as something to be granted to the unfortunate in desperate circumstances but as something which should be available to all women on request. While actively campaigning to reform the legal situation, she argued that doing this would enable medical research into better methods, and in fact foresaw the introduction of safe reliable chemical abortifacients and improved contraceptives. Throughout her career she critiqued a medico-scientific establishment which produced ever more devastating weapons of war while neglecting research into means of easing women's reproductive burdens. Stella Browne's fight for abortion law reform was rooted in her tripartite commitment to feminism, socialism (she was very aware that better-off women had demi-legal access to safe abortion denied working class women) and individualism. This paper positions her in the context of the politics of reproductive choice in early twentieth century Britain and of the survival of a militant feminism in the interwar period.
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