Mary Chamberlain’s new novel, The Lie, exposes the truth about the stark choice faced by pregnant unmarried women before contraception was widely available. It’s all so different now, we think. But, she asks, will the rolling back of abortion rights in America revive the stigma of illegitimacy — and the practice of forced adoptions — here?
‘I was destroyed by it too,’ Joan confesses in my novel, The Lie. ‘Nobody escapes something like that.’ She was referring to the illegitimacy of her daughter, Kathleen, born during the Second World War, though it could have been any time in the 19th or 20th century when access to contraception was limited, abortion was illegal, there was no economic or other support for single mothers, and illegitimacy was a devastating stigma.
Some unmarried women wed the fathers of their child but many were pressured into giving up their babies for adoption. A few children — like Sir Paul Nurse, Catherine Cookson or Eric Clapton — were absorbed into the mother’s family, often believing that their grandparents were their parents, their birth mother an older sister. Most were put out for adoption and many of those embarked, in later life, on a painful and sometimes perilous journey in search of birth parents.
For many of the mothers forced to relinquish their children, the agony of the sacrifice and of not knowing was, and is, a chronic pain they must endure. It is now the subject of a campaign to pressure the government to apologise for the anguish and distress caused, which had an immediate, and continuing, impact on their lives. I witnessed this lived out by friends who became pregnant in the 1960s.
I’ve also witnessed the other side, of adopted children who grew up and, whatever the narrative told them, however successful the adoption, or not, developed a sense of loss if not abandonment. These two sides of the same drama were the spur to The Lie, but there lurk deeper historical truths.
From the mid-1970s more and more children have been born to co-habiting couples, or to single mothers. Data from the 2021 census reveals that more children are now born outside of marriage than within it. At the same time, although abortion is illegal, since 1967 access to the procedure for UK women (with, until recently, the exception of Northern Ireland) has been possible under certain conditions, and state support for single parents, unable to work or living on a single, often low-paid, income, now exists.
We forget, perhaps, how access to safe, legal abortion was prohibited by law which, from the initial 1803 Act, increasingly criminalised abortion and abortionists throughout the 19th and 20th century. At the same time, knowledge of, and access to, effective birth control methods was virtually denied to working class women, and to all single women.
Marie Stopes first opened her clinic in 1921 but it was not until the 1930s that a network of such clinics existed, though in major urban centres only. It was not until 1967 and the Family Planning Act that unmarried women could access contraception.
Until then, abortion was a major form of birth control, and many women, married and single, did not consider it either immoral or illegal to attempt an abortion before ‘quickening’ – the time at which the movements of the foetus are first felt.
In 1938 a landmark case, R v Bourne, determined that a termination could be permitted if continuing the pregnancy would render the woman ‘a physical or mental wreck’. This opened the door to permitting abortion under certain circumstances, but only wealthy women had access to a psychiatrist or physician who could provide the necessary evidence, for a fee.
Most women had no choice but to resort to backstreet abortionists, the majority of whom were women. Many of those were untrained midwives, revered and respected women in their communities. A BMA report of 1935 estimated that approximately 15 per cent of all pregnancies in the UK were aborted criminally every year – figures which came to about 90,000.
A survey conducted for the Abortion Law Reform Association in 1966 estimated, conservatively, that 85,000 women in Britain attempted to have an abortion annually. Most of those who sought abortion were married women for whom another child meant considerable hardship; but many were also unmarried, for whom caring for a child and continuing to work were incompatible.
And yet, attitudes are capricious. In the United States, the 2022 repeal of Roe v Wade means that many women no longer have access to a safe, legal procedure. As always, this impacts most on those who are economically most vulnerable, increasing pressure on scarce resources or forcing women to relinquish children for adoption.
While the anti-abortion lobby is not so powerful in the United Kingdom, Right to Life, an anti-abortion campaigning organisation, lists among its patrons MPs and members of the House of Lords. The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children recently described the creation of buffer zones around abortion clinics as an ‘outrageous assault on civil liberties’ and a ‘black day for democracy’.
And, since the reversal of Roe v Wade, there has been an increase in prosecutions of women in the UK under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, including the recent case of a woman jailed for ‘misusing’ the pills-by-the-post service initiated in the pandemic. [Update: she was released from jail on Tuesday, 18 July, following an appeal]
The British Bill of Rights, which will replace the Human Rights Act, yet to receive its second reading, does not include, as a human right, abortion. And there is talk, by the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and others, of reducing the time limit for abortion from 24 to 12 weeks.
More insidiously, life is now considered to start at conception for many of the religious right. Pregnancy outside of marriage signifies sin, single parenthood a threat to marriage and the family.
The introduction of sanctions and caps on benefit claimants and the inability to enforce child maintenance all contribute to an increasing stigmatisation of single parents, making life for them more difficult.
Being forced to carry a baby to term and to give up their babies for adoption was a harrowing experience. ‘I never stopped loving you, never stopped thinking about you,’ Joan says, words borrowed from a friend forced, in the 1960s, to relinquish her son. It is a sentiment shared widely by women in comparable situations.
And yet, this could be the situation facing women in the future. There are 16 anti-abortion agencies active in the UK. If access to abortion is restricted, as it has been in the United States, if women lose the right to choose whether, and when, to have a child, or if access to welfare support becomes more punitive and continued underfunding of family planning services leads to more women denied contraception, is the stigmatization of those children so very far away? And with it, once more, forced adoptions?
The Lie by Mary Chamberlain is published on 20 July, 2023.
Read more about this book.
Mary was the first author to be published by the pioneering women’s press, Virago, as she tells Historia in Memories of Virago.
Since then she has had a number of novels published. Her most recent is The Forgotten (2021); read Sarah Day’s review of this book, or Mary’s feature about its backdrop, The Partisan, socialist cafe and creative centre. Her previous novel, The Hidden, came out in 2019 and Duncan Barrett reviewed it for Historia.
Images:
- Abandoned baby girl in the arms of a nurse, 1964: Picryl (public domain)
- Eric Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall, 2017: Raph_PH for Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)
- National Health Service (Family Planning) Act 1967: UK Parliament (Open Parliament Licence v3.0)
- Protesters outside the US Supreme Court on the day Roe v Wade was overturned: Ted Eytan via the Organization for World Peace (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- ALRA News (Abortion Law Reform Association), February, 1939, page 1: © Wellcome Collection, by permission
