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Essays on women's rights in the 19th century
Prostitution in the 19th century
Abortions in the 1800s
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Sauer (1978) found that some pregnancies in the 19th century were desperately unwanted by woman. Because of this, desperate measures such as baby farming, infanticide and abortion were carried out to discard of the pregnancy. Abortion, which is the termination of a human pregnancy, was made illegal in 1803, but was still carried out in the backstreets of Britain (Knight 1977). However, only a few cases were brought to attention as according to Latham (2002), there was difficulty in detecting abortion, yet Bulwer- Lytton (1833 as cited in Sauer 1978) still believed abortion took place frequently in towns for reasons such as illegitimacy. Illegitimacy was just one of the reasons on why abortion was carried out and according to Macfarlane (2002), who believed illegitimacy was a burden, and the child was seen as “The bastard, like the prostitute, thief and beggar…a living symbol of social irregularity”. Women feared of being degraded and losing their social status within society, and they would willingly kill their own child to forget the existence of illegitimate children, so it was no surprise woman would go through with abortion so they would still be accepted within society. Extreme poverty was also a reason as many parents and woman could barely feed themselves, much less another child (Sauer 1978). Knight (1977) also argued that in the 19th century was when depression hit so both working class and middle class could not afford children. The ways in which a woman could have an abortion were high in numbers. According to Knight (1977), woman could purchase medicines and drugs at a chemist to acquire an abortion, drugs such as quinine. There was also a number of cases of lead poisoning, as a doctor had seen 100 cases of it from 18... ... middle of paper ... ... 19th century abortion was one of the most popular ways to deal with unwanted pregnancies even though illegal. With the fact that both men and woman, even married woman would take it up as a profession gives the idea that it was a well-paid job and because of the high demand, it was a profession that was most likely worth getting in to. Even though legislation was put into place to deal with the doing of abortion, it was still hard to catch a case as it was hard to prove with the lack of health care in the 19th century. Woman wanted abortions which gives the answer to why abortionists did the job and with the use of herbs, drugs and instruments how the abortion was done. Legislation helped to catch some people who had abortions and had it as a profession, but not many cases were brought to light as it mostly happened in the backstreets hidden from the law.
Oddly, physicians brought abortion into the public’s eye. These physicians formed a pro-life movement arguing the moral knowledge that the public didn’t seem to have (12, Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood p. 000). According to the source, women didn’t understand that the embryo is a living being. With their lack of knowledge about things, they came “murderesses” and the only way this could be solved was to outlaw abortion. They kept the idea that abortion was murder, but, at the same time, they also said that only they could decide when an abortion should occur. With their accomplishment, in 1900, every state had a law that stated that abortion is illegal except for when the mother’s life is in danger. But the weakness of this was that the law didn’t specifically define the danger a mother should be in.
The Queen vs. Davis case concerns the murder trial of Arthur Paul Davis and Alice Davis that occurred in 1875. In it, they were tried and convicted of murder for conducting an abortion; the killing of a fetus and subsequently causing death of the victims, Catherine Laing and Jane Vaughn Gilmour. This essay will examine the historical context of the case, what the trial reveals about the nature of women’s lives in Toronto during the 1870s as subordinate women who are deemed as caretakers and how women managed to end unwanted pregnancies. During the late 19th century ending an unwanted pregnancy was an illegal offence because it was considered unethical to kill a fetus. Women were not able to access safer alternatives such as contraception, as it was an offence to sell or advertise them at that time. Women did not claim they wanted an abortion directly, but rather that they wanted to be fixed of their problem. They did not feel guilty as they thought it was acceptable to induce abortion before the 3rd month of pregnancy or quickening of it, which under the English common law, it was not wrongful to procure an abortion prior to the feeling any movement of the fetus. Doing an Abortion was a private matter but nonetheless a criminal offence. Beginning in the early 19th century, laws were passed to support the prohibition of abortions; these then continued on to the revision and creation of the 1892 criminal code for abortion.
During the nineteenth century laws and public opinion started to change. In 1803, there was the first English Act outlawing abortions. In cases where there was an abortion performed after the quickening, the penalty was death. If the procedure was done before the quickening then the punishment was fourteen years of imprisonment. By 1860 abortions were prohibited in almost all of the states.
In the later half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, many states adopted laws against abortion because abortions were performed in unsanitary conditions, which made the operation dangerous for women. Plus, society believed killing a possible life was immoral. However, as time progressed and morals changed, people begin to question weather or not the government had the right to interfere with peoples’ carnal matters.
During the 1950s, hospitals within the country started to decide if doctors should perform abortion by using therapeutic abortion boards, allowed by law only if the mother’s life was in danger. Mortality rates decreased during this time, due to the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s. In 1962, a mother, Sherri Finkbine, traveled to Sweden with her husband, after her request for abortion in the U.S. was denied. In 1967, England ended up loosening its own restrictions on abortion laws that permitted women to have the procedure as long as they had written permission from two physicians.
In 1900 a law was passed banning women from having an abortion. Before 1900, abortions were a common practice and usually performed by a midwife, but doctors saw this as a financial threat and pushed for a law making abortions illegal. From 1900 until 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a women’s right to have an abortion, women who wanted to have an abortion did so secretly. These secret abortions were performed
Women were confronted by many social obligation in the late nineteenth century. Women were living lives that reflected their social rank. They were expected to be economically dependent and legally inferior. No matter what class women were in, men were seen as the ones who go to work and make the money. That way, the women would have to be dependent since they were not able to go to work and make a good salary. No matter what class a woman was in, she could own property in her own name. When a woman became married she " lost control of any property she owned, inherited, or earned" ( Kagan et al. 569). A woman's legal identity was given to her husband.
During the mid-19th Century there were no actual federal law regulating abortions, many states were against it and banned the whole practice entirely, except when the life of the mother was in danger. However there were some states that made no exception, not even to save the mother’s life. A lot of women argued that it was unconstitutional, and found other ways to have one. Whether it was by an unlicensed physician or performed the procedure themselves. Most illegal abortions were dangerous because they were performed in unsanitary conditions. As a result, many states such as the United States and New York began to legitimize or ban abortions complete...
Until the mid 1800s, abortion was unrestricted and unregulated in the United States. The justifications for criminalizing it varied from state to state. One big reason was population control, which addressed fears that the population would be dominated by the children of newly ...
Abortion is a procedure carried out to terminate a pregnancy. In 1967, liberal Member of Parliament David Steel introduced the Abortion Act. This legally permitted abortion to be carried out by a medical practitioner in England, Scotland and Wales (Glennerster 2000). Since the implementation of this policy, numbers of abortion have gradually increased. In 2010 almost two hundred thousand procedures were carried out in England and Wales, ninety-six per cent of which were funded by the National Health Service (Department of Health 2011). To access the strengths and weaknesses of abortion regulation a number of areas must be considered. Following a brief section about the background and development of abortion policy, the legal requirement of two doctor consent will be discussed. Repercussions of this legality will be used to justify why the requirement is considered an outdated obligation that weakens abortion regulation. The extent of abortion provision will then be argued as a weakness by sending a troubling message to society. This will interconnect with the need for restrictions in abortion provision, a concept supported by the further discussion of related health risks. Counterarguments will then consider the procedure step by step and suggest that regulations enable a process efficient and suitable for both the hospital and patient. Finally, medicalisation will be discussed as the most prominent strength of the British approach to abortion in regards to safety.
Abortion is arguably the most controversial topic in all the issues revolving around reproduction. Women of all different races, classes, and religions have been practicing abortion since before the colonial era in America. The laws pertaining to abortion have changed many times, adding and removing discrepancies and stipulations throughout many years, and still to this day. The views of abortion in society during different time periods have also changed and adapted. At the time of Sarah Grosvenor’s decision to abort, the laws pertaining to abortion did not make the act fully illegal. However in years after Grosvenor’s case abortion was outlawed. The law played a minor part in women’s decisions to have an abortion, however society, and gender played the most prominent role in the decision of abortion.
Advocates of criminalization also stressed society’s obligation to halt the declining birthrate among white Americans. And many stressed the need to protect the sanctity of motherhood and the chastity of white women; abortion, after all, supported the separation of sexual intercourse from reproduction. For many physicians and others, all of these concerns where generally more trenchant in the nineteenth century than the issue of fetal life. (Solinger: 5).
Expecting to completely eliminate abortions from the face of the earth by making them illegal and getting rid of the facilities that provide them is an awfully absurd idea due to the fact that abortions will never cease to exist. Induced abortions have taken place all over the world, and “societies have [been struggling with] the issue of abortion for millennia” (Abortion). Within countries where abortions are essentially illegal, many turn to unsafe abortion methods, usually performed by unskilled practitioners (Chapter 5). These procedures are “often unsanitary… and [result] in the death or mutilation of many women” (Abortion). In areas where these services are not attainable, many women are prompted to seek out specialists to assist them in dangerous and surreptitious methods of abortion such as repeated blows to the stomach and the insertion of bizarre objects in the vagina and cervix. However, abortion-related deaths are usually quite rare in developed countries where the service is both legal and accessible. It is estimated...
Throughout the early 1800s, British women most often were relegated to a subordinate role in society by their institutionalized obligations, laws, and the more powerfully entrenched males. In that time, a young woman’s role was close to a life of servitude and slavery. Women were often controlled by the men in their lives, whether it was a father, brother or the eventual husband. Marriage during this time was often a gamble; one could either be in it for the right reasons, such as love, or for the wrong reasons, such as advancing social status. In 19th century Britain, laws were enacted to further suppress women and reflected the societal belief that women were supposed to do two things: marry and have children.
Abortions can be traced back to ancient times; some were done by using sharp objects as tools, applying pressure on the lower abdomen, the use of herbs as medicine, and, beatings focusing