Abortion becomes a criminal offence- 24 June 1803

Laws that criminalize abortion are of relatively recent origin in British history and this is the story of the first one, the Malicious Stabbings or Shooting Act, 1803 (‘Lord Ellenborough’s Act’)

The original purpose of the law was to protect people who had already been born from the rising tide of intra-personal violence in the late Georgian period. The 1803 Law was a rambling piece of legislation in two large paragraphs which was mainly designed to protect people from being attacked and assaulted with weapons, even if death did not result, or even if there was no intention to kill. The unborn child was added to the list of those protected. So, although not specifically an act against abortion, it had major consequences.

An examination of the law after 1803 shows that it was not often used on women trying to control their fertility, which were by definition private event. It was mostly used when men fell out and wounded each other with knives and cutlasses, or when drunken individuals waved their guns or knives in the streets. Those who wished to intimidate people with violence before robbing them would have to think twice, although in reality the death sentence was hardly ever applied. In a society where murder, attempted murder and writing an anonymous letter threatening murder all carried the same death penalty, there had to be a degree of leniency.

On average one person (out of c100 executions a year) was executed for cutting and maiming in the late Georgian period. In 1804, the establishments token victim was Hugh Evans, aged 19, who was found guilty of maiming Elizabeth Parker and slashing her face until she was unrecognisable. He was one of a gang of three who had intimidated Palmer and her boyfriend with a “What are you nosing at?’.

The new act construed this particular cruel act as attempted murder, and he was hanged outside Horsemonger Road goal on 2nd March. Hanging next to him was David Rose, convicted of bestiality and the like Evans, the only person that year hanged for the capital crime. Examples had to be made.

The unborn were also protected from attempted murder as well, and the spirit of the new Act remained part of British Law until 1967.Before 1803 there were no laws criminalising a deliberate termination before the ‘quickening’ of the child in the womb, and procuring an abortion afterwards was a relatively minor civil misdemeanour. The case below came before Lord Justice Kenyon in 1801. It was an allegation that somebody had procured an abortion. The Judge pointed out that this was a civil matter and asked why he was being asked to comment on it in a criminal tribunal.

What did it mean to be ‘quick with child’ in the eighteenth century? Part of the definition was practical there was a quickening if the baby could be physically felt by the mother. There is a wide range of ages for this, but in the Regency period, doctors put the period at around 16 to 20 weeks. Blackstone’s Law Commentaries made the point ‘life begins in condition of law as soon as the infant stirs in the mother’s womb’.

This most common Georgian view was that ensoulment, and the creation of the human, happened at quickening and not conception. This was an ancient belief that predated Christianity, and the church tended not to contradict it. It had the unintended consequence of allowing women to control their fertility in the first months after a suspected pregnancy. Although details can never be explicit, it seems that women had always controlled their fertility in the period before quickening, both at home and in the commercial market using herbs and the wisdom of other women to reinstate their period.  It was not a crime at all before 1803. This was a practical application of the law- if there was no proof of a foetus in the womb, and then there could be no victim of a crime.

The new law moved the point of human status from quickening to conception, and a new felony was created from something that was not formally illegal.

Anybody who(the bold parts are mine)

wilfully and maliciously administer to, or cause to be administered to, or taken by any woman, any medicines, drug, or other substance or thing whatsoever, or shall use or employ or cause or procure to be used or employed any instrument or other means whatsoever, with intent thereby to cause the miscarriage of any woman not being, or not being proved to be, quick with child at the time of administering such things…shall be and are hereby declared to be guilty of felony, and shall be liable to be fined, imprisoned, set in and upon the pillory, publicly or privately whipped, or to suffer one or more of the said punishments, or to be transported beyond the seas for any term not exceeding fourteen years…

The Roman Catholic Church did not formally declare that life began at conception until 1869- but English statute law did this more than sixty years earlier.

In the inexorable logic of the bloody code, the new (ultimate, if rarely used) penalty for organising or abetting an abortion post ‘quickening’ had to be death. A more severe tariff was needed to differentiate it from the newly created offence of procuring an abortion when pregnancy was merely suspected.

The 1803 Act raised the bar of proof against a woman who was thought to have killed her child at birth. The prosecution now had to prove that it was born alive rather than the women prove it was born dead. Any slight doubt would acquit the defendant of infanticide, so a new crime of concealment of birth was introduced with a tariff of two years imprisonment. The case below is from 1808;

There were other cases. In 1809 Thomas Newton was found guilty of poisoning Elizabeth Turner in order to prompt a miscarriage and was given three years in prison and a fine of £100. The judge made it plain that it would have been the death penalty if she had been quick with child. Oddly, he was spared transportation because Elizabeth had cooperated with him and survived the attack.

Ellenborough’s Law almost was particularly difficult for powerless females, such as domestic servants, who did not have the support network to do something about their pregnancy at an earlier time. I have written about another example, that of Mary Fordham, here.

Please consider my three books on the Georgian and Victorian Era

The Dark Days of Georgian Britain– a political and social history of the Regency. More details here

Passengers – a social history of Britain 1780-1840 told through travel, transport, roads and hospitality. More details here

Radical Victorians– nineteen radical Victorian men and women who dared to think differently. More details here 

Advertisement

Introducing ‘Radical Victorians’

Ever heard of Florence Nightingale or Charles Darwin? Of course you have, or you would not have started reading this, but my book is not about them, or many other famous radical thinkers. Many succeeded in convincing people in their lifetime. This book will introduce you to people who were equally as radical but were less successful in their own lifetime, and only became important post mortem.

Publisher’s details

Our first chapter is a case in point- the subject is Britain’s most famous vegetarian Anna Kingsford. Her life was varied and interesting, and her refusal to conform went much further than not eating meat. She was a founder of British theosophy, an anti-vaxxer and a believer in equal marriage. Readers of this chapter might understand way vegetarianism retains its slightly unorthodox tint in the present century.

Chapter two features another campaign against cruelty, in the form of the most famous Anglo-Irish campaigner against vivisection Frances Power Cobbe. She was a socially well placed journalist (and a member of Conservative Party) who used gruesome words and pictures to condemn animal cruelty. She was also a campaigner for woman’s rights in the area of domestic violence, property rights and the vote and openly lived in a same-sex relationship for much of her life.

Our next woman was definitely a radical, despite being the wife of an Irish Presbyterian minister who would have been very angry indeed with the ideas of Kingsford or Cobb. This is Ann Jane Carlile, who fought against the demon drink in Britain and Ireland. She fought against the hugely powerful drinks industry, tried to empower working class woman by removing the debilitating effect of alcohol from their lives and diets. Even if she does not sound like you kind of person, if you read the chapter you may at least come to admire her.

Florence Cook

Temperance was radical in itself because it gave a voice to women. Spiritualism was the same, and our Victorian radical in this area is Florence Cook. It does not matter is she was a fraud, and her radicalism was unconnected with the truth of her beliefs. Spiritualism was a radical movement; it defied traditional religion and was organised largely by women. Florence’s story shows a woman who was well aware what she could achieve with the tool of spiritualism.

Talking about the dead (rather than merely talking to them) we come to our first double chapter on Sir Henry Thompson and Isabelle Holmes.  Henry Thompson was about as ‘establishment’ as you could be, and somebody like that was needed to achieve what he did; he brought cremation to Britain. He did not make it popular; by 1902, there had only ever been 4,409 cremations, 2,653 of which had taken place in one crematorium in Woking. Cremation represented barely 5% of interments even as late as the 1930s in the UK. Cremation only overtook traditional burial in 1967. Isabelle Holmes is by far the most obscure of our Radical Victorians; she campaigned for new open spaces for the poor of London, and was one of the first to point out that the dead were hogging all the available land. She supported cremation, and went on to have a career in local government, which although unremarkable in our time, was a trailblazing effort for the middle class females of the time. This was the part of the book I liked writing the most; I had brought her back from total obscurity!

Our next double chapter is on woman’s legal rights, including the right to vote; the twentieth century suffragette movement has deep roots in Victorian times. The chapter features a Pankhurst- Richard Pankhurst , and Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy. Richard has been overshadowed by his wife and daughters, probably rightly, but he was as committed as they were, if not so well organised. Wolstenholme-Elmy was a feminist campaigner who has been saved from obscurity by a successful campaign to erect a statue in Congleton, where she lived in sin with her partner Ben Elmy until her woman’s rights ‘friends’ pressurized the pair into marriage.

Birth control is the subject of the next double chapter, containing a name you might know and a name you probably do not; Annie Besant and George Drysdale.  Drysdale’s views on sex, sexuality and birth control where utterly shocking in mid-Victorian Britain; at the time he did not put his name to the book because she was afraid of his mother’s reaction. As part of his belief in free love her advocated free and shameless contraception; the more famous Besant did so with slightly different motives in mind, and the book tells the story about how she came to her freethinking and radical conclusions.

Edward Truelove will be a new name to almost everybody. He was a printer and book seller in London and fought all of his life for a free press, fighting laws against sedition, blasphemy and obscenity. He published and distributed the work of Drysdale and worked with Annie Besant. He knew every radical in London and he was perhaps the only person who was on speaking terms with both Florence Nightingale and Karl Marx. He was imprisoned for four months in the fight for a free press. He wore prison uniform, pick oakum and sleep on a hard plank bed. He was sixty-eight.

Our central figure, the man who holds the book together, is Charles Bradlaugh, Britain’s most famous atheist. He was part of a radical free speech movement and knew Drysdale, Truelove, Besant and Wolstenholme-Elmy. He made atheism an acceptable intellectual conclusion for future citizens, at considerable personal effort and cost, which is described in the chapter.

Refusing to take a religious oath..

Our next radical Josephine Butler was a campaigner for the rights of woman and is well known for her organised opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts. The Acts themselves were the most egregious example of the sexual double standard of the Victorian era. It was an anti-prostitution action in the major military towns which focused only on woman, regulating theirs action and punishing only them when apprehended.

A man who worked with Butler on her radical campaigning was William Thomas Stead, known as W.T.  As well as being a famous victim of the Titanic accident in 1912, he was Britain’s first campaigning ‘tabloid’ journalists who made his name exposing the sexual mistreatment of women and children. He had other interests too; spiritualism, Esperanto and world peace being only three of them.

Members of the Church of England could be radical, but could not be successful. Our Christian socialist radical is Stuart Headlam. He was a curate who liked actresses and dancers, believed that the kingdom of heaven belonged as much to them as the rich and powerful, and started one of the first socialist groups of any kind in Britain. He was a believer in free speech; when Charles Bradlaugh was in trouble with the authorities for refusing to swear an oath to God, Headlam wrote and offered him the blessings of Christ.

If you are interested or supportive of the British Labour Party (full disclosure; I am an active member) then the chapter on Socialism will ring a bell. It contains a common and an uncommon name. James Kier Hardie was a child coal miner and trade unionist who is the first name in Labour party History; Henry Hyndman was a rich and privileged lawyer who converted to Marxism and represented another strand in the development of socialism. If you wonder why the Labour Party is such a ‘broad church’ today, it is because it still has to accommodate the different views of these two people.

The next chapter busts the myth that Queen Victoria and the monarchy were a fixed a popular point in the era named after her. Republicanism did exist – Bradlaugh, inevitably, was a republican but the most famous one of the era was the wealthy liberal Charles Dilke, and he spearheaded, rather reluctantly, a brief frenzy of mass republicanism which only lasted a few years but left a lingering republican sentiment in Britain which has existed but not rarely thrived since. Dilke had other radical inclinations, but it was his brief republicanism and a messy divorce case which ruined his prospects. He is our only radical Cabinet Minister, and the only one who was ever talked about as Prime Minister.

Finally, a man who actively disliked today, rather than forgotten or celebrated. This is the eugenicist  Francis Galton; indeed he invented the word, from the Greek meaning ‘to live well’, which sounds uncontroversial and even positive, but this is not  the case. His name is linked with racism and genocide, a proto-Nazi; but the whole story is much more complicated than that. The number of people who shared his views is remarkable; while people today may think they completely reject ‘selective breeding’ of humans, the truth is more complicated, and therefore more interesting.

Please suggest the book to your library.

You can buy at all the usually places online such as Amazon but they are not always the cheapest.

Kindle and Kobo also available

Books by James Hobson

The Slaughterhouse in Georgian Britain

If you visited a butcher in Regency Britain and you were poor, you may have been offered some ‘slaughterhouse pork’. This name might not have bothered you; all animals were killed in a slaughterhouse, and it sounded like a statement of the obvious. It wasn’t.

For a start, the pig would have come from a knackers’ yard- a place for killing horses that were no longer of any use. There, pigs, and ducks and chickens would have been feed on the flesh, blood and organs that would have lain around the knacker’s yard. They were in the slaughter house not to be slaughtered, but to be fed. This was not a niche market- up to 5000 pigs per from horse offal were sold in London per week, many becoming sausages for consumption by the poor. It was also called “knackers’ pork” or “dust hill pork”, but it was an expression that the industry only used amongst themselves.

A horse slaughterer’s yard was not necessarily a place for killing horses either. Like every business, it was dependent on supply and demand, and if trade was not brisk the horses would be kept alive until needed. They would not be fed; sometimes the horses would be hired out by the knackers to squeeze an extra week’s work out of them. They were sold to a dust cart or Hackney Cab owner; the latter would only use it at night in case their gentlemen passengers’ objected. Those in the yard would to left to rot, slowly starving to death. If the eventually aim was death anyway, this did not matter. The famous prison reformer John Howard was also concerned about slaughterhouses; he would never part with any of his horses after they had outlived their usefulness- he organised their killing himself.

There were few rules about slaughterhouses; they were mostly small scale private businesses. There was a Horse Slaughterers Act in 1786, but that was more concerned with stopping stolen horses being fenced through knackers’ yards. When there were prosecutions, it would be as a public nuisance, not in the name of humanitarianism. Most of slaughterhouses were in the centre of towns; today we think we can imagine the smells of an insanitary town because we experience them ourselves now and then, but we know little about the putrid smell of dead and starving animals in a morass of excrement , rotting body parts and pungent horse skins.

In 1826, the Parish of St Pancras prosecuted a slaughter house in Maiden Lane, Highgate, but it was for stench rather than cruelty. When investigating the foul smells, they found starving houses eating each other. This description comes from the Voice of Humanity (1827);

Before we arrived In the first we entered we saw the usual living skeleton appearance of the poor horses in the yard some in the worst stage of glanders, some suffering acute pain from diseases or injuries some from famine… attempting to eat the filth of the place, some dying from disease and some among them lying dead whose sufferings were just terminated by death Several bull dogs There were a considerable number of pigs and ducks designed for the London market who were revelling in the luxury of the refuse of the slaughterhouse and combining the putrid flesh of the diseased and glandered horses with their own systems with all possible avidity

Glanders is horrible. Untreated, it kills slowly and painfully, and can spread to other animals and humans. Symptoms include, fever, ulcers and the release of an infectious nasal discharge, followed by septicaemia. It is not a disease designed to enhance the food chain.

The treatment of lambs and calves was anything, even worse. Calves were hanged from the ceiling, alive, until the butcher chose to kill them; animals were skinned before they were dead. Iron hooks were ripped into their faces to better collect the blood. All animals were stored by being thrown into dung and carcass filled cellars, where they broke their jaw or legs as they were thrown in.

Best practice was found in the Jewish slaughterhouses. Animals were killed immediately, with a single razor sharp knife (a foot long for a sheep) which cut all arteries quickly, with death from the rapid loss of blood. The Voice of Humanity went on to make a kind of joke- ‘there would be nothing unchristian in appointing inspectors to regulate the slaughterhouses’.

The Voice of Humanity, published regularly after 1830, was a breakthrough in the treatment of animals, largely because of what it did not say. It did not abhor cruelty for religious reasons, or want to ban the cruel animal sports of the poor to improve their morals. It was purely a matter of avoiding unnecessary cruelty and it also applied to animals that were not used for recreational purposes. Indeed their magazine compared the death in a hunt favourably to that in a slaughter house; death took hours and not days, and the meat could actually be eaten.

The French did all of this much better- something that the average Briton did not want to hear. The Voice of Humanity noted an abattoir ( to use the new fangled term) in Montmartre  which was  large, clean, used  water  diverted from local rivers to carry away the stench.  The whole operation was inspected by the police. In Briton there was no police to inspect anything, and slaughterhouses had the right to continue their cruelty any way they wanted because they were private property- like the animals they mistreated.  However, this does not seem to be the whole story; poor practices in France seemed to continue as well, as can be seen in this blog*, which also explains more about the conditions of animal slaughter houses in general.

 

*https://storvaxt.blogspot.com/2016/02/montfaucon-rats.html

My four books on Georgian and Victorian Britain

The Dark Days of Georgian Britain is a social history of the period 1815 to 1819 with an emphasis on the poor .

Passengers is a social history of the wider period 1780 to 1840, focussed on the stagecoach and the inn but covering lots of other issues, like the treatment of horses.

Radical Victorians explores the lives of social reformers of the era who were not much appreciated in their time.

Voices of the Georgian Age is the story of a 100 years of history through the letters, diaries and journals of those people who lived through it. Amazon link here   

 

Amazon link

More details

More details

More details

Abortion becomes a criminal offence- 24 June 1803

Laws that criminalize abortion are of relatively recent origin in British history and this is the story of the first one, the Malicious Stabbings or Shooting Act, 1803 (‘Lord Ellenborough’s Act’)

The original purpose of the law was to protect people who had already been born from the rising tide of intra-personal violence in the late Georgian period. The 1803 Law was a rambling piece of legislation in two large paragraphs which was mainly designed to protect people from being attacked and assaulted with weapons, even if death did not result, or even if there was no intention to kill. The unborn child was added to the list of those protected. So, although not specifically an act against abortion, it had major consequences.

An examination of the law after 1803 shows that it was not often used on women trying to control their fertility, which were by definition private event. It was mostly used when men fell out and wounded each other with knives and cutlasses, or when drunken individuals waved their guns or knives in the streets. Those who wished to intimidate people with violence before robbing them would have to think twice, although in reality the death sentence was hardly ever applied. In a society where murder, attempted murder and writing an anonymous letter threatening murder all carried the same death penalty, there had to be a degree of leniency. On average one person (out of c100 executions a year) was executed for cutting and maiming in the late Georgian period. In 1804, the establishments token victim was Hugh Evans, aged 19, who was found guilty of maiming Elizabeth Parker and slashing her face until she was unrecognisable. He was one of a gang of three who had intimidated Palmer and her boyfriend with a “What are you nosing at?’.

The new act construed this particular cruel act as attempted murder, and he was hanged outside Horsemonger Road goal on 2nd March. Hanging next to him was David Rose, convicted of bestiality and the like Evans, the only person that year hanged for the capital crime. Examples had to be made

The unborn were also protected from attempted murder as well, and the spirit of the new Act remained part of British Law until 1967.Before 1803 there were no laws criminalising a deliberate termination before the ‘quickening’ of the child in the womb, and procuring an abortion afterwards was a relatively minor civil misdemeanour. The case below came before Lord Justice Kenyon in 1801. It was an allegation that somebody had procured an abortion. The Judge pointed out that this was a civil matter and asked why he was being asked to comment on it in a criminal tribunal.

What did it mean to be ‘quick with child’ in the eighteenth century? Part of the definition was practical there was a quickening if the baby could be physically felt by the mother. There is a wide range of ages for this, but in the Regency period, doctors put the period at around 16 to 20 weeks. Blackstone’s Law Commentaries made the point ‘life begins in condition of law as soon as the infant stirs in the mother’s womb’.

This most common Georgian view was that ensoulment, and the creation of the human, happened at quickening and not conception. This was an ancient belief that predated Christianity, and the church tended not to contradict it. It had the unintended consequence of allowing women to control their fertility in the first months after a suspected pregnancy. Although details can never be explicit, it seems that women had always controlled their fertility in the period before quickening, both at home and in the commercial market using herbs and the wisdom of other women to reinstate their period.  It was not a crime at all before 1803. This was a practical application of the law- if there was no proof of a foetus in the womb, and then there could be no victim of a crime.

When the human was created, they had rights- for example they could not be executed in the womb if the mother had committed a crime. This was ‘pleading the belly’, and it was a regular but not common aspect of judicial proceedings in the late Georgian period, and of course this continued after the severe tightening up of the law in 1803.

It moved the point of  human status from quickening to conception, and a new felony was created from something that was not formally illegal
Anybody who…(the bold parts are mine)

wilfully and maliciously administer to, or cause to be administered to, or taken by any woman, any medicines, drug, or other substance or thing whatsoever, or shall use or employ or cause or procure to be used or employed any instrument or other means whatsoever, with intent thereby to cause the miscarriage of any woman not being, or not being proved to be, quick with child at the time of administering such things…shall be and are hereby declared to be guilty of felony, and shall be liable to be fined, imprisoned, set in and upon the pillory, publicly or privately whipped, or to suffer one or more of the said punishments, or to be transported beyond the seas for any term not exceeding fourteen years…

The Roman Catholic Church did not formally declare that life began at conception until 1869- but English statute law did this more than sixty years earlier.

In the inexorable logic of the bloody code, the new penalty for organising or abetting an abortion post ‘quickening’ had to be death. . A more severe tariff  was needed to differentiate it from the newly created crime.

Some women were convicted under this law. The 1803 Act raised the bar of proof against a women who was thought to have killed her child at birth. The prosecution now had to prove that it was born alive rather than the women prove it was born dead. Any slight doubt would acquit the defendant of infanticide, so a new crime of concealment of birth was introduced with a tariff of two years imprisonment. The case below is from 1808;

Ellenborough’s Law almost was particularly difficult for powerless females, such as domestic servants, who did not have the support network to do something about their pregnancy at an earlier time. I have written about another example, that of Mary Fordham, here.

There were other cases. In 1809 Thomas Newton was found guilty of poisoning Elizabeth Turner in order to prompt a miscarriage and was given three years in prison and a fine of £100. The judge made it plain that it would have been the death penalty if she had been quick with child. Oddly, he was spared transportation because Elizabeth had cooperated with him and survived the attack.

Please consider my three books on the Georgian and Victorian Era

The Dark Days of Georgian Britain– a political and social history of the Regency. More details here

Passengers – a social history of Britain 1780-1840 told through travel, transport, roads and hospitality. More details here

Radical Victorians– nineteen radical Victorian men and women who dared to think differently. More details here