The medical historian Mary Fissell begins her history of abortion with an account of her visit to a cemetery in south London to see the grave of Eliza Wilson, a 32-year-old dressmaker from Keswick who died in 1848 after an abortion went wrong. Historians have estimated that by the early 19th century, half of births in London were conceived out of wedlock, and that by 1850 rates of illegitimacy were the highest they had ever been. In a big city, filled with young migrant workers, there was clearly a lot of bed-hopping, and plenty of cads who could disappear and evade community pressure to arrange a shotgun wedding. A single woman who found herself pregnant and abandoned, however, had few good options. If she kept the baby, she would likely lose her job and be refused medical care. Places such as London’s Foundling Hospital would not care for babies left anonymously or born out of wedlock, because they did not want to be seen to encourage extramarital relations. Abortion was one solution, and pills were widely available in Victorian Britain and marketed using coded terms such as “female obstruction pills”, the obstruction referring to a delayed period. What made Wilson’s story unusual, then, was not that she had an abortion but that she died from one, after contracting an infection.
Wilson was the first woman Fissell researched, having found newspaper stories about her death. Her case attracted media attention as the two midwives who treated Wilson and her married lover were charged with murder following her death. After a high-profile court hearing, all three defendants were either acquitted or had their charges dropped. At the time, abortion was criminalised and could carry the death penalty, but convictions were rare and, as the jury’s response in the Wilson case suggested, abortion was generally tolerated.
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