Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
Europe, modern, motherhood, politics, reproduction
Abstract
This paper uses abortion as a lens to examine how war and sudden demographic change impact society’s conceptions of women, motherhood, nationalism, and state power. It begins in about 1930, during the height of the abortion debate in Britain and ends in 1967 with the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act, the legislation that decriminalized abortion. Abortion proves a useful lens to study social change because as historian Amy Kaler writes, birth control and abortion are “about much more than whether a particular baby will be born at a particular time; [they are] about the struggle over who will direct the material and symbolic resources represented by a fertile young woman’s womb.” In other words, debates about abortion are fundamentally disagreements about who should have the power to control female bodies; and thus, they are struggles about who should decide society’s expectations of women and their wombs. Ultimately, it argues that while British feminists may find it expedient to hold up the legalization of abortion as one of the cornerstones of modern feminism, it was demographic concerns—over population growth, immigration, the increasing obligations of the welfare state— that ultimately succeeded in loosening the British state’s objection to legalized abortion.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Download
“Population Politics, Abortion, and Word War II: How Demographic Change helped Decriminalize Abortion in Britain during the Postwar Period”
This paper uses abortion as a lens to examine how war and sudden demographic change impact society’s conceptions of women, motherhood, nationalism, and state power. It begins in about 1930, during the height of the abortion debate in Britain and ends in 1967 with the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act, the legislation that decriminalized abortion. Abortion proves a useful lens to study social change because as historian Amy Kaler writes, birth control and abortion are “about much more than whether a particular baby will be born at a particular time; [they are] about the struggle over who will direct the material and symbolic resources represented by a fertile young woman’s womb.” In other words, debates about abortion are fundamentally disagreements about who should have the power to control female bodies; and thus, they are struggles about who should decide society’s expectations of women and their wombs. Ultimately, it argues that while British feminists may find it expedient to hold up the legalization of abortion as one of the cornerstones of modern feminism, it was demographic concerns—over population growth, immigration, the increasing obligations of the welfare state— that ultimately succeeded in loosening the British state’s objection to legalized abortion.