Daily Life in the Nineteenth Century447obtain an abortion throughout those years, but only
one hundred to two hundred French women were con-
victed of the crime each year. Physicians’ records from
small villages show varying local rates, from 3 percent
to 18 percent of all pregnancies ending in abortion. In
contrast, fully 40 percent of the working-class women
interviewed in Berlin in 1913 admitted that they had at
least one abortion; the entire group had terminated al-
most one-third of their pregnancies by abortions. The
means of abortion that they reported were startling:
One simply “jumped off chairs and stools.” Another
“sent for a [chemical] remedy that was advertised in the
newspaper.” And a third “poked around with a quill a
little bit until blood came.” Descriptions of similar
means of aborting unwanted pregnancies occur in late
nineteenth-century novels, such as Zola’s grim por-
trayal of peasant life in France, The Land(1887). Such
sources suggest that many abortions were performed by
midwives (see illustration 23.4). Despite the medical,
legal, social, and religious obstacles, European women
practiced birth control and abortion on a large enough
scale during the nineteenth century to sharply lower
European birthrates (see table 23.6).
The increasing use of birth control did not mean
that social problems associated with child birth, such as
illegitimacy, abandonment, and infanticide, disap-
peared. Illegitimacy began to increase in the late eigh-
teenth century and grew during the nineteenth century,
until 8 percent of all European births in the 1880s were
illegitimate. This pattern varied regionally, with the
highest national averages being found in Germanic
central Europe. Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Scan-
dinavia had a combined illegitimate birthrate above 10
percent, with the highest figure being in Austria (14.9Annie Besant Surveys Birth Control
Options (1877)All thinkers have seen that since population increases
more rapidly than the means of subsistence, the human
brain should be called in to devise a restriction of the pop-
ulation, and so relieve man from the pressure of the strug-
gle for existence.... Malthus proposed... the delay of
marriage.... [But] the more marriage is delayed, the more
prostitution spreads.... Later, thinkers, recognizing at
once the evils of over-population and the evils of late mar-
riage... have advocated early marriages and small fami-
lies.... [Yet] how is this duty to be performed?
The check we will take first is ‘natural laws’....
Women are far less likely to conceive midway between
the menstrual periods than either immediately before or
after them.
The preventive check so generally practiced in France
... consists simply in the withdrawal of the husband pre-
vious to the emission of the semen, and is, of course ab-
solutely certain as a preventive....
The preventive check advocated by Dr. Knowlton is,
on the other hand, entirely in the hands of the wife. It
consists in the use of the ordinary syringe immediately af-
ter intercourse, a solution of sulphate of zinc, or of alum,
being used instead of water. There is but little doubt that
this check is an effective one... [but] there are many ob-
vious disadvantages connected with it as a matter of taste
and feeling. The same remark applies to the employment
of the baudruche,a covering used by men of loose character
as a guard against syphilitic diseases, and occasionally rec-
ommended as a preventive check.
The check which appears to us to be preferable, as at
once certain, and in no sense grating on any feeling of af-
fection or of delicacy, is that recommended by Carlile
many years ago in his Every Woman’s Book.... To prevent
impregnation, pass to the end of the vagina a piece of fine
sponge....
There is a preventive check attempted by many poor
women which is most detrimental to health, and should
therefore never be employed, namely, the too long persis-
tence in nursing one baby in the hope of thereby prevent-
ing the conception of another. Nursing does not prevent
conception....
Another class of checks is distinctly criminal, i.e., the
procuring of abortion. Various drugs are taken by women
with this intent, and too often their use results in death, or
in dangerous sickness.
Besant, Annie. The Law of Population.London: Freethought Publishing
Company, 1877; and Carlile, Richard. Every Woman’s Book, or What is
Love?London: 1838.