Irregularities of the System: the Crime of Abortion in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales

Abstract In 1898, three brothers dispatched 8,000 blackmail letters threatening recipients with life imprisonment for their purchase of abortifacient pills advertised in newspapers as ‘Lady Montrose’s Tabules’. The brothers were themselves behind Montrose, a lucrative mail-order pill scam that had amassed 12,000 customers in three years. Through a comprehensive review of Assize records, this article contextualizes the Montrose trial in the preceding century of prosecution, finding very few defendants were women charged with procuring their own abortions. For the Court, abortion remained a low priority, and the goal of prosecution constant: protecting women from, not punishing them for, criminal abortions.