Embodied sources: abortion, medicine, and the law in early twentieth-century British Guiana

This article uses a particularly rich account of an abortion trial in a British Caribbean colony in the early twentieth-century—British Guiana—to explore the extent to which contemporary ideas about population decline influenced the enforcement of anti-abortion laws in this colony. This article argues that the official focus on the interwined problems of infant mortality and population decline did not determine popular approaches to …