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 reproduction. It shows that the fragmentary sources produced at the trial point to local knowledge networks about abortion and the role of midwives as abortion providers. It also reveals a very personal story, the efforts of one woman and her family to deal with the social and legal consequences of unmarried pregnancy and abortion.