ABSTRACT
Abortion became enmeshed in a story of developing gender roles, racial concerns and a shifting world power structure. In the debate preceding the Abortion Act 1967, the denial of a historical narrative is as poignant as the new stories that were spun. Although the Abortion Act was constructed without an explicit recognition of the campaign waged by the emerging medical profession in the nineteenth century, many of the assumptions, preoccupations and aims of the reformers were similar. In her consideration of the Abortion Act, Sally Sheldon conceptualizes the legal subject as an internal construct of a given law. She contends that 'Law creates its own fiction of the subject it seeks to regulate', and that, recognizing this, it is possible to '"deconstruct" the 1967 Act to reveal the legal subject created within it'. As with the criminalization of abortion in the nineteenth century, the professional self-interest of medicine again played a crucial if not determinative role in the twentieth century.
