ABSTRACT
Janet Chance, who went on to cofound the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) in 1936, wrote about abortion in a 1931 book, The Cost of English Morals . Chance notes that ‘self-inflicted abortion’ is common across all classes of women. She then, however, establishes working-class women as the main suspects. ‘The proof’, she writes, ‘that motherhood has this secret seamy side, is to be found in any group of working mothers’ (54). Chance, a middle-class reformer writing to a middle-class audience, expected her readers to find this ‘seamy side’ shocking. She writes that ‘The repetition of even everyday life stories of working-class mothers is greeted with the dismay that is usually accorded to some exceptional and dreadful tale’ and pleads for the reader’s attention: ‘what other people have had to live, it is not too much for us to spend a moment or two reading’ (54, 56).
