188 Years of Misogyny: Abortion and the Poor Law Amendment Act

Zoe Sommer '23

Just over two months ago, West Virginia delegate Chris Pritt addressed the state House and argued that child support requirements should be ended. His reasoning: child support requirements encourage abortion.

When I read about Pritt’s attacks on child support, his rhetoric was almost identical to sentiments espoused in an interesting bit of legislation I gained familiarity with through my AP European History paper: the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. At a glance, a section of an act written almost two-hundred years ago in a different country seems insignificant to discourse regarding modern public policy and the women’s rights movement. However, the similarity between this act and Pritt’s proposed legislation highlights the prevailing misogynistic attitudes present in the law that continue to oppress women.

At the time Pritt asserted his claim about child support, West Virginia had already restricted abortion access: Second-term abortions were prohibited unless the mother’s life was in danger, and patients seeking an abortion were required to undergo state counseling designed to dissuade them from having the procedure and wait 24 hours before getting an abortion (Guttmacher Institute).

According to Pritt, these restrictions and numerous others were not enough: “Let’s say you’ve got a father who doesn’t want to really be involved in the life at all, really. He knows that if she carries through the pregnancy he’s going to have possibly some sort of child support obligation. What he wants to do is, he wants to, in a sense, encourage her to go and find a way to get an abortion…it’s going to be better for me to go and just terminate this life.” Pritt elaborated, “I don’t want to be doing anything whatsoever that is encouraging folks to go and get an abortion.” Following immense online backlash, Pritt has tried to walk back this statement, but his words leave no room for interpretation.

The objective of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was to redesign England’s poverty relief system through the creation of workhouses. Parishes were grouped into unions and required to build one workhouse each. Old poverty relief systems were abandoned; in almost all cases, if poor people wanted aid, they were required to surrender their autonomy and go to a workhouse, which were essentially factories notorious for horrible conditions.

A crucial section of the Amendment was the change in child support laws. Before the act was passed, single, pregnant women could secure support for their future child by going to their local parish and swearing on oath the identity of the father. If the parish decided that the mother’s claims were valid, fathers were required to pay all incurred fees. Fathers who failed to comply would be sentenced to 12 months with hard labor. It’s important to note that this system was built upon 19th century notions of gender that cemented men as income-earners and regulated women to the domestic sphere. Nevertheless, the system ensured that, with affiliation, mothers could secure a weekly allowance whether or not the father paid the parish.

Monumental policy change on the subject of child support was spurred by a reappraisal of the poor law systems by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1834. In their report, the commissioners argued that men were the victims of the system, alleging that women made false claims about their child’s parentage in order to gain income or a husband.

Furthermore, the commissioners, in their findings, placed women in a position of disgrace relative to alleged fathers. In order to rectify what they thought was an unjust system and protect men, the commissioners argued that the care of illegitimate children should be placed solely on the mother. They reasoned that unmarried mothers “voluntarily put [themselves] into the situation of a widow” as they “voluntarily [became] a mother without procuring… the assistance of a husband and her father.”

Additionally, the commissioners argued that, in regard to the putative father’s failure to properly compensate parishes, “all punishment of the father is useless.” This was a self-contradictory statement considering that the commissioners also took issue with the fact that parishes weren’t sufficiently being compensated for the assistance they provided single mothers.

When the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 passed, all prior acts regarding financial maintenance of illegitimate children were repealed, leaving the burden of illegitimate children solely on their single, unmarried mothers. Women could obtain affiliation, and thus secure paternal support, but evidence requirements were heightened, affiliation hearings were moved to the more formal court of Quarter Sessions, and parishes were liable for the costs of unsuccessful affiliation cases. Thus, not only was the veracity of women’s claims automatically doubted in court, but single, unmarried mothers could only really receive aid if they entered a workhouse.

Now that I’ve put the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 into context, I want to directly compare it to Pritt’s statement. The Amendment Act punished women based on allegations that a few were exploiting the system while Pritt sought to punish women based on a man’s potential response to her pregnancy. Simply put, both of these views absolve men of responsibility while restricting the rights and opportunities of women. In doing so, these men place unmarried mothers as figures of moral degeneracy and allow fathers to escape the burden of childcare and scrutiny.

It is also important to note that the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 pertained solely to the lower class of English society. Although Pritt didn’t mention economic status in his statement, poor women are disproportionately affected by recent abortion bans: a 2014 report from The Hill showed that 75% of women who get abortions are deemed poor or low income. These women are now at a greater disadvantage, lacking the ability to secure an out-of-state abortion or adequate pre-natal healthcare. It has been one 188 years since the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed, and yet the basic rights of marginalized women continue to come under attack by privileged male lawmakers.

Given the striking similarities between the rhetoric behind the Poor Law Amendment Act and recent abortion bans, we can use the results of the Amendment Act as a predictor for the success of modern day abortion policies. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was a failure; although the goal of this act was to discourage illegitimacy, the numbers of illegitimate births in England were actually thought to have increased during the time in which this law was enacted, even though the number of affiliation orders and charges of bastardry decreased. Ironically, many practices such as baby farming, a process in which mothers would pay someone to take custody of their child that often lead to the child’s death by negligence, gained popularity as desperate mothers couldn’t secure employment with an illegitimate child. Similarly, multiple studies prove that banning abortions doesn’t lower abortion rates, it only increases the number of dangerous and deadly abortions. I have no doubt that decades from now we will look back on recent abortion bans and remark on their sweeping failure just as we can look back on the ineffectiveness of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

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188 Years of Misogyny: Abortion and the Poor Law Amendment Act