The film is a testament to the central place of the right to choose abortion in the fight for women’s emancipation. Vera Drake opens a window on the conditions women faced in the United Kingdom and elsewhere before the decriminalization of abortion. It highlights how the right to choose is a class question. In the absence of legal and accessible abortion, working-class women who seek to terminate a pregnancy face dangerous, often life-threatening choices.

In the film, middle-aged Vera works cleaning the houses of rich families. She is married to Stan, a motor mechanic who works in a small car repair shop with his brother.

Vera performs abortions for women who are mostly from the working class and denied access to safe treatment by medical professionals because the procedure is illegal and prohibitively expensive. Vera’s method is to inject the uterus with soapy water, explaining to her patient that a miscarriage will occur within a couple of days. The film contrasts this with the experience of the daughter of a rich family Vera cleans for, who is able to get a safe abortion at a private clinic.

Vera’s patients are referred to her by her longtime friend Lily, who also deals in postwar black-market goods. Lily is secretly exacting payment from the women for every abortion Vera performs, without ever telling Vera, who views her own actions as “helping women” and takes no money.

Following one of the abortions Vera performs, the young woman becomes seriously ill, is hospitalized, and the police are informed. Vera is arrested and tried under the Offences Against The Person Act of 1861. This law made it illegal to use drugs or instruments to cause an abortion in oneself or another woman. Found guilty, Vera is sentenced to two and a half years in prison.  
 
Abortion decriminalized in UK
Prior to 1967, abortions in the United Kingdom were a crime, punishable by up to life imprisonment for the doctor and the woman. Contraception was inadequate and unavailable for many women. Denied legal access to abortion, women were forced to turn to the backstreets. Thousands of women tried desperate measures to end their pregnancies. Purgatives such as a pint of Epsom salts; gin and ginger; turpentine; raw spirit; aloes; or sloes were used. Other treatments contained poisons like mercury.

“The horrors of backstreet abortions are beyond imagining and defy description,” noted a review of the film in the Guardian. “They were done without anesthetic, with obsolete or inadequate surgical instruments, with no sterilization, often with very poor light, on kitchen tables, by medically untrained people with no real knowledge of anatomy.”

In 1965, hospital records indicate 3,050 women were treated for post-abortion poisoning. Some 160 women were recorded as dying as a result of botched abortions between 1961 and 1963.

Following the legalization of abortion with the 1967 Abortion Act, the number of deaths as a result of abortions fell to four in the years 1985 to 1987.

The 1967 law was a historic breakthrough, making safe and legal abortion widely available under the National Health Service. It legalizes abortions if pregnancy poses a risk to a woman’s life or in cases of fetal abnormality, or a woman’s physical or mental health, or that of her children, is put at greater risk by continuing the pregnancy. In practice, most women who request an abortion within the prescribed number of weeks of pregnancy may obtain one legally.

Changes to the 1967 Abortion Act were introduced in Parliament in 1990. Time limits were lowered from 28 weeks of pregnancy to 24 for most cases. In 1993, 89 percent of abortions in England and Wales were performed at 13 weeks or less. An estimated one in three women in the United Kingdom has an abortion in her lifetime.

In Ireland abortion remains a criminal offense. As a result, thousands of Irish women from the north and south travel to Britain each year for privately performed abortions, often late into the pregnancy.

Since 1967, members of Parliament have introduced bills numerous times attempting to restrict access to abortion. Each has been met by street protests and failed. The biggest demonstration, in October 1979, was supported by the Trades Union Congress and drew 80,000 people.

At the Bafta British film awards, Imelda Staunton, who plays Vera, won the prize for best actress, and Mike Leigh received the award for best director. Staunton also won the award for best actress at the Venice Film Festival, where Vera Drake was awarded best film honors. The film was nominated for an Oscar in the categories Actress in a Leading Role, Directing, and Original Screenplay.

The fact that this film not only can be made today but can also win wide acclaim shows the profound change in social attitudes about women since the 1950s. It is a tribute to the Veras of past decades who stood their ground in defense of a woman’s right to choose abortion as an elementary precondition for ending the second-class status that women face in class society.  
 
 
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