Être médecin à Rome

controllers were not alone in seeking to end such traditional ideas and practices. Women were informed by magistrates and medical men that life did exist before quickening and that any interference-not that just carried out by a third party with a sharp instrument-could be described as an attempt at abortion. But by the 1920s lawyers and doctors were expressing their own unhappiness with the 1861 law on abortion. The statute was obviously an embarrassment to the police who recognized that abortion was largely condoned and prosecutions unpopular. Eugenically-minded judges in the 1930s wondered aloud why impoverished mothers should be punished for seeking to avoid the birth of unhealthy children. And doctors-who for the most part believed that abortion was "wrong" but sometimes "necessary"-worried that their freedom to provide or withold therapeutic abortions would be jeopardized if they were subjected to the dictates of either their patients or the courts. It was in this context that feminists began the long march toward the liberalization of the abortion statute with the creation, in 1936, of the Abortion Law Reform Association. This book is a mine of interesting information. Although the treatment in separate chapters of legal, medical, and feminist responses to abortion leads to a certain amount of repetition and occasional chronological vagueness, the reader cannot miss the essential point that women demonstrated enormous tenacity in taking whatever measures were necessary to control their fertility. More could perhaps have been said of the changing types ofwomen who had recourse to abortion, and their attitudes towards the activists in the ALRA. The author's sympathies obviously lie with the organization's best known activists, Stella Browne and Dora Russell, and it is accordingly disappointing that there was not space in this slim book to say more about them. Would they have been pleased, one wonders, with the 1967 Steele Bill which liberalized abortion, but placed the process firmly in the hands of the medical profession? The line of argument advanced in this study implies that the feminists lost and the doctors won. What is not made clear is what other solutions were or might have been envisaged.