Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa by Susanne M. Klausen (review)

Suzanne Klausen’s prize-winning monograph provides the first book-length history of abortion in South Africa. Klausen’s focus is the shifting legal status and availability of abortion throughout the apartheid period, 1948 to 1994, particularly the social forces that came together to restrict abortion at a time when much of the world was liberalizing access to the practice. Drawing on a compelling range of sources, including novels, popular press stories, oral history interviews, medical journals, and university and hospital records, Klausen argues that white, South African social elites vehemently opposed abortion as part of their wider obsession with the sanctity of the so-called white race. By associating abortion with the loss of social morality, figures in the church and government worked closely to criminalize abortion and prosecute medical professionals who provided such services to white women. Simultaneously, the government was content to let black women suffer and die as the result of backstreet abortions, even as medical professionals demanded legal reform. South African historiography has tended to focus on either white or black South Africans, given that apartheid actively worked to divide these populations. By contrast, Klausen here includes black and white women’s experiences with abortion. In doing so, she demonstrates the entanglements of racism and its effects on white and black life in South Africa.

The first two chapters provide an overview of abortion under apartheid, and an analysis of why the government was opposed to legal abortion. Drawing on existing historical work on the intersections of family life, sexuality, and colonialism to explain the rise in unwanted pregnancy among black South Africans, Klausen demonstrates that abortion was an immense social and medical problem, particularly from the 1960s. Women recovering from botched abortions were the main occupants of gynecology wards in hospitals for black South Africans, to the extent that hospitals established special wards for septic abortion cases. At the same time, white South Africa began to experience many of the social changes occurring in the west at this time – rock music, teenage culture, university student radicalism, and extra-marital sex. Because the white minority government felt under threat from the rising tide of independence movements in Africa, supposed communist threats, and the potential breakdown of white patriarchal family values, liberalizing sexual attitudes were viewed as an existential threat to the (white) nation. As a result, Klausen argues, the government and social elites emphatically opposed legal abortion for white women, all the while ignoring clandestine abortion among black women.

Yet, as Klausen shows, white South African society was not unified in its opposition to abortion. By the 1960s, many medical doctors were effectively performing abortion on demand for paying clients; many more were facing the consequences of backstreet abortions in their hospitals. Medical professionals led the push to legalize abortion, inspired by a mix of fear of prosecution, concern over population growth, and compassion for suffering women. Klausen also notes the influence of international medical networks, which brought South African doctors into contact with colleagues in countries where abortion laws were changing. Chapters four and five, for example, explore two major criminal trials around abortion in the early 1970s, prosecuting renowned medical professional, Derk Crichton, and several colleagues for allegedly providing abortions. With a writer’s eye for dramatic irony, Klausen exposes the gap between Crichton’s expectations of his trial and what resulted. Overly confident in his own position and the forces of progress, Crichton did not anticipate how urgently the apartheid state would prosecute people perceived as undermining white morality. Poignantly, Klausen underscores that the persecution of Crichton, and those who had used his services, was aimed only at the white population, to police the sexual conduct of white women. Clandestine abortionists working mostly for black women were not pursued in the same way. In the wake of the trials, the...