The Department of History’s Susanne M. Klausen is set to release a groundbreaking book titled Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa published by Oxford University Press. Klausen’s new book comprehensively examines how the ruling Afrikaner National Party attempted to regulate women’s reproductive sexuality under apartheid (1948-1990) and chronicles the extreme lengths to which women facing unwanted pregnancy would go to control their destinies.
Abortion Under Apartheid is the product of ten years of research by Klausen. The scholarship exposes the horrific and often tragic conditions faced by pregnant girls and women of all races and ages during apartheid, a time when abortion was criminalized and deemed socially abhorrent by the National Party; a regime whose principal concern was preserving the existing system of white supremacy.
“Sexuality under apartheid remains understudied,” explains Klausen – a historian who strongly self-identifies as a feminist.
In fact, Abortion Under Apartheid is the first full-length historical study of abortion in South Africa, indeed in any African country.
“The book exposes yet another way the state dehumanized South Africans with their harmful laws, this time by attempting to control the bodies, sexuality, and fertility of women,” says Klausen.
Klausen has long been advocating for women’s reproductive justice, but this ongoing struggle hasn’t always taken place in South Africa. Her introduction to the fight for abortion rights dates back to her time as a student activist and member of the Canadian national Reproductive Rights Movement when she was an undergrad at the University of Victoria.
In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the abortion law as unconstitutional. When the Brian Mulroney Progressive Conservative Government attempted to reintroduce abortion legislation soon after, Klausen joined the Movement that sought to keep abortion out of the criminal code.
“Throwing myself into this national struggle was a real baptism by fire. It was daunting, but we succeeded and the legislation was thwarted. Winning a political struggle is so inspiring and I look back on those days as a profoundly formative period in my thinking about the politics of fertility and reproduction.” Influenced by those events, Klausen’s first published academic study was about clandestine abortion in British Columbia in the 1930s.
Klausen built upon this political experience by becoming an AIDS activist, joining the board of AIDS Vancouver Island, a non-profit society, in the early 1990s. At the time, Africa, in a general sense, wasn’t on Klausen’s radar. This changed when she was selected as the Canadian delegate for an international conference on youth and AIDS in Namibia in 1994.
“It was an amazing, exhilarating time. I ended up hitchhiking around Namibia after the conference and was so impressed by the warmth of Namibians and fell in love with the region. It was 94’ and apartheid was ending, so it was a fantastic, exciting, historic time to be introduced to Southern Africa and I was just absolutely swept away by the experience.”
With that, Klausen decided to maintain her thematic focus as a scholar on the politics of fertility and reproduction but shift her regional focus to Southern Africa. Not long after, while completing her PhD at Queens University, she discovered that there was little scholarship on the history of abortion under apartheid in South Africa; and so she began a decade-long research journey which would eventually culminate in the newly released Abortion Under Apartheid.
For the book, Klausen did a tremendous amount of archival work and spoke with numerous people who in one way or another were affected by the criminalization of abortion. She interviewed several women who had become pregnant and subsequently fell victim – in myriad of ways – to the harsh apartheid laws.
She also had numerous discussions with doctors and untrained abortionists who had performed illegal abortions, and with doctors who helped women and girls who were living with the ramifications of bungled procedures. Klausen’s research has made Abortion Under Apartheid a very vivid narrative of what it meant to face unwanted pregnancy during the era of apartheid.
Emblematic of the fragmented realities of apartheid, Klausen uncovered the racially disparate experiences of white and black women who intrepidly sought illegal abortions under National Party rule.
“Many girls and women, especially black women, were forced to turn to clandestine abortionists for help. These back-alley practitioners would often use dangerous, sometimes deadly, methods to try and terminate pregnancies,” says Klausen.
Based on hospital and court records, archives of groups like the Abortion Reform Action Group, and the interviews she conducted, Klausen estimates that hundreds of thousands of women (most black) procured illegal abortions each year during the apartheid era, many of these resulting in lifelong physical impairments and excruciating death.
One widely reported example of a young woman who died from a botched abortion is Iris Phuthini, a beautiful rising star of the stage and up-and-coming model who died at King Edward VIII Hospital in Durban in 1972 (see photo of newspaper article).
But the regime was only interested in ending the practice of white girls procuring illegal abortions; it became alarmed by what it perceived to be the declining moral values of unmarried white girls who were having pre-marital sex. The regime felt that instances of white girls getting pregnant out of wedlock were signs of the decay of “white purity.” It reacted by implementing a strategy of putting medical professionals who had helped these girls and women on trial alongside their patients.
Conversely, the government never exhibited any concern for the health or lives of black girls and women forced to turn to the clandestine abortion industry.
For white women, the long, patriarchal arm of the National Party government used public shaming as a primary method of punishment for those had an illegal abortion.
In what Klausen calls “voyeuristic sex spectacles,” white women were forced to testify in return for immunity from prosecution at the trials of a number of abortionists in the early 1970s. They were asked for details about their bodies and abortions in front of galleries of onlookers from all walks of life who would even dress up for the occasion, as though they were attending the theatre. Meanwhile, journalists eagerly covered the trials, writing widely circulated, sensational articles for both national and local publications.
“This was a deeply humiliating process. The women were forced to go into detail about the experience of the abortion, how they became pregnant, and discuss their bodies in public. This struck terror into the hearts of white girls and women across the country,” says Klausen.
As detailed in Abortion Under Apartheid, gynaecologist Dr. Derk Crichton’s prosecution in 1972 is a particularly infamous case. Crichton was an eminent doctor and academic, and an outspoken advocate of “abortion on demand” who performed abortions on teenage and unmarried young white women in the 1960 and early 1970s. He was targeted by the authorities and made an example of for other doctors sympathetic to women’s plight. He was prosecuted along with James Watts, an untrained but very safe and careful abortionist with whom Crichton collaborated.
Klausen met with Crichton and interviewed his wife Susan Pohl-Crichton, who stood by him during the trial, James Watts, and the primary police officer tasked with arresting Crichton, Dan Matthee, who confirmed that the government wanted Crichton arrested and prosecuted at almost any cost. Despite the immense pressure on Crichton, he defiantly refused to express any regret at helping young white women safely terminate unwanted pregnancies. Inevitably, he was convicted and his medical career was irreparably damaged as a consequence.
Crichton’s and Watts’s trial is one tale of many in Abortion Under Apartheidthat recounts instances of human resiliency when people declined to bow to the unjust laws of the state.
“One woman unabashedly refused to cooperate during the trial, claiming she had no recollection of details or events about which she was asked, angering Crichton’s lawyer mightily in the process.”
Though Abortion Under Apartheid is rife with tragedy, the book is ultimately a significant study about human triumph in dire situations.
“Countless girls and women circumvented the law and disobeyed the injunctions of patriarchal religious institutions and public leaders, and in doing so demonstrated tremendous courage and agency.”
Although many women were harmed, many more were successful in their attempts to defy the law.
Today, post-apartheid South Africa boasts one of the most progressive laws on abortion in the world after the passage in 1996 of the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act that allows for abortion on demand during the first trimester and within limits during the second trimester. However, this doesn’t mean that the country is without challenges when it comes to women’s rights. Klausen is alarmed about the stigma that continues to be attached to abortion and the problematic politics of reproduction and sexuality in a society that is still deeply affected by patriarchal ideals and practices.
“I still have great concern about the status of women and their rights in South Africa. Despite some very important gains of feminists and advocates of women’s health and rights, the statistics on rape of women and children, violence against women, and murder of women, often by intimate partners, are extremely disturbing. Women and girls continue to fight a major battle against oppression in South Africa.”
“For a long time race and class dominated the concerns of historians writing about South Africa, but sexism and the oppression of sexual minorities also need to be scrutinized as major features of society in both apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.”
Carleton’s Institute of African Studies and the Department of History is pleased to invite you to celebrate the launch of Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africawith Susanne M. Klausen on Friday, January 29th.
Order Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa by Susanne Klausen use promo codeAAFLYG6 to save 30% off the regular price.
Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa – News and Notes
- Klausen will be the William Evans Fellow for February and March of 2016 in the History Department at the University of Otago in New Zealand where she will lecture on Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa as well as her current research on the criminalization of interracial sex in South Africa during apartheid, and take part in a variety of other events.
- Listen to Dr. Klausen’s interview about Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africaon a morning South African call-in show on SAfm.
- Read an excerpt from Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa in South African national newspaper Business Day.
Klausen will be delivering the Nelson Mandela Lecture titled “From Rights to Justice: The Ongoing Struggle For Reproductive Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa” for Wilfred Laurier University’s Tshepo Institute for the Study of Contemporary Africa on January 21, 2016.