Downton Abbey: crisis pregnancies are real, but abortion kills a baby.

Lady Edith and Abortion Rights

by Michael Stokes Paulsen

For many women, the social, practical, and personal reasons for having an abortion simply trump the life of their child.

Spoiler alert: This essay is based on a series of episodes of the fabulously popular Downton Abbey, and it reveals some elements of the plot. If you’re a fan of the show and haven’t watched the latest season, stop reading now. My title, while cryptic, is spoiler enough—please do accept my apologies. If you’re a fan and all caught up, you’ve seen this one by now and understand my title: Read on.

For the uninitiated: Downton Abbey chronicles the goings-on of the Crawley family: Lord Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham; his wife, Lady Cora Crawley, a wealthy American whose fortune helped save the estate; their daughters, Mary, Edith, and Sybil; Lord Grantham’s irrepressible old mother, the Dowager Countess; and, most interestingly of all, the downstairs staff of butlers, valets, footmen, ladies’ maids, and kitchen workers. The story begins in 1912, with a report of the sinking of the Titanic reaching Lord Grantham by telegram and newspapers, and it proceeds through the Great War into the Roaring Twenties. Almost against my will, I too—like so many common, vulgar Americans—have become hooked on this strangely compelling drama about the English landed aristocracy.

Here comes the spoiler: Lady Edith, the sometimes nasty, irritatingly selfish, and hard-luck pathetic middle sister, finally has a true lover, Michael. Michael, however, is married to a mental invalid who no longer even knows who he is. He cannot legally get a divorce in England, though he loves Edith and wants to marry her. (Sound a bit like Jane Eyre?) Michael’s a decent enough chap, even if distressingly middle class—a journalist, of all things! We all feel some sympathy for his plight. He eventually travels to Germany to become a citizen of England’s recent war enemy, so he can divorce his wife and marry Edith, whom he loves dearly—and in whom he brings out the best. Mostly.

Michael and Edith evidently spent an illicit night together before he embarked, and now Edith is pregnant and Michael is nowhere to be found. Edith suddenly finds herself alone in her pregnancy. Her mother, father, sister, and grandmama have no clue.

Edith’s is a classic crisis pregnancy, but in a 1920s aristocratic key. The man is gone, the baby is conceived, and the pregnant woman is left alone with her looming massive social embarrassment and colossal inconvenience. Edith does not want to “kill”—the word she chooses, accurately—the “wanted child” of the man she truly loves. But the specter of being a single mother of a “bastard” child, with all that this entails—the social ostracism, pity, and family shame—is worse, in her benighted judgment. Edith reluctantly resolves to have an abortion in London, telling no one but her widowed and childless Aunt Rosamund, with whom she stays in the city. Edith has found a doctor who advertises somewhat clandestinely that he will help a pregnant woman get rid of her problem.

Aunt Rosamund behaves reasonably well in all this. Indeed, in the end, she is the heroine of the day. Rosamund, no spy, knew about Edith’s initial indiscretion with Michael. At that time, Rosamund had conveyed her disapproval of Edith’s conduct in no uncertain terms, in addition to her pique at being placed in such a compromised position with respect to her brother and sister-in-law. Now Edith is pregnant and, once again, in Rosamund’s London parlor.

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