Law, Class and Compassion: Vera Drake and the Lived Reality of Illegal Abortion

On 28 January 2026 Durham CELLS and the Institute for Medical Humanities hosted an ‘Afternoon of Law, Medicine and Popular Culture’. We watched and the discussed the film Vera Drake, with introduction and talk from Dr Samantha Halliday.

The cinematic power of Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake (2004) lies in its commitment to "kitchen sink realism". Rather than treating abortion as a remote legal abstraction, Leigh grounds the narrative in the mundane details of 1950s working-class London. Muted greys, cramped interiors, and lingering domestic shots depict illegality as embedded within ordinary life. Vera Drake offers a compelling reflection on the disjunction between abortion law and the lived experiences of women subject to it.

When the film is set, abortion was criminalised under sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 before the Abortion Act 1967 introduced statutory defences. Although the law treated abortion as a serious offence, Leigh's aesthetic choices unsettle this categorisation. Vera acts not in clandestine clinics but in kitchens and bedrooms, framing abortion as informal care. The ordinariness of these settings exposes the ethical inadequacy of a framework that reduced complex social realities to a binary of lawful and unlawful conduct.

Leigh's use of light and space develops this critique. The film's darkest interiors are reserved for the most marginalised, notably the West Indian household, where racial and economic disadvantage intersect and social invisibility is mirrored by physical darkness. By contrast, wealthier households have brighter, more expansive spaces. This visual hierarchy reflects an ethical one: safety, privacy, and dignity are distributed not according to need, but according to class position.

This disparity is underscored by the film's depiction of unequal access to lawful abortion. Wealthier women navigate the legal system through private doctors and psychiatric certification, relying on the therapeutic exception recognised in R v Bourne [1938]. In practice, this exception functioned as a privilege of wealth. Those able to pay could frame their circumstances within legally acceptable narratives, while poorer women were excluded.

Vera Drake exposes the injustice of a system that formally criminalised abortion while selectively tolerating it for those with resources. Leigh depicts a form of shadow legality, in which the law operated flexibly for some and punitively for others. The contrast between Vera's tea-and-syphon method, and  the clean procedures accessed by wealthier women, illustrates how criminalisation does not prevent abortion, but instead redistributes risk onto the most vulnerable.

Vera herself embodies this ethical tension. She neither profits from her actions, nor perceives them as criminal. Her swift departure after each procedure underscores the absence of institutional support or legal protection. The film invites re-evaluation of where moral responsibility lies: with the individual providing care in unsafe conditions, or with the legal framework that produces those conditions.

This conflict is crystallised in the police interrogation. The warmth of Vera's kitchen gives way to the harsh lighting of the police station, marking the transition from social reality to legal categorisation. The detective's fleeting empathy as Vera breaks down reveals a clash between individual compassion and institutional rigidity, demonstrating how enforcement may be shaped by personal moral judgment even as the law remains inflexible.

Legally, the scene gestures towards a broader historical pattern. Prior to statutory reform, abortion law relied heavily on narratives of exception and sympathy. Women were required to present themselves as psychologically damaged or morally deserving to access lawful care. Vera Drake exposes the arbitrariness of this approach, showing how legality was mediated through classed and gendered assumptions rather than principled recognition of reproductive autonomy.

The film anticipates the rationale behind the Abortion Act 1967, by revealing the moral unsustainability of criminalisation tempered only by discretion. Vera Drake ultimately insists that law cannot be assessed in isolation from the lived experiences it governs. Its enduring significance lies in its exposure of how legal frameworks shape vulnerability, a lesson that remains acutely relevant in contemporary debates on reproductive justice.

In a striking modern echo of these concerns, in June 2025 the House of Commons voted to approve a clause to the Crime and Policing Bill, a measure intended to decriminalise abortion for women in England and Wales in relation to their own pregnancies, by removing the threat of criminal investigation and prosecution for ending a pregnancy outside the legal framework. As the debate continues the proposal has prompted renewed scrutiny of the appropriate boundary between criminal law and reproductive healthcare, particularly where enforcement has fallen most heavily on women in situations of vulnerability.