A Friggin' Saint

“Vera Drake” film by Mike Leigh, 2004

This is a realist, ‘kitchen-sink’ film about providing secret abortions in London in 1950.  Abortion, like it was in the U.S., was against the law at the time.  So it’s view of our future in a bunch of states in the U.S., if not the whole country.  Vera Drake is a kind and happy working class woman who takes care of her ailing mother and a sick neighbor, works in a light-bulb factory, works as a cleaner for a wealthy woman and takes care of her family by cooking and cleaning. A spot of tea and cheerfulness are her methods. She’s a friggin’ saint.

Vera’s motivation towards the various women she works with is to help them, a kindness when they are overwhelmed with too many children already, were raped, are destitute or can’t handle a child at their young age.  She uses a solution pumped into the uterus that produces a miscarriage, which is disposed of in the toilet.  Her methods have worked for years.  She does not take money and treats this as an act of charity and concern.  She works with another woman who connects her to the pregnant, who collects 87 pounds in 2023 money from each.

Eventually one of the women who she helped gets sick and goes to the hospital where the miscarriage is thought to be suspicious.  The police get involved and eventually they trace it back to Vera.  Vera is totally cowed by the court and is tried and sent to prison with a longer 2.5 year sentence as a legal warning to others.  The sentence is carried out based on an archaic law – the “Offences Against The Person Act” of 1861.  There she meets other women also in the stir for the same ‘crime.’  They tell her she will get out sooner than that.

A gut punch of a film, as her family did not know about her secret activities. Vera is only dimly aware of the illegality of what she is doing. The cruelty of the austere police system towards these women is obvious.  There is no happy ending – except that in 1967 most abortions were made legal in the U.K. up to 22 weeks.  They were based on a ‘risk to woman’s mental health,’ along with threats to the mother’s physical health, or that the child will suffer from physical or mental disabilities.  This is six years before the U.S. national Roe v Wade decision.  The NHS provides the care for free. Scotland and Wales followed English law in 1967.  Northern Ireland liberalized their laws in 2019 upon a decree of the U.K. Parliament, as the prior government had been under the control of the ‘Democratic’ Unionist Party of conservative High-Church Tories.

Mike Leigh is one of the best proletarian filmmakers in the U.K., who along with Ken Loach nearly always produces films of gravity and social realism.  The blog has reviewed two of his films: “High Hopes” about working-class Lefties under Thatcherism and “Mr. Turner,” about the idiosyncratic impressionist painter J.M.W Turner.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Abortion,” ‘Without Apology,” “Obstacle Course,” “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “Fetal,” “Let’s Rent a Train!,” “Marxism & Women’s Liberation,” "High Hopes," "Mr. Turner."

The Cultural Marxist / November 8, 2024