IN 1861 slavery was still legal in the US; Abraham Lincoln was the president; Britain had a Liberal prime minister in Henry John Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston; Nigeria was colonised by the UK; and votes for women were still more than half a century away.

If these brief historical snippets do nothing else, they show quite clearly that life in 1861 was a whole different ball game to the life we enjoy now in the 21st century. And to be quite honest, unlike this summer's World Cup, it is a ball game that few modern women would want tickets to.

The woman's place was still very much in the home in the 19th century. We were not expected to contribute anything to society apart from children and the odd needlework sampler, and we were not to expect anything from society other than a husband who, if we were very lucky, would keep his penchant for domestic abuse to a minimum.

Marriage and childrearing were indivisible. Indeed, in the mid-nineteenth century, reproduction was considered a woman's only correct occupation. Birth control literature was illegal and the average working- class wife was either pregnant or breast feeding from wedding day to menopause, typically raising five living children from eight or more pregnancies.

She was not given a great deal of help along the way by a medical profession that still had a long way to go in its search for knowledge, particularly when it came to women and their "troubles" (a word that must only be uttered in a whisper and always accompanied by a shudder of disdain).

Victorian medics believed imbalances in our reproductive system were to blame for virtually every physical and mental problem, and it was not unheard of for middle or upper-class women to have their ovaries, clitoris or womb removed to "relieve" symptoms elsewhere in the body.

Other leg-crossingly awful treatments included applying a leech or hot steel to a woman's cervix. While, if the situation was more minor, physicians simply told women to cease all intellectual and physical pursuits until their body was restored to good order.

But this was not a prescription for putting your feet up: it was more often a life sentence of vegetation and mental breakdown. After being told by her doctor to "never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live", author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote the classic The Yellow Wallpaper, described how she came perilously close to losing her mind:

"The mental agony grew so unbearable that I would sit blankly moving my head from side to side... I would crawl into remote closets and under beds - to hide from the grinding pressure of that distress."

Sounds fun, doesn't it? In a word, no. So why on earth would anyone want to hark back to such a morally questionable and medically ignorant time? The answer, unfortunately, is simple: to put a spanner in the works of the pro-choice movement.

An anti-abortion group is trying to block over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill in the High Court using the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which prohibits supply of any "poison or other noxious thing" with intent to cause miscarriage.

The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child claims the Victorian argument that pregnancy begins when the egg is fertilised by the sperm still holds good today, and that this means the pill, called Levonelle, actually causes women to have a miscarriage by preventing the fertilised egg from implanting in the womb.

The Department of Health, backed by the Family Planning Association, disagrees. It argues that taking the pill does not amount to miscarriage or abortion, because the modern understanding is that a pregnancy is not viable until the egg has implanted, several days after fertilisation.

Abortion and procured miscarriage are terms that are bound to divide, but these divisions should not be allowed to cloud the issue. The fact is that women have a legal right to choose if they want a pregnancy to continue, and this should include the right to take the morning-after pill.

If the SPUC wins its case, it would immediately criminalise 4.5 million women - women who are simply taking responsibility for their actions and ensuring an unwanted pregnancy does not occur. It would also open the door to other claims against the mini-pill and intra-uterine devices such as the coil, which would make a similar mockery of the law outlined in the Abortion Act and of basic common sense.

Women had little choice in 1861: we have now. Let's keep it that way.

Updated: 11:36 Tuesday, February 19, 2002