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This article addresses the social, cultural, and political history of backstreet abortion in post-war Britain, focusing on the murders of Beryl Evans and her daughter Geraldine, at Ten Rillington Place in 1949. It shows how the commonplace connection of John Christie to abortion and Beryl Evan's death was not a given in the wider public, legal, political, and forensic imagination of the time, reflecting the multi-layered and shifting meanings of abortion from the date of the original trials in the late 1940s and 1950s, through the subsequent judicial and literary reinvestigations of the case in the 1960s, to its cinematic interpretation in the 1970s. Exploring the language of abortion used in these different contexts, the article reveals changes in the gendering of abortionists, the increasing power and presence of abortion activists and other social reformers, the changing representation of working-class women and men, and the increasing critique of the practice of backstreet abortion. The case is also made for a kind of societal blind spot on abortion at the time of both the Evans and Christie trials; in particular, a reluctance to come to terms with the concept of the male abortionist, which distorted the criminal investigations and the trials themselves. Only when public acceptance for legalizing abortion grew in the more liberal climate of the 1960s and beyond did a revisionist understanding of the murder of Beryl Evans, in which abortion came to be positioned as a central element, gain a sustained hearing.

Defence date: 15 January 2005 Examining board: Prof. Silvana Sciarra (Supervisor, European University Institute) ; Prof. Marie-Ange Moreau (European University Institute) ; Prof. Bob Hepple (University of Cambridge) ; Prof. Alan C. Neal (University of Warwick) PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

Combined hyperlipidemia (CHL) is a common disorder of lipid metabolism that leads to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The lipid profile of CHL is characterised by high levels of atherogenic lipoproteins and low levels of high-density-lipoprotein-cholesterol. Apolipoprotein (APO) A5 is a newly discovered gene involved in lipid metabolism located within 30kbp of the APOA1/C3/A4 gene cluster. Previous studies have indicated that sequence variants in this cluster are associated with increased plasma lipid levels. To establish whether variation at the APOA5 gene contributes to the transmission of CHL, we performed linkage and linkage disequilibrium (LD) tests on a large cohort of families (n=128) with familial CHL (FCHL). The linkage data produced evidence for linkage of the APOA1/C3/A4/A5 genomic interval to FCHL (NPL = 1.7, P = 0.042). The LD studies substantiated these data. Two independent rare alleles, APOA5c.56G and APOC3c.386G of this gene cluster were over-transmitted in FCHL (P = 0.004 and 0.007, respectively), and this was associated with a reduced transmission of the most common APOA1/C3/A4/A5 haplotype (frequency 0.4425) to affected subjects (P = 0.013). The APOA5c.56G allele was associated with increased plasma triglyceride levels in FCHL probands, whereas the second, and independent, APOC3c.386G allele was associated with increased plasma triglyceride levels in FCHL pedigree founders. Thus, this allele (or an allele in LD) may mark a quantitative trait associated with FCHL, as well as representing a disease susceptibility locus for the condition. This study establishes that sequence variation in the APOA1/C3/A4/A5 gene cluster contributes to the transmission of FCHL in a substantial proportion of affected families, and that these sequence variants may also contribute to the lipid abnormalities of the metabolic syndrome, which is present in up to 40 percent of persons with cardiovascular disease.