death or maiming so as not to bear a child were married—perhaps
one million married women each year. They were not shameless
sluts, unless all women by definition are. They were not immoral in
traditional terms—though, even then, they were thought of as promiscuous and single. Nevertheless, they were not women from the streets, but women from homes; they were not daughters in the
homes of fathers, but wives in the homes of husbands. They were,
quite simply, the good and respectable women of Amerika. The
absolute equation of abortion with sexual promiscuity is a bizarre
distortion of the real history of women and abortion—too distorted
to be acceptable even in the United States, where historical memory
* Bates and Zawadzki, in their 1964 study of 111 convicted abortionists,
place the percentage of married women at 67. 6 percent. Other studies
range from the conservative 49. 6 percent (based on the records of two
abortionists in a single year, 1948; arguably, the figure is low compared to
other findings and estimates because women lied about marital status when
committing the criminal act of getting an abortion) to 7 5 percent (the sample being composed of women in charity hospitals from botched abortions). Bates and Zawadzki, who discuss both the 49. 6 percent figure andthe 75 percent figure, conclude that they “could find no authority or piece
of research purporting to demonstrate that the majority of women undergoing abortion today are unmarried”
reaches back one decade. Abortion has been legalized just under one
decade. * The facts should not be obliterated yet. Millions of respectable, God-fearing, married women have had illegal abortions. T hey thank their God that they survived; and they keep quiet.
T heir reasons for keeping quiet are women’s reasons. Because
they are women, their sexuality or even perceptions of it can discredit or hurt or destroy them— inexplicably shame them; provoke rage, rape, and ridicule in men. Dissociation from other women is
always the safest course. T hey are not sluttish, but other women
who have had abortions probably are. T hey tried not to get pregnant (birth control being illegal in many parts of the country before 1973), but other women who had abortions probably did not.
They love their children, but other women who have had abortions
may well be the cold mothers, the cruel mothers, the vicious
women. T hey are individuals of worth and good morals who had
compelling reasons for aborting, but the other women who had
abortions must have done something wrong, were wrong, are
somehow indistinct (not emerged from the primal female slime as
individuals), were sex not persons. In keeping the secret they cut
themselves off from other women to escape the shame of other
women, the shame of being the same as other women, the shame of
being female. T hey are ashamed of having had this bloody experience, of having this female body that gets torn into again and again and bleeds and can die from the tearing and the bleeding, the pain
and the mess, of having this body that was violated again, this time
by abortion. Admitting to an illegal abortion is like admitting to
having been raped: whoever you tell can see you, undress you,
spread your legs, see the thing go in, see the blood, watch the pain,
almost touch the fear, almost taste the desperation. The woman
