Women keep quiet about abortions they have had, illegal abortions, because they are humiliated by the memory of those abortions; they are humiliated by the memory of their desperation, the panic, finding the money, finding the abortionist, the dirt, the danger, the secrecy. Women are humiliated when they remember asking for help, begging for help, when they remember those who turned aw ay, left them out in the cold. Women are humiliated by
the memory of the fear. Women are humiliated by the memory of
the physical intrusion, the penetration, the pain, the violation;
countless women were sexually assaulted by the abortionist before
or after the abortion; they hate remembering. Women are hum iliated because they hated themselves, their sex, their female bodies, they hated being female. Women hate remembering illegal abortions because they almost died, they could have died, they wanted
to die, they hoped they would not die, they made promises to God
begging him not to let them die, they were afraid of dying before
and during and after; they have never again been so afraid of death
or so alone; they had never before been so afraid of death or so
alone. And women hate remembering illegal abortions because
their husbands experienced none of this: which no woman forgives.
Women also keep quiet about illegal abortions precisely because
they had married sex: their husbands mounted them, fucked them,
impregnated them; their husbands determined the time and the
place and the act; desire, pleasure, or orgasm were not necessarily
experienced by the women, yet the women ended up on the
butcher’s block. The abortionist finished the job the husband had
started. No one wants to remember this.
Women also keep quiet about abortions they have had because
they wanted the child, but the man did not; because they wanted
other children and could not have them; because they never regretted the abortion and did regret subsequent children; because they had more than one abortion, which, like more than one rape, fixes
the woman’s guilt. Women keep quiet about abortions because
abortion inside marriage is selfish, ruthless, marks the woman as
heartless, loveless—yet she did it anyway. Women also keep quiet
about abortions they have had, illegal abortions, because the
woman who has had one, or tried to induce one in herself, is never
really trusted again: if she will do that to herself—hurt herself, tear
up her own insides rather than have a child—she must be the
frenzied female, the female gone mad, the lunatic female, the
female in rebellion against her own body and therefore against man
and God, the female who is most feared and abhorred, the Medea
underneath the devoted wife and mother, the wild woman, the
woman enraged with the sorrow between her legs, the woman
grief-stricken by the way men use her uterus, the woman who has
finally refused to be forced and so she must be punished by the
pain and the blood, the tearing and the terror.
The law gives a married woman to her husband to be fucked at
w ill, his w ill; the law forced the woman to bear any child that
might result. Illegal abortion was a desperate, dangerous, last-
ditch, secret, awful w ay of saying no. It is no wonder that so m any
respectable, m arried, God-fearing women hate abortion.
*
A n estimated 20 million illegal abortions are performed in the world each year and are a leadingcause o f death among women of child-bearing age, a
study issued today said.
The report by the Population Crisis Committee
also said that another 20 million abortions were selfinduced annually and that the number was growing.
Women cannot be responsible for pregnancy, in the sense of acting
to prevent it, because women do not control when, where, how,
and on what terms they have intercourse. Intercourse is forced on
women, both as a normal part of marriage and as the prim ary sex
act in virtually any sexual encounter with a man. No woman needs
intercourse; few women escape it.
In marriage a man has the sexual right to his wife: he can fuck
