*See testimony on forced motherhood, forced sterilization, and forced sex
in
E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven (Millbrae, Calif.: Les Femmes,
1976).
of the maternal deaths in New York State resulted from illegal
abortions); (4) the anecdotal reminiscences of doctors who were
asked for “help” by desperate women. These sources provide a
profile of the average woman who wanted and got an illegal abortion. Indisputably, she was married and had children: “. . . it has been repeatedly demonstrated that most criminal abortions today
are obtained by married women with children, ” 1 wrote Jerome E.
Bates and Edward S. Zawadzki in
1964. An estimated two thirds of the women who got criminal
abortions were married. * This means that up to two thirds of the
botched abortions were done on married women; up to two thirds of
the dead were married women; perhaps two thirds of the survivors
are married women. This means that most of the women who risked
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 and the 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
