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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” (Criminal Abortion, p. 44).

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