Modern American Abortion Narratives and the Century of Silence

Abstract

finally found a doctor in West New York, New Jersey. doctor very sweet. He had pictures of crucifixes walls. It only cost $900. I went to a bank and took out a vacation loan. I am still paying it off. found two psychiatrists who said that for $60 each they'd write a report which said I mentally unstable and ought to have abortion. I had to prove that I crazy to get a legal abortion--and sanest thing I had ever done in my life. When you tell man you're pregnant, he says, 'How do you know it me? I'm not only guy you ever slept with, am I? just living with this middle class guy, and my life just like his. We were just going along, together. I didn't do anything strange or unusual. I didn't make any decisions. But one day I pregnant. Then there a difference. --Redstockings Abortion Speak-Out On March 21, 1969, women's liberation group Redstockings organized first public speak-out, Abortion: Tell It Like It Is, for a crowd of 300 people in Greenwich Village's Washington Square Methodist Church. The idea, organizer Irene Peskilis explains, was to get examples of different kinds of experiences--women who'd had babies that were taken away women who went to hospital for a therapeutic abortion, women who'd gone illegal route, different kinds of illegal routes (qtd. in Brownmiller 108). Credited with taking out of realm of private secrets and ma[king] it issue that women could talk about in public, speak-out has been hailed as an important political tactic (Reagan 230) and a pivotal event in development of contemporary feminist discourse abortion (Dubriwny 396). What's forgotten in this tale of secrecy and outburst, though, are large numbers of narratives written and published by American writers in 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s, narratives that helped set stage for later movement to decriminalize by building new vocabularies and interested publics ready to out about abortion. The Century of Silence story that historians usually tell about American politics says that after nationwide criminalization of in 1880s issue of fell silent. Early histories of American practice and politics by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and James Mohr skipped over 1890s-1950s, and sociologist Kristin Luker, first to study years of criminalized abortion, declared this era the of (40), a time when on public level, rarely discussed (54). More recently, historian Leslie Reagan has complicated century of thesis by reminding us that women did have abortions during years when a crime and did speak of their abortions among themselves and within smaller, more intimate spaces (21). But like Luker, Reagan finds little public discussion of during early twentieth While Luker suspects that 'ownership' of abortion caused public silence around it by undercut[ting] potential opposition from all other quarters (41-42), Reagan points to red scare, arguing that the association of legal with Soviet socialism ... ensured that a public discussion of idea never developed (142). It not until late 1950s, and early 1960s--or so story goes--that people began speaking publicly about abortion. By 1950s and 1960s, advances in obstetrical science had virtually eliminated need to perform abortions to save life of mother. With this old justification for therapeutic abortions gone and new medical dilemmas at hand--namely, a rubella epidemic and new research linking morning sickness drug Thalidomide to birth defects--controversy erupted amongst medical community as doctors entered into new debates about conditions under which they would perform legal therapeutic abortions (Luker 66-91). …