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SheilaT

(23,156 posts)
3. For the most part, yes.
Sat Sep 19, 2015, 11:05 PM
Sep 2015

But there will be some who are so vociferously anti-choice, that their daughters won't dare go to them when they are "in trouble" and will instead go the illegal route.

There is a very obscure novel called "The Afternoon Women" by Lael Tucker Wertenbaker. It came out in 1970, and is about a doctor who performs abortions. And the reason he does is that some years earlier his daughter died from an illegal botched abortion. A year or so after this a young woman, a friend of his daughter's, pregnant and wanting an abortion, goes to him for the procedure, and when he turns her down, she says something like, "I thought you would do this because of what happened to your daughter."

A while later he starts doing abortions. It's an open secret in the city he lives in, and in fact the title of the book refers to the fact that over time, his mornings are devoted to his regular practice and his afternoons to abortions.

The book is long since out of print, but I see it's available on Amazon. They have no reviews of it there, but depending on your taste in literature, and allowing for the fact that I would have read it more than forty years ago, so I've forgotten a lot but I recall it as being very moving, I recommend it to you.

One thing most people simply don't know anymore, is that one reason the birth rate in this country dropped so precipitously during the Great Depression is that many women aborted unwanted pregnancies. The low birth rate was NOT because of efficient and accessible contraception, but because pregnancies were ended. Of course, some women died, others were rendered sterile, but there you have it.

As you and everyone here clearly understands, abortion will always be with us. Which is exactly why it needs to be safe, legal, and as common as needed.

correction on edit: the book seems to have originally come out in 1966, long before Roe v Wade, and even four years before Hawaii or New York State both legalized abortion in some circumstances. It was a very forbidden topic back then, even though all of us knew women who'd had abortions one way or another.

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