The 1950s

Abstract

The word “abortion” was rarely mentioned in polite company during the 1950s; some said it was even “unthinkable.” Nevertheless the unmentionable, unthinkable practice of abortion may have been no less common than it is today. While there were few reliable data, most estimates of U.S. abortions during the 1950s ran from 200,000 to more than one million abortions annually. Dr. Christopher Tietze, chairman of the statistical committee for a conference on abortion held by Planned Parenthood in 1955, thought 1.2 million abortions— or about one pregnancy in four—was the most accurate figure (Calderone, 1958). Dr. Albert Kinsey’s 1953 study of more than six thousand urban, white, educated women showed that one-fifth to one-fourth of their pregnancies had been ended in abortion.

The child (or children) might be absorbed in busyness, in his own dreamworld; but as soon as he felt me gliding into a world which did not include him, he would come to pull at my hand, ask for help, punch at the typewriter keys.... My anger would rise; I would feel the futility of any attempt to salvage myself, and also the inequality between us: my needs always balanced against those of a child, and always losing. I could love so much better, I told myself, even after a quarter-hour of selfishness, of peace, of detachment from my children. A few minutes! But it was as if an invisible thread would pull taut between us and break, to the child’s sense of inconsolable abandonment, if I moved—not even physically, but in spirit—into a realm beyond our tightly circumscribed life together.... I did not understand that this circle, this magnetic field in which we lived, was not a natural phenomenon.

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (1979)