We will get to Dorothy Parker in a second, but first: Have you read Kelly O’s story about being spit on outside of an abortion clinic in Detroit when she was in college?
Do that.
I’ve worked with Kelly for 12 years and I’d never heard this story until Amelia Bonow and Lindy West invented and popularized the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion. The whole point of the social-media project is to get conversations that don’t happen very often to start happening, and since then, a whole bunch of news outlets have written about the movement.
On her blog, the author Lesley Hazleton says:
Old and young, black and white and brown, married and single, straight and gay, religious and irreligious—women have been telling me their abortion stories.
Hazleton has more to say here and here and here.
I was reading a biography of Dorothy Parker over the weekend when I learned that she, too, had an abortion in 1922. The humorist, poet, fiction writer, and critic—a really, really vicious critic—was married to an opium addict who was in and out of treatment, and was having an affair with a newspaperman who was also unhappily married to someone else.
She was between jobs at Vanity Fair (which had just fired her) and The New Yorker (which didn’t exist yet) when Parker found out she was pregnant. Her biographer Marion Meade writes in the fascinating biography What Fresh Hell Is This? that:
She lived from day to day in bewildered agony, alternately denying and accepting the certainties of her situation. “It’s not the tragedies that kill us,” she believed. “It’s the messes. I can’t stand messes.” Her untimely pregnancy, a tragedy, also qualified as a sorry mess. She found herself, at the age of twenty-nine, married, pregnant, and carrying the child of another man, also married. Reluctance to abort the fetus only partially accounted for her paralysis. She seems to have been waiting, hoping that [the baby’s father] would return to her…
Later her doctor “performed a legal hospital abortion,” Meade reports. “There was no problem obtaining one, so long as she had the means to pay. Her guilt and anguish were exacerbated by her doctor, who was upset to discover in the operating room that she was further along than she had known…” This confirmed Parker’s “suspicion that she had sone something truly wicked.”
For a while, she “resisted the temptation to speak about the experience,” but eventually she broke her silence, Meade says.
It was a subject she brought up periodically… when she had drunk a great deal and verged on brimming over with great emotional cloudbursts. Then, with little discrimination, she would unburden herself to her drinking companions, mostly males who classified abortion stories as women talk and wished she would go home and sleep it off. Despite herself, she went on talking…
She was trying to share what was going on with her, but the men wouldn’t have it. She was trying to speak, but she was being silenced. She was ashamed, and “shame” was not a feeling that came to her often.
Meade also says that Parker “was quoted as saying that the experience served her right for having put all her eggs in one bastard.”
As anguished as Parker was said to be (according to her biographer), Hazleton makes an important point: “You know that thing about abortion being the hardest choice a woman will ever have to make, or the one she most regrets? Bullshit.”
The stigma in 2015 is not what it was in 1922. As Hazleton points out, 90 percent of women who’ve had abortions are glad they did.
