If in earlier literature female characters who got abortions died tragic deaths—as fallen women, the victims of male rapacity or their own sexuality or both—the 1930s abortion plots centered on what it means to live with her choice. In these stories, in other words, the woman has her abortion and moves on: often with contemplation, sometimes with gratitude and excitement, sometimes with pain and thoughtful if not totalizing regret.
In Tess Slesinger’s 1932 short story “Missis Flinders,” possibly the first mainstream publication of a story explicitly about abortion, the procedure itself represents the lack of choice. It’s “a D and C between friends,” Margaret Flinders calls it, brittle with the pain of a termination she didn’t really want to have. All the women in the story have had choice wrested from them: by men, by biology, by simple tragedy. One woman offers her husband another daughter, a disappointment to him; another gives birth to a stillborn baby. Margaret gets an abortion, pressed into the surgery by her own political hesitations—how could she and her husband, leftist intellectuals, make real social change while providing for an infant?—but mostly by her husband. She had wanted to keep it.
Other stories addressed the choicelessness of abortion, too—Margery Latimer’s This Is My Body, a 1930 novel that shared an editor with William Faulkner, and so explicit about both sex and abortion that people wrapped it in brown paper to read on the subway. Or they focused on social sympathy, as in Dorothy Parker’s euphemism-laden 1924 story, “Mr. Durant,” in which a twenty-year-old stenographer, “in trouble” via her cruel 49-year-old boss, is “fixed up” by a more sophisticated coworker; another Parker story, “Lady with a Lamp,” published in 1932 in Harper’s Bazaar, revisits social hypocrisy and shame around abortion. Together, they revealed the quiet prevalence of surgical terminations and abortion pills. In Kay Boyle’s 1934 novel My Next Bride, a yawning woman, filing her nails, talks about which friend can find a woman the right doctor, and a shop clerk takes pills and then miscarries while her customers peruse the wares. Black women writers like Angelina Weld Grimké and Georgia Douglas Johnson, for their part, addressed a far more harrowing landscape in their fictional narratives, writing not about abortion but about women who killed their newborns rather than enlist them into a life of racial violence.
The list, once you begin to compose it, grows large and unwieldy, simultaneously restless with disagreement about what to make of abortion and rich with consideration of the experience. Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Herbst, Jessie Redmon Fauset, as well as male authors like Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and others: all took up the theme, in varied terms and from varied perspectives, for all kinds of audiences.