rtion would not be at all difficult to obtain.
Regardless of these assumptions on Hays' part, it is nevertheless true that in general around the world in the 1920s abortion was indeed illegal, dangerous, hard to obtain, frightening, and socially unacceptable.
Ellen Messer and Kathryn May, in Back Rooms: Voices From the Illegal Abortion Era, are blatantly pro-choice, so it is no surprise that their depictions of abortions in that era are harrowing indeed. Nevertheless, the authors and the women interviewed for the book argue that the choice to have an abortion when life's circumstances are not good for the pregnant woman to have the baby is a choice which turns out most often to have been the right one. Margaret Sanger writes, for example, that "No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother" (Messer & May, 1988, 1).
However, the woman in the story is clearly not enjoying her freedom to have an abortion. She does not want to have the abortion. Sh
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