Dissociation from other women is always the safest course. They are not sluttish, but other women who have had abortions probably are. They tried not to get pregnant (birth control being illegal in many parts of the country before 1973), but other women who had abortions probably did not. They love their children, but other women who have had abortions may well be the cold mothers, the cruel mothers, the vicious women. They are individuals of worth and good morals who had compelling reasons for aborting, but the other women who had abortions must have done something wrong, were wrong, are somehow indistinct (not emerged from the primal female slime as individuals), were sex not persons. In keeping the secret they cut themselves off from other women to escape the shame of other women, the shame of being the same as other women, the shame of being female. They are ashamed of having had this bloody experience, of having this female body that gets torn into again and again and bleeds and can die from the tearing and the bleeding, the pain and the mess, of having this body that was violated again, this time by abortion. Admitting to an illegal abortion is like admitting to having been raped: whoever you tell can see you, undress you, spread your legs, see the thing go in, see the blood, watch the pain, almost touch the fear, almost taste the desperation. The woman who admits to having had an illegal abortion allows whoever hears her to picture her—her as an individual in that wretched body—in unbearable vulnerability, as close to being punished purely for being female as anyone ever comes. It is the picture of a woman being tortured for having had sex.