The dark history behind Old Hollywood’s forced abortions
Old Hollywood demanded two things of its starlets. One, they would exude the kind of sensuality Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth came to typify. Two, off-screen, they would be virginal because mothers just couldn’t sell sex in the same way. As a result, since Hollywood’s infancy, backstreet abortions were rife and encouraged by studio heads desperate to control the image of their silver screen stars.
This wound its way into the so-called “morality clauses” thought up by Will H Hays in 1922. He collaborated with studios to ensure their top earners would sign on the dotted line a bizarre assurance that no scandals would threaten their reputation. A pregnancy, unintended or not, would rip away the glamour Hollywood worked so hard to build, and the contracts soon became a tool of control.
It was rumoured these clauses prevented actor Jean Harlow from marrying because a wife couldn’t be a bombshell. Harlow continued seeing lover William Powell regardless, eventually becoming pregnant, only to mysteriously enter the hospital for a brief period of rest.
She stayed in the same room, with the same private nurses she had spent the year before, for an alleged appendectomy. When Jeanette McDonald found herself pregnant, she similarly checked into a hospital with an ear infection. Eva Gardener was supposedly discreetly flown to London for her abortion, and Judy Garland’s own mother is said to have conspired with studios to ensure she also underwent the procedure.
It was an endemic problem in an age meant to be the most dazzling and opulent of Hollywood’s history, with MGM studio head Lous B. Mayer reportedly telling his stars to simply “get rid of the problem” whenever pregnancy reared its head.
A group of Hollywood “fixers” would arrange these abortions without any regard for the risk or psychological ramifications they posed to the stars enduring them. As biographer Lee Israel wrote of Tallulah Bankhead, “[she] got abortions like other women got permanent weaves”; they were that commonplace behind the scenes.
The contemptuous attitude to pregnancy drove some stars, like Lupe Velez, to suicide. Others, fearing for their livelihoods, endured the abortion route. The cost of Lana Turner’s was cut from her paycheck, done in a hotel room without any anaesthesia.
The darkness of the film industry’s underbelly is well covered, but abortion remains its most taboo element. But these pervasive attitudes were a testament to the treatment of women onscreen, who had to be staggeringly beautiful – enough to make audiences fall in love with them – but were told to shun marriage and children because it interfered with the fantasy they offered audiences.
Old Hollywood presents a curious paradox. Women had a staggering amount of power, their performances and beauty standing to make studio executives rich, and putting themselves on a path of unimaginable fame and fortune. But it never afforded them their fundamental right to their own bodies.
