I was blown away by a passage from George Orwell in his Keep the Aspidistra Flying. This novel was published in 1936, but it's take on abortion is so true-to-life, prophetic and well-written. I read this passage on Orwell Today. Here's a quote:
Keep the Aspidistra Flying - published in 1936 when he was thirty-three years old - is Orwell's fourth book. When I read it I was totally amazed to hear him writing about abortion. In it he said that if Marxism or Leninism came into power there would be "free abortion clinics on all the corners". He wrote these words in 1936 when there wasn't an abortion clinic in sight and now here we are seventy years later almost at that point of having aborted the next generation. Also I was amazed to read how much Orwell knew about pre-natal development. ~ Jackie Jura
Here's another compelling part:
...He looked up and saw that he was passing a public library. A thought struck him. That baby. What did it mean, anyway, having a baby? What was it that was actually happening to Rosemary at this moment? He had only vague and general ideas of what pregnancy meant. No doubt they would have books in there that would tell him about it. He went in. The lending library was on the left. It was there that you had to ask for works of reference.
... He opened one of the books and searched inexpertly through it. There were acres of close-printed text full of Latin words. That was no use. He wanted something simple - pictures, for choice. How long had this thing been going on? Six weeks - nine weeks, perhaps. Ah! This must be it.
He came on a print of a nine weeks' fetus. It gave him a shock to see it, for he had not expected it to look in the least like that. It was a deformed, gnomelike thing, a sort of clumsy caricature of a human being, with a huge domed head as big as the rest of its body. In the middle of the great blank expanse of head there was a tiny button of an ear. The thing was in profile; its boneless arm was bent, and one hand, crude as a seal's flipper, covered its face - fortunately, perhaps. Below were little skinny legs, twisted like a monkey's, with the toes turned in. It was a monstrous thing, and yet strangely human. It surprised him that they should begin looking human so soon. He had pictured someting much more rudimentary; a mere blob with a nucleus, like a bubble of frog-spawn. But it must be very tiny, of course. He looked at the dimensions marked below. Length 30 millimeters. About the size of a large gooseberry.
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