NORA’S ABORTION

I buy Tirra Lirra By The River at a second-hand book shop for $1 and am excited to find it is about being a woman wanting to make art, which is what I am, I think. Maybe. Early on, the narrator Nora is told a story about Sydney’s “abortion car” which “collected that day’s batch” of pregnant women “every Monday and Wednesday and sometimes Thursday from Doctor So-and-so’s rooms in Macquarie Street, opposite the Botanical Gardens” before driving them to the eastern suburbs for the procedure. The whole thing was “as easy as puff”.

When Nora needs such a service, however, she’s living in London where “abortion was a matter of whispers, danger and solemn secrecy”. With the help of her friend Olive, she manages to get an appointment with a doctor who doesn’t use anaesthetic and speaks to her “with an almost wild contempt”... “Stop that noise. Don’t tell me it hurts. Of course it hurts. You were willing enough to have the fun, weren’t you? Oh, yes! But now you’re groaning because it hurts. Hurts! You women. You make me sick, the whole rotten lot of you. There’s only one sure way to avoid pregnancy, but oh no, you haven’t the decency for that.”

I would have agreed with him once. I mean, I would always have detested him for his cruelty and would once have detested him for his work, but this idea that if you want to have sex you need to be prepared for the ultimate consequence – well, I used to think that, sincerely and righteously. I can’t identify a moment when that changed, but reading this scene now I am overcome with rage.

Days after her abortion, Nora is bleeding so heavily she has a “spoilt mattress to be paid for”. Still, though, “very frightened”, Nora says she is “prepared to die rather than submit myself to medical examination. I mean that quite literally: I was prepared to die.” I know it’s an old book but I want to find the doctor who made her feel that way and run him through with a sword. I want to burn down the British Houses of Parliament and the Australian ones while I’m at it. Prepared to die, she said. I can’t bear it. I can’t.