Good Girls Avoid Abortion / Literature

• In Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, Stone Telling aborts a pregnancy after her husband has sex with her without her consent, because she doesn't want to bear a Child by Rape. In her culture, abortion is not considered immoral, as her people believe the soul of the child will simply be born again in another body; however, she has to do it secretly because her husband's patriarchal culture forbids it. Fortunately, that rule is only strict when it comes to nobility; commoners are stated to abort more often than not, so obtaining and smuggling in the required potion was easy enough.
• In The Naked Sun, it is at one point revealed that the artificial gestation facility on Solaria is manually operated because robots would keep all the fetuses and embryos alive (including the imperfect ones). This, combined with the First Law of Robotics (robots must never harm human beings) means that in the story embryos and fetuses are considered human beings by the robots.
• Later in The Robots of Dawn, the physically deformed Doctor Fastolfe states that he would have been aborted had his physical imperfections been detected before his birth. Elijah Baley replies by stating that if Fastolfe had been aborted then humanity would have lost one of its best minds.
• Averted as a plot point in Robert Silverberg's The World Inside, but it's in the subtext, since on several occasions characters talk about how their culture "values life",^note Interestingly, it anticipated the Catholic Church's "culture of life" rhetoric by at least a decade and particularly fertility, with the strong implication that contraception, much less abortion, would be unthinkable. "Good girls" in this novel get married at the age of 12 and within a decade have usually had several children, possibly by men other than those they are married to since all men are required to "nightwalk".
• In A Brother's Price, due to male Gender Rarity Value and an inversion of STD Immunity, unwanted pregnancy is rare. Still, after the death of some family members, grieving Kij Porter went to a brothel and "didn't catch anything other than a baby". She keeps the baby. Subverted in that Kij Porter is not really a good girl, and the child's father is not who she claims; the truth is much grimmer.
• The Alice Series has Pamela end up pregnant by her boyfriend in Almost Alice. While her mother discusses all sorts of options with her — having the baby and raising it, giving it up for adoption or even abortion — Pamela is too distraught over the news and can't decide on anything except that she doesn't want to be pregnant or even want to have to make a decision. She has a miscarriage a week later.
• Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy explores the hypocrisy of this concept. Clyde Griffiths and Roberta Alden initially decide to abort their child but find it difficult to seek a sympathetic doctor, mostly because of religious notions. Roberta, already wracked with guilt, decides to keep her baby, an action that drives Clyde to plot her murder. After her death, she's portrayed in the media as an angel and a good woman, whereas if she had gone through with the abortion, she would be judged more harshly.
• The Phantom's Phantom, a modern novel retroactively set in The '50s, has a Back-Alley Doctor referring his poor patients to a prostitution ring in lieu of cash payment. And between illegal abortion and prostitution, blackmail opportunities abounded.
• Katie Nolan gets pregnant three months after the birth of her first child in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn but declines the abortifacient the midwife offers her.
• Isabel Allende's works:
  • In Daughter of Fortune, Mama Fresia learns about Eliza's pregnancy and makes arrangements for an abortion with a machi (a Mapuche medicine woman). On the scheduled night, Eliza is on her way to Mama Fresia's hut when she bumps into her uncle John. He thinks she is acting suspiciously and manages to prevent her from leaving the house, so the abortion doesn't happen.
  • A Long Petal of the Sea: When Juana Nancucheo, the Del Solar family housekeeper and Old Retainer, learns about daughter Ofelia's pregnancy, she tries lighting candles to St. Jude, making the girl drink rue tea (which is very poisonous but Juana figures the risk is worth it to prevent the birth of a "huacho" or bastard), and parsley stalks. None of these work. Ofelia is sent away to a convent as soon as her pregnancy is noticeable. Family members conspire to keep her drugged before and after birth so that her baby daughter is given away to adoptive parents and deceive her into believing she gave birth to a stillborn boy.
• Bizarrely averted in one of Karen Traviss's Wess'har books, where the protagonist's God Mode is so strong that she can't have a normal abortion, so she has to cut the fetus out and blow it up with a grenade.
• Completely averted in Lynn Margulis's Luminous Fish, where René, one of the main characters, has a back alley abortion in her college years because her boyfriend could not stand to see her future ruined. She ends up as a perfectly fine atmospheric chemist later, even if she can't have children (and is happier for it). Note that Margulis is the biologist who made symbiogenesis a mainstream evolutionary theory, and therefore doesn't fail biology forever.
• In the final book of the Twilight series, Bella refuses to end her vampire/human hybrid pregnancy even though it seems very likely to kill her. Even when she's vomiting blood and the baby breaks her spine. Of course, every. single. female in the book is baby-obsessed; and no one is child-free in Forks, apparently. Also keep in mind that Meyer is Mormon. What's somewhat ironic is that a pregnancy that threatens the life of the mother is one of the few situations where Mormonism condones abortion (the other two being incest and rape, though the latter can be fuzzy depending on where you are and who you ask). The logic is usually that a.) if the mother dies, the baby dies anyway, and b.) odds are good the woman already has other kids, who would be left without a mother. Of course, the out of universe reason is that the presence of the baby kicks off the second half of the plot (another vampire mistakenly thinking Renesmee is a illegal immortal child, getting the Volturi involved).
• Similarly, in The Whitby Child, Nelda, one of a race of magical Fisher Folk, refuses a magical herb that will end her pregnancy, and the character who offers it to her is presented as evil for even suggesting it. This is even though 1) Nelda's people are under a curse that causes all laboring women and almost all their babies to die slow and agonizing deaths and 2) we're told that at in human terms Nelda's approximately eight years old. Got that? Good girls are willing to die to avoid abortion even if they're minors and there's no realistic prospect the baby will even survive.
• In Someone Like You, teenaged Scarlett finds herself posthumously pregnant after her boyfriend dies in a motorcycle accident and her mother (who herself gave birth to Scarlett at eighteen) is furious and immediately schedules her for an abortion. Scarlett reluctantly agrees, but after arriving at the clinic she changes her mind and is picked up by a friend. This leads to a massive fight with her mother, which ends in a compromise that Scarlett will carry the baby to term and seriously consider adoption. After giving birth, she keeps her daughter.
• Averted by Lyra Volfrieds, the protagonist in Ursula Vernon's Black Dogs. She is impregnated by The Dragon in an attempt to create a powerful and long-lived bloodline, and in a Heroic Sacrifice she uses a brand of magic to both abort the pregnancy and sterilize herself to prevent this plan from ever being carried through.
• Two examples in Sword of Truth: Two examples-when Du Chaillu says she's going to abort her pregnancy (which was due to rape) Richard asks her not to, saying a child is not to blame for what it's father did (he was conceived this way himself). Verna also urges against it, due to her belief a child is a gift from the Creator. Du Chaillu concedes, and because they're married according to her people's custom, later considers the child to be also "his." Later Kahlan, having gotten pregnant by Richard, considers having an abortion due to having been told by a semi-reliable source that the child would be male, and the last time male Confessors were allowed to live past infancy they turned out to be Always Chaotic Evil; since then male Confessor children have always been killed at birth. Du Chaillu is then the one to say she shouldn't, but Kahlan still gets an abortifacient. She eventually decides against it...two minutes before she's beaten very nearly to death, which causes one from trauma anyway.
• While never stated directly, Ernest Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants" is about a couple discussing whether or not the woman should have an abortion: he wants her to, she doesn't but eventually agrees, saying she's willing to always do anything he wants. Nearly the entire story is dialogue without mentions of tone, gestures or thoughts, leaving the possibility for a lot of Alternative Character Interpretation (whether or not she's being angry or sarcastic at the end, for example).
• Averted in Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years with Rosie, Adrian's teenage sister. While she's not exactly a "good girl", she's portrayed as being rather naive in some ways and thinks she wants to keep the baby. Adrian, in a rare moment of maturity, persuades her to spend a week taking care of a baby doll of the sort used to demonstrate the realities of baby-care to teenagers in school. After caring (after a fashion; at one point she chucks it out the window) for the doll for a week, Rosie opts to have an abortion. It's portrayed as being a good choice for her.
  • It's also averted by Pandora (although she's about as much of a "good girl" as Rosie is), whose dad points out that she "had a termination in her lunch break once".
• In The Pale King, a teenaged Lane Dean secretly hopes that his Christian girlfriend will break up with him, but still keep their unborn child. It's eventually revealed that they're still together and raising the child.
• Inverted in Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar, when an assassination attempt nearly kills Cordelia Vorkosigan, and does severe, permanent damage to her unborn child. Pretty much everybody thinks she should abort and start over. She doesn't.
• Cannie Shapiro, of Good in Bed, is faced with this option, after her Sex for Solace with an ex ends with her becoming pregnant. She decides against it, after sensing the baby in her (and, for a time, believing that the decision was made for her).
• In A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Cersei Lannister reveals to Eddard Stark that when her husband Robert impregnated her, she had the child aborted — not so much because she didn't want children — but she didn't want Robert's children, and she was perfectly fine bearing the secret children of her own twin brother, who she passes off as Robert's children. In-story, this is used to show her villainous and petty side. Fans hotly debate the implications of this - but Cersei herself considers her abortion to have been "murdering" Robert's child, and she did it gladly, purely out of spite against him. She considers it a petty triumph against Robert.^note In the TV series, Cersei does give birth to her child with Robert and it turns out to be a son, but he dies shortly after birth due to a fever. In fact, the TV version has omitted any mention of abortion in Westeros.
  • Lysa Arryn, née Tully, is revealed to have had an abortion when she was young. She was impregnated by a man she was not married to and who was below her station ( Petyr Baelish), which resulted in her father making her drink tansy, an abortifacient, to abort the child. Worse, Lysa says that she would've gladly born the child and didn't even know that they were giving her tansy until it was too late. It's also implied that her later issues with multiple miscarriages once she is married might be a result of this, though it's not certain since this was also said to have happened to Lysa's mother as well.
  • Asha Greyjoy mentions that she learned how to make her own moon tea from an apothecary, due to being very sexually active with many men, "to keep her stomach flat". From the way it's phrased, it is unclear if she had an outright abortion, as moon tea is both an abortive and contraceptive drug.
• Youth in Sexual Ecstasy takes a strong pro-life stance. The protagonist of the novel mentions abortion as one of the main reasons for youngsters having sex freely, then after watching The Silent Scream he has a My God, What Have I Done? moment when he remembers breaking up with his pregnant girlfriend (who pleaded and begged him to help her keep their baby) and then giving her the money for aborting his child.
• Averted in The Red Tent. Ruti has been suffering at the hands of her husband Laban, and she does not want to give him any more children, because she does not believe he deserves the honor of more sons and she knows he will molest a daughter, so she asks Rachel to help her terminate the pregnancy, threatening to kill the child anyway after it's born. Rachel agrees, and next month (when the women enter the menstruation tent), she gives Ruti an unidentified black brew that induces a miscarriage. The women are all supportive of Ruti's choice, on the grounds that they don't much care for Laban or the way he treats her either.
• Built into the way healing works in Tales of Kolmar. Magical healers can cause a deformed embryo that wouldn't survive long out of the womb (if it got that far) to abort, same with most pregnancies that the body fights against, but this technique won't work against a healthy embryo. When Lanen's half-dragon twins are threatening to get her killed, they are not sick enough for this to work, and she's furious at the suggestion that it should.
• Inverted in Brave New World. Linda is a social outcast for having a baby in a world where in-vitro fertilization is universal, motherhood is an archaic obscenity, and Abortion Centres are luxury facilities. Linda herself is so humiliated at the idea of being a mother (by the time she realized she was pregnant, she was trapped in the Savage Reservation and couldn't abort) that as soon as she got back to society, she took soma until it killed her.
• In John Barth's The End of the Road, Rennie is determined to get an abortion, but the quack who does it gets her killed.
• Discussed in Memoirs of a Geisha when it's revealed that Sayuri's mentor Mameha aborts all of the children she conceived by her client, the Baron. While most of the characters treat it as normal if a bit embarrassing, Mameha has graves for her aborted children which she visits regularly.
• In The Sleep Police by Jay Bonansinga this winds up being the motive for the killer, since due to his beliefs he decided that he would target women who got abortions and kill them in ways reminiscent of the procedure, including cutting them apart and laying them in a fetal position with their thumbs in their mouths. He also decides to target the main character's ex wife after he finds out she's had two abortions and very nearly succeeds at killing her.
• In Rosemary's Baby, Rosemary breaks down crying at one point, out of confusion and fear over her extremely bizarre pregnancy. Her friends convince her that the constant pain she's been experiencing is not a normal pregnancy symptom and suggest she should see a different doctor about it (her current doctor is insisting that it's normal, though we later find out that this is because he's a Satanist in on the plan for Rosemary to give birth to The Antichrist). Rosemary's first thought is that they're suggesting she abort the baby, and tearfully insists she won't do that. Her friends assure her that they weren't recommending that, and just that she ought to get a second opinion to make sure there isn't a health complication she is unaware of.
• In 1632, Julie Sims rejects the idea of abortion on the basis of her personal beliefs. Given that she's from West Virginia, that's not surprising.
• Averted in Hometown. Good Bad Girl Vicki fears that she may be carrying a Child by Rape and is distraught by the possibility, but is much calmed when someone points out that abortion is an option. It turns out to be a moot point anyway, as she isn't pregnant, but rather suffering from an eating disorder that has stopped her from menstruating.
• Both averted and played straight in The Diviners by Margaret Laurence. A minor character (who was abused and mistreated throughout her life) self-aborts with a coat hanger. The baby is buried at the dump and a nice boy from town marries her, although she can no longer have children. Morag, the protagonist, later uses the incident in a novel. Morag's character is a Broken Bird stripper type.
• Played mostly straight in Honor Harrington. It is mentioned that this is a part of the Beowulf Code (the foundation for medical ethics across the known universe). When Honor becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she immediately rejects the idea of abortion, but does seriously consider adoption. Abortion isn't necessary anyway, as they can remove and "tube" fetuses safely (i.e. place them in a uterine replicator), which is what Honor ends up doing.^note It should be noted that in the Honorverse, birth control is both freely available and much more reliable, to the point where unexpected pregnancies are almost unheard-of; Honor's only occurred due to her being declared legally dead at one point, resulting in a documentation error regarding her implant.
• Played straight in Frostflower and Thorn, where Thorn is hankering for money to procure an abortion until a Type 3 option presents itself (a spell to speed up the pregnancy and birth), but also averted because Thorn has in fact had at least one abortion before and her current predicament is refreshingly presented not as some agonizing moral dilemma but rather a practical choice.
• Zig-Zagging Trope in Mickey Zucker Reichert and Jennifer Wingert's Spirit Fox. The heroine Kiarda, who's pretty clearly a good girl (though a moody teenager) is impregnated (apparently through rape when she was blacked out). She begs her healer friend Bevin to give her an abortion. Bevin tells her she can't do it, because it would be destructive magic that would endanger Bevin's healing powers (a White Mage who practices destructive magic will no longer be able to perform White Magic), and pleads with her to keep the baby. Kiarda reluctantly agrees. However, Kiarda isn't portrayed as bad for wanting an abortion, and Bevin later reassures Kiarda that she doesn't think ill of her for it. Kiarda eventually suffers a miscarriage anyway, because her Half-Human Hybrid twins are severely deformed and non-viable. Her pregnancy-by-rape was actually pregnancy through mating with a male fox when she was shapeshifted into a female one. It's a bit complicated to explain.
• Heralds of Valdemar: Averted near the end of Arrow's Flight in which Talia allows a midwife to abort a young woman's pregnancy if she wishes it (which was due to her stepfather raping her, and she'd found that it was non-viable anyway since the girl was underage).
• The Scream: Averted with Jesse, who's had two abortions and is pregnant a third time. Played straighter with thirty-seven year old Rachel, who is pregnant with her second baby in less than two years (she already has a much older teenage son).
• Invoked and subverted in the 87th Precinct novel Lightning. The plot involves a Serial Rapist who keeps re-attacking the same victims. It turns out he's deliberately targeting pro-life Catholic women in order to get them pregnant and make them reconsider their views on the procedure.
• In Fifty Shades Freed, Ana discovers that she is pregnant because her birth control wore off earlier than expected. It takes her less than a paragraph (in which the word "abortion" is not even mentioned) to decide she's not getting an abortion, including the clichés of declaring that train of thought "a dark path" and wrapping an arm protectively around her belly.
• Deconstructed heavily in She's Come Undone. Dolores by this time is not a good girl—she's been deceiving her boyfriend about everything, including the fact that she's not on birth control—but by this point, we've lived with her through the emotional devastation that led her to lying. And Dante is definitely not the hero, as he pressures her into aborting a child she very much wants and later, when she is grieving, is very unsympathetic. The whole thing is tragic, and the consequences haunt her for the rest of her life.
• Subverted in Newes from the Dead: Anne tries to abort but it doesn't work, and when she miscarries it has nothing to do with her abortion attempt, which she gave up on several months earlier.
• Averted in Guardians of the Flame: When Andy-Andy becomes pregnant, Karl (the father) gives his immediate support to whatever choice she makes, even saying he would perform a D&C himself, despite having no medical training (reasoning their healing potions will fix any damage). She ultimately decides against abortion, and they have a son, though it's made clear it would have been perfectly acceptable. In his internal thoughts, Karl specifically disclaims the idea that a blastocyst is a person.
• Played straight in the e-novel Steel Beneath the Skin. After the main character, Anika, and her girlfriend Ella were kidnapped and raped by a group dedicated to the "genetic purity of humanity" because Anika was a Human Popsicle from the 21st Century who was found 1000 years in the future (and the group didn't know that she was actually a Robot Girl and therefore had no DNA anyway), her girlfriend worried about the possibility of getting pregnant. When Anika asked why she couldn't get an abortion, she was informed that because society had few sexual taboos left with easy and reliable contraception readily available, abortions were outlawed because all pregnancies were considered voluntary even in the event that someone was kidnapped, given an anti-contraception injection against her will, and repeatedly raped. As it turned out, Ella wasn't pregnant anyway so it wasn't an issue.
• In Stephen King's The Stand, Fran Goldsmith finds herself pregnant and unmarried. She basically ignores her boyfriend's offer to pay for an abortion, and never considers it again even as a worldwide plague decimates most of humanity.
• In The Sinner, the third Rizzoli & Isles book, Jane Rizzoli learns that she's pregnant and even though the word is never spoken, she outright says that she can't keep the baby—she's not happy about the pregnancy, it's been established in the previous two books that she doesn't like children, and her relationship with the baby's father is uncertain. One conversation with her mother is all it takes for her to do a 180° turn and go from being miserable about the pregnancy to deciding to have the baby.
• Played straight in the Maeve Binchy novel Circle Of Friends. Nan is horrified when her lover responds to the news of her pregnancy not with a marriage proposal, but with money and the name of an abortionist, wailing, "I'm a Catholic, I couldn't kill my baby!". It's averted in Binchy's first novel, Light a Penny Candle, where a character goes through with one. Despite the Irish Catholic setting and the time frame, she is never regarded as a horrible person by herself or anyone else involved.
• Played straight in the Danielle Steel books that tackle this topic, usually in one of the ways laid out in the page description. Occasionally, either the woman who wants the abortion or the man who wants her to have one is portrayed as a selfish jerk:
  • Averted in the novel Changes, when a teenage girl has one. Despite becoming ill afterwards, she is never portrayed as bad or condemned for her decision. Later in the book, her mother becomes pregnant and contemplates having one, given the upheaval that the family is currently in, but decides against it.
  • In Heartbeat, a woman's husband wants her to have one (having been abused as a child, he doesn't want to have any kids himself). When she refuses, he divorces her.
  • In the novel Daddy, the titular character's wife intended to have an abortion every time she got pregnant—she didn't feel ready for a child the first time, felt overwhelmed at the thought of caring for two infants the second time, and simply did not want to have any more children the third time. Each time, her husband talked her out of it, and she is never portrayed as anything but a loving mother.
  • Jewels. When a man discovers that his wife intends to have an abortion, he is shocked, having thought she was just as thrilled about her pregnancy as he was. It turns out that she doesn't want children and that the child in question might not even be his—she's been having an affair with his brother. Her infuriated husband informs her that the child is his—his brother had a vasectomy—and proceeds to basically force her to play this trope straight by offering her money to have the baby and threatening to divorce her without a dime should she even legitimately miscarry. This is outright abusive behavior that is portrayed as completely okay because she's a horrible person.
  • The Apartment: When a woman decides to have an abortion since she doesn't want children, her boyfriend proceeds to do everything he can think of to prevent this—begging, demanding, threatening to break up with her, offering to take sole custody of the baby, even going to the courts to try and find some legal way to stop her from doing it. Despite this downright abusive level of control that he attempted to take over her life, she eventually changes her mind and the book concludes with them happily engaged and anticipating the baby's birth.
• It's mandated under a future dystopian government in When She Woke, where after a sterility plague there is a surge in Christian fundamentalism, gaining enough power to amend the US constitution so abortion is banned. Women found guilty of abortion are sentenced to genetic alteration so their skin turns bright red over a certain amount of time. Instead of being sent to prison, all are free out in society but shunned due to the stigma, and sometimes killed (other crimes get different colors), in a homage to The Scarlet Letter. Most live in shelters run by fundamentalist Christians where they're made to confess and do penance in a creepy fashion. The author herself doesn't agree with this view regarding abortion, and the book reflects that clearly.
• Played straight in Yulia Voznesenskaya's My Posthumous Adventures.
  • Anna, the main character, has an abortion at eighteen and at first doesn't think of it as anything bad, but she is left infertile, suffers bouts of depression due to it, and often secretly cries watching kids on a playground. After her clinical death she is judged (among other things) for the child's murder and shown that had she kept the baby, her boyfriend whom she thought immature would have married her, and they would have eventually become a happy and loving family.
  • Anna's foil Tatiana also gets pregnant at a young age, by a married man from another country at that, but, being a priest's daughter, refuses to abort the baby. She atones for the adultery in prayer for the rest of her life, and ends up in Heaven. After she dies of cancer and her son's father in a plane crash, the boy gets Happily Adopted by Anna in the epilogue after they support each other in their losses.
• Discussed in The Terminal Experiment and Mind Scan by Robert J. Sawyer. The former has proof of the human soul weighing into the debate (especially given it happens after abortion's allowed in the US). In the latter, Roe vs. Wade was overturned by the US Supreme Court. Characters who have had abortions in these novels are sympathetic.
• The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls: Averted. Emilie had an abortion before her mental breakdown.
• Subverted in Robertson Davies 'What's Bred in the Bone'. In the early 20th century, a young unmarried woman in a prominent Catholic family falls pregnant and 'of course' abortion is not to be thought of! But she's been very stressed lately, so her mother says some very hot baths, large amounts of gin and plenty of castor oil would be good for her. Also jumping vigorously up and down. The young woman remains pregnant, a marriage is hastily arranged with another man, and the child is born with severe birth defects, which are prevented from ruining the family's reputation by faking the child's death and keeping him hidden in the attic until he really does die as an adult. Also, due purely to coincidence and without anyone in-story knowing it, the child's caregiver for that time is his biological father. It's a screwed-up family.
• Downplayed rather delicately in Kris Longknife: Unrelenting. At least one of the women impregnated as a result of the sabotage of a shipment of contraceptive implants chooses to terminate. Kris encounters her in sickbay afterwards and the younger woman is clearly torn-up about it; the chief medical officer describes her as having had to make her first serious adult decision since joining the military. Kris, who got pregnant herself (by her husband) in the same incident also firmly stomps on a (male) admiral's suggestion that the pregnant women be made to abort.
• Worlds of Shadow: Averted with Amy once she gets pregnant due to her rape. She decides to have an abortion quickly, waiting only until she's on Earth. Though she finds it unpleasant, she's not shown as regretting her choice or even hesitating much at all.
• Fellow Travelers: Mary, a single woman in the 50s, might have been able to have an illegal abortion, but it probably wouldn't have been too safe. She instead chooses to leave town and quietly put the kid up for adoption.
• In Left Behind, Hattie Durham becomes pregnant with Nicolae Carpathia's child, but since Nicolae shows no interest in marrying Hattie, she decides to ditch him and have her child with him secretly aborted. Nicolae has Hattie tailed by the Global Community Peacekeepers just in case her old friends, who are now part of the Tribulation Force, attempt to rescue her, which they do, although it does result in at least one Peacekeeper death. Her friends, being Christians, talk Hattie out of aborting the child, but as they find out that Hattie's been poisoned, she fears that her child may be in danger. Eventually she ends up delivering an undeveloped stillborn that has absorbed all the poison meant for Hattie, which the doctor and nurse attending the delivery end up destroying to prevent further contamination, though in the process the doctor ends up contracting the poison that kills him.
• A version of this occurs in the Colleen McCullough novel The Touch when Elizabeth, one of the protagonists, discovers that her mentally retarded, 13-year old daughter Anna is pregnant (given her age and mental capacity, this can be considered nothing but rape). The local doctor refuses, but on medical grounds, not moral—Anna is too far along for the procedure to be done safely.
• Earth's Children: When Joplaya gets pregnant, her mother Jerika urges her to have an abortion since she's worried that the birth will kill her. This is because her mate is apparently half Clan, and they have larger skulls. Joplaya refuses, as she'd been trying for some time to have children with no success, and in the end safely gives birth. However, she does agree to use contraception to prevent future pregnancies.
• The Alice Network: Some of the characters believe that abortion is evil.
  • This belief is why Charlie and Evelynn have so much trouble getting abortions. Charlie has to go to Switzerland, where abortions are legal, to get a safe procedure, and Evelyn is forced to accept the services of a Back-Alley Doctor.
  • The Back-Alley Doctor tells a patient that she can borrow the tools she needs for an abortion from a doctor she knows, but that the doctor would never do it himself — he goes to mass every Sunday.
  • Charlie half believes it herself, and has mixed feelings about her approaching abortion. Realizing she's been pushed into the abortion, she doesn't go through with it, and ultimately decides to keep the baby.
  • The spy, Lili, is implied to disapprove of abortion. It isn't stated outright, but she's Catholic, and when one of the other characters needs an abortion, she doesn't talk to her friend, Lili, about it and no suggestion is ever made of telling her.
• Olivia Hussey discusses this trope in her autobiography The Girl on the Balcony, revealing she was raped by actor Christopher Jones at the end of a toxic and abusive relationship. She discovered she was pregnant, and quietly got an abortion, and the public never found out. She takes the time to say she often wonders who the child might have grown up to be and occasionally regrets her decision, but ultimately feels she made the right choice. Rather prophetically, she played Jess in Black Christmas, who was scheduling an abortion over the phone (although she actually filmed it right after she welcomed her first child into the world, having two more later).
• Trish from Wicked Good is pregnant from being raped by her mother's boyfriend. She initially plans to abort it, but later she is inspired by Archer's love for Rory and decides to carry it to term.
• Quarters: Averted, as the idea of abortion is floated early on when Annice gets pregnant without meaning to. Though she wants to go through with her pregnancy, abortion's treated as perfectly acceptable if that was her wish.
• My Year of Rest and Relaxation: Nobody judges Rava for aborting the child she could've had with her married boss...but, if she had kept the baby, she wouldn't have died; she would have been on maternity leave on 9/11, where she ultimately died.
• Tam Lin: Played with depending on which version you're reading. In more sanitized versions of the tale, Janet never considers abortion despite being an unmarried noblewoman, and thus in a very bad position to be pregnant. (Though, to his credit, her dad doesn't get angry and, assuming Janet got pregnant by one of his knights, just asks who it is so he can make sure they get married.) Some really kid-friendly versions leave out the part where Janet gets pregnant altogether. However, older versions of the tale have Janet seriously consider using some herbs and flowers to create what is essentially Plan B. She ultimately doesn't, since she rescues her baby daddy, Tam Lin, from The Fair Folk and they can get married and raise their kid. Janet is happy to have her husband and child at the end, but it's pretty clear she had no intent of being an unwed mother or raising a baby alone—had she not been able to rescue and marry Tam Lin, she would've gone through with the abortion, and this isn't portrayed as being wrong at all.
• The Change Room: Eliza got pregnant without intending to both times, but she never considered an abortion even when she's a pro-choice feminist. In the case of her friend Zi Lan, she actually scheduled an appointment to have an abortion after also getting pregnant unexpectedly, then couldn't go through with it.

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