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Epilogue: 1944 and Beyond “White women get pregnant—plenty.” His voice was harsh and angry. “They wouldn’t want it—they’d be too shamed to want it.” –Lillian Smith, Strange Fruit The above conversation takes place between Dr. Sam Perry and Bess Anderson, friends with a professional relationship, given that Sam is also the town’s only African American doctor. Bess has come to tell him that her sister, Nonnie, is pregnant as a result of a love affair with a white man, Tracy Deen, and she wants to keep the baby even though marriage is impossible given race relations in rural Georgia in the 1940s. Bess, however, insists that her sister must have an abortion. Both women are college educated, an accomplishment they achieved in part because of their mother’s hard work and savings. They are, as a white character notes, the town’s most respected black family. Yet when Nonnie becomes pregnant, their fragile relationship with the small and deeply segregated Maxwell begins to unravel. When Nonnie admits to Bess, her older sister, that she is pregnant, Bess immediately suggests an abortion, and her rationale reflects the popular discourse about reproduction. She tells Nonnie, “We’ve got to follow American ways. We’ve got to be respectable. We are respectable, Non. Our folks were decent people— fine good people.”1 Bess’s admonishment might seem hypocritical: she recommends that her sister obtain an abortion—an illegal procedure, as Bess is aware—in order to “follow American ways” and “be respectable.” However, Bess also knows that while she is having this conversation with her sister, Grace Stephenson, the fifteen-year-old daughter of another respectable white family in town, is struggling with the same question. Grace had a fling with another white boy—a boy her father calls “white 140 / epilogue trash”2 —and now her father is seeking an abortion for her. Unlike Nonnie , Grace is complying, and after Tut Deen, the town’s white doctor and Tracy’s father, refuses to provide his friend’s daughter with an abortion, he refers him to a doctor in Atlanta who will do the procedure. Bess wants the same for her sister. As previous chapters already noted, historical records show that white women with financial means most commonly resorted to abortion. Even when abortion was outlawed, most wealthy women could still find a doctor willing to provide an abortion for the right sum.3 Bess is disgusted that her sister would agree to live as Tracy’s mistress, to have his child out of wedlock, and to live, according to her and most of the town’s residents, in disgrace. Those practices, she explains to her sister, were understandable “in slavery maybe” and “in those bad years afterward,” when “folks had to find back ways,”4 but in an era when she and Nonnie can legally marry other black men and be educated, Bess cannot understand her sister’s decision. Yet, despite her desire to follow respectable standards, obtaining an abortion was by no means respectable according to state law. In the 1940s government crackdowns on abortion were as strong as ever, if not at their peak. Leslie Reagan has documented that through the 1940s and 1950s authorities focused much of their energy on prosecuting not only abortionists but also women who sought abortions.5 Kristen Luker notes that beginning in the early 1950s hospitals responded to rather lax standards about what constitutes a therapeutic abortion by creating boards that scrutinized women’s reasons for seeking the procedure , and some boards even created yearly quotas that could not be surpassed.6 Despite this harsh new legislation, women still turned to abortion to control their reproduction, and as Bess’s position documents, many women preferred risking the illegal procedure to the alternative: humiliation and rejection by a community that condemned any woman who had a child out of wedlock. Strange Fruit anticipates the movement to liberalize abortion laws that would only really begin in the 1960s and that would most famously end with Roe v. Wade. The novel neither condones nor condemns abortion , although Bess’s last description of the fetus as “simply a mass of pulp, which could be quickly removed, were it not for Non’s stubbornness ,”7 does privilege Nonnie’s life over the fetus she carries. Yet Strange Fruit admits what few other public discussions of abortion published after 1900 would: abortion has always been available regardless of its legal status, but access to it...

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