In the nineteenth century, when a character had premarital sex, you held your breath not for an abortion but for a wedding. Think of “Pride and Prejudice,” where Lydia’s child marriage comes as a great relief. The marriage plot relegates the actual having of children to the last page, just after the rice is thrown and the reader assured that our heroine will be happy and rich. If great Western literature of the time does allude to abortion, it does so subtly or with plausible deniability. The first time I read “War and Peace,” I managed to miss the suggestion that Hélène died of an overdose of abortifacient drugs. In “Middlemarch,” when Rosamond goes horseback riding against the explicit wishes of her doctor husband and subsequently miscarries, Eliot hastens to explain that this was a “mi...
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