Why a Doctor Told Gloria Steinem: ‘You Must Promise Me Two Things’

When Gloria Steinem was 22 years old and a recent graduate of Smith College, she found herself sitting in a doctor’s office in London, asking for an abortion. Not long before, she had slipped off her engagement ring, tucked it under her fiancé’s pillow and, in her words, fled. She was headed to India on a fellowship, leaving behind the comfortable domestic life expected of her, and walking into a future that must have looked awfully fuzzy even without an unwanted pregnancy blurring her path forward. This was 1957, and elective abortion was illegal in both the United States and Britain (not to mention much of the rest of the world). Ms. Steinem managed to find a doctor who agreed to help her anyway. She dedicated her 2015 memoir to him, recalling what he told her: “You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.” By the time Ms. Steinem died this week at the age of 92, she had done more than anyone could have possibly imagined with her life. Among her biggest accomplishments was enabling millions of other women to do what they wanted with their lives. At the core of that work was reproductive freedom, as she called it: the right to have sex for pleasure without shame and to say no without grave consequence, to use contraception to prevent unintended pregnancies, to have access to safe and legal abortion, to have children by choice in safety and with support. She, and the second-wave feminist movement of which she was a part, succeeded in many of those aims. Premarital sex has been largely stripped of its stigma. Contraception is legal in the United States and enjoys widespread use and strong public approval. Pregnant women and mothers still lack adequate support, but millions have had access to parental leave, workplace protections and a level of spousal help that was virtually unheard-of when Ms. Steinem was young. Perhaps the pinnacle of those efforts was the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision…