My Grandmother’s Desperate Choice

As a child, Kate Daloz was told her grandmother died in a “household accident,” but the secret her mother had been keeping was a source of long-held family trauma: She had died of a “criminal abortion” on an unremarkable afternoon in her own home after she was unable to get a doctor to perform one illegally. Her grandmother had been married with two kids and a third on the way, when her husband was been shipped off to London by the OSS. Without a doctor, her French step-mother had suggested an alternative method: “Frenchwomen take care of these things themselves.”