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CHAPTER 1

This Is No Dream; This Is Really Happening: Rosemary’s Baby

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is an uncontested classic. Directed by Roman Polanski, adapted from Ira Levin’s immensely popular 1967 novel of the same name, and starring a diaphanous Mia Farrow (Rosemary Woodhouse), a seething John Cassavetes (Guy Woodhouse), a manic Ruth Gordon (Minnie Castevet), and a terrifying Sidney Blackmer (Roman Castevet), this film is routinely cited by fans and critics alike as one of the greatest horror films of all time.

The story is simple enough: A young couple moves into a New York apartment building; the wife gets pregnant by Satanic rape; she struggles through her pregnancy; she gives birth to the Antichrist. It’s so simple – albeit disturbing – that it almost sounds silly.

But in its fully realized form, it’s a brilliant film on all counts, from cinematography to script, acting to sound design, direction to editing, as horror buffs and critics have recognized for fifty years.

What most critics admired about the film was its creepiness-the witches, the Satanism. But Rosemary’s Baby isn’t just a film about witchy Satanists; it’s a film about violence toward women. The film both reflected and consolidated public attitudes toward forced pregnancy, toward the relationship between women and the medical establishment, and, most of all, toward a woman’s right to be in charge of her own body, her own mind, and her own pregnancy.

In fact, Rosemary’s Baby gave voice to a reality already well known to but unnamed by many American women: a reality in which they were forced to become pregnant and then to stay pregnant by their abusive husbands. Nowadays, we call this type of abuse reproductive coercion, or reproductive violence, but that language didn’t exist in 1968.

Reproductive violence happens when a man forces his female partner to engage in sexual activities she does not wish to engage in with the goal of impregnating her, or when a man sabotages a woman’s birth control. It also happens when a woman is denied appropriate access to gynecological or reproductive medicine in an attempt to control whether or not she has a baby.

Rosemary’s Baby was the first American film to thematize reproductive violence and reproductive control as horror. It’s a film in which a young woman is drugged by her husband, raped by Satan, and forced to endure a pregnancy of intense physical pain until she gives birth to an inhuman child.

No matter the supernatural elements at play, the message is the same — Rosemary is in danger for one reason and one reason only: She is a woman of childbearing age.

To see Rosemary’s Baby’s reproductive horror in sharpest relief, we need to look at the battle for reproductive rights in New York State in the years leading up to the film’s release.

Rosemary’s Baby is set in New York City, and that’s no accident: New York was where a great deal of the loudest and most successful protesting about reproductive restriction was happening in the United States.

Abortion was illegal in New York State in almost all cases in the 1950s and 1960s, permissible only if the mother’s life was in provable and immediate medical danger. Getting an abortion legally, in practice, was next to impossible. Of course, the illegality of abortion didn’t mean abortions didn’t happen; it simply meant that abortions didn’t happen safely. There were examples of this in the news everywhere – and in particular, they were plastered all over The New York Times.

In April 1951, police raided a Stuyvesant Town apartment, in which an “abortion ring” had been operating, consisting of three doctors and three aides; the doctors were taken into custody and interrogated and eventually brought up on charges. In 1953, a doctor was arrested on a murder charge because a woman had died during an abortion procedure he illegally performed on her at his office.

In April 1954, a Bronx woman was found dead in her apartment, with abortion as the presumed cause of death. In 1956, two abortion providers accidentally killed their patient, and then so feared prosecution for providing an abortion in the first place that they dismembered her and hid her body parts. Case after case emerged of women being found dead, where abortion was known or strongly suspected as the cause of death.

Dozens of these articles were published in The New York Times and other papers throughout the 1950s, creating an atmosphere of fear and terror. New Yorkers were regularly reading horrific accounts about young women’s bloodied bodies, left to die, by doctors who were imagined as rogue, renegade madmen, helped by nurses of the night. Mainstream media showcased lack of access to legal abortion in safe hospital settings as what it was: truly, a horror show.

In June 1960, the American Medical Association (AMA) decried abortion law as too strict and began to advocate for doctors’ rights and obligations to provide abortion care to pregnant women. The American Medical Association called for abortions to be legalized whenever medically or humanely necessary. The AMA pointed out that the main 1960s argument against abortion-that it was dangerous for the pregnant woman-was grossly exaggerated, and that women were far more likely to die through a botched abortion than a medically sanctioned abortion, and far more likely to suffer psychiatric illness after a live birth than after an abortion.

Notwithstanding this plea from the AMA, abortion remained illegal in every state throughout the 1960s. But the pressure was on to change things.

The controversy around thalidomide intensified that pressure. In the early 1960s, many pregnant women were prescribed thalidomide, a drug later proven to cause severe birth defects in children. Doctors, women, and advocates began to suggest that women who took thalidomide should be allowed to access abortion in order to prevent the birth of severely deformed children. One particularly well-publicized case was that of married actress Mrs. Robert Finkbine, who found out she was pregnant after having taken thalidomide and sought legal permission to get an abortion in the state of Arizona. It was denied, and she and her husband publicly announced that they would seek a legal abortion for her elsewhere. Two weeks later, in Sweden, a panel agreed that Mrs. Finkbine’s mental health justified an abortion; when the fetus was aborted, the Swedish surgeon confirmed that it was indeed severely deformed. This narrative was papered all over mainstream news media, largely because of Mrs. Finkbine’s celebrity status as Miss Sherri, from the children’s television show Romper Room. Everybody loved Miss Sherri, which made it harder to hate her decision.

In response to the thalidomide controversy, the New York Academy of Medicine urged the legalization of all “therapeutic abortions,” which would be performed any time the mother’s physical or mental well-being was endangered by the continuance of the pregnancy or any time a fetal deformity was suspected.

The next year, the Times ran an editorial advocating for the legalization of all therapeutic abortions, noting that 87 percent of people polled about the New York Academy of Medicine’s recommendations favored their passage. In later 1965, a full-scale war erupted in the editorials page of the Times, with some taking strong stances about the urgent need to decriminalize abortion and others stating that aborting fetuses on the chance they might develop abnormalities in the wake of things like thalidomide usage or German measles (also known to cause birth defects) was murder.

By the end of June 1965, the Times ran an article about doctors becoming more and more willing to stretch the law, ostensibly reflecting a softening in public and medical attitudes toward the procedure; by the end of that year, the Times ran strongly worded editorials condemning the “cruel” laws of forty-five states in which abortion was illegal unless performed to save a woman’s life. This article pointed out that approximately ten thousand American women died per year due to illegally performed abortions. Let that statistic sink in: ten thousand women per year.

In 1966, there was a widespread effort to liberalize abortion law in New York. Doctors and psychiatrists spoke up to back abortion law reform. Polls showed that most Americans-even Catholics-supported the liberalization of abortion laws. That summer, the New York Obstetrical Society backed the liberalization of abortion law. In the fall, the American Lutheran Church came out in support of therapeutic abortions; two weeks later, the American Medical Women’s Association spoke up in favor of liberalizing abortion law.

Toward year’s end, the New York County Medical Society urged New York law to change so that a woman could legally obtain a therapeutic abortion, as well as in cases of rape or incest; the New York State Council of Churches spoke out in support of that position a week later. Enough is enough, even ecclesiastical organizations started to say; we have to do something to protect women from untimely and preventable death.

Despite efforts to liberalize New York’s abortion laws, in March 1967, the abortion bill was killed on the legislative floor in New York State by a vote of 15-3. Fifteen to three: It wasn’t even close. All those dead women; all those deformed fetuses; all those stories of maniacal, murderous doctors operating terrifying abortion rings… Somehow, it hadn’t done the trick yet. People weren’t quite horrified enough. They needed a little push.

One New Yorker was poised and ready to push: novelist Ira Levin. In 1967, at the height of the abortion controversy, he published his wildly popular novel Rosemary’s Baby. He has said of the genesis of his novel that he “was struck one day by the thought… that a fetus could be an effective horror if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine!” For Levin, from the be-ginning, it was the unwanted baby, not the Satanism itself, nor the witchy neighbors, that was the real horror. To the best of my knowledge, Levin never came out and called Rosemary’s Baby a topical novel about the overstrict abortion laws in New York or in the United States broadly. But maybe he felt he didn’t need to announce it so baldly: His much earlier novel, A Kiss Before Dying (1953), also centers on a young woman who dies because of an unwanted and unplanned pregnancy. So, writing novels that were about abortion availability was kind of Levin’s modus operandi.

Just after Levin released Rosemary’s Baby, things in New York shifted a little more: Governor Nelson Rockefeller urged his legislature in 1968 to liberalize abortion law in New York. Referring to the then-current state of affairs as a “human tragedy” because of the needless loss of women’s lives due to unsafe abortion, he begged his colleagues to modernize the state’s eighty-five-year-old abortion statute.

Within the month, Governor Rockefeller appointed a ten-person committee to study the potential effects of liberalizing New York’s laws; that committee was rumored to be pushing toward far broader and more capacious reforms than those that had been rejected the year before. Despite this, the abortion reform again failed in the New York State Senate in April.

But over the course of 1968 and 1969, something shifted in New York, so that, by 1970, New York became the second state not to liberalize abortion law, but in fact to legalize abortion. The something that shifted was multivariate: grassroots organizing, ongoing controversy surrounding thalidomide, the ever-accelerating women’s rights movement.

But a piece of that shift, signal-boosting the changes in consciousness and attitude that were already circulating around the United States and were particularly intense in New York, was the release of Rosemary’s Baby in mainstream theaters across the US in summer of 1968.