Reactions to Rosemary’s Baby and New York’s Abortion Laws, 1968-1970
Rosemary’s Baby was one of the biggest cinematic hits of 1968. It was nominated for and won numerous national and international film awards— for direction, for best actress, best supporting actress, best film, and others.
The average ticket price in 1968 was $1.31 (USA Today), and Rosemary’s Baby made $33 million at the box office worldwide, which means approximately 25 million tickets to the film were sold. Even assuming that some of those tickets were bought by viewers who saw the film more than once, that’s still a lot of individual people, mostly Americans, viewing the film.
Rosemary’s Baby was on screens in the United States for more than a year.
During that time, Americans shrieked together at the physiological and psychological stresses of her pregnancy, they cringed at Rosemary’s loneliness and isolation, they shuddered at her rape, and they worried about the pregnancy that seemed apt to kill her. They screamed at the domestic horror she found herself trapped in – the realness and plausibility of it all, at least as much as they did at the supernatural wonder of it.
Renata Adler said in her Times review, “Mia Farrow is quite marvelous, pale, suffering, almost constantly onscreen in a difficult role that requires her to be learning for almost two hours what the audience has guessed from the start. One begins to think it is the kind of thing that might really have happened to her, that a rough beast did slouch toward East 72nd Street to be born.”
The horror of Rosemary’s Baby is the horror of reproductive agency being denied to women, and the movie, rather than making it seem unbelievable and unreal, made it seem like something “that might have really happened to her.”
The enormity of the film’s popularity both reflected and concentrated abortion reform sentiment in New York. Watching this film means watching someone who is raped, and then forced to carry a rape-induced pregnancy to term. Watching this film is thus watching a woman forced to comply with actual state and national regulations about abortion in 1968-69. Watching this film, moreover, isn’t just watching the film; it’s empathizing with Rosemary, worrying that she will die, worrying that her baby will be born demonic.
Everything in the film is geared to activate our sympathy with Rosemary—she is in no way depicted as a selfish, promiscuous, contemptible woman. Quite the contrary, she is consistently depicted as a modern Virgin Mary, who is raped by Satan and bullied by malevolent neighbors, a cruel husband, and a corrupt doctor into carrying the Antichrist to term.
Through their encounter with this film, viewers were forced right into a reproductive disaster along with Rosemary. They were forced to live, imaginatively and empathically, through a worst-case scenario of a woman being denied adequate medical care and access to abortion during a pregnancy that began with rape. This film urges viewers to shift their thinking around reproductive rights.
Rosemary, we think, has a right to better care than she receives. She has a right to see a real doctor, and not a quack or a “sadistic nut,” as her friends call him. She has a right to her own health. She has a right to the truth. Rosemary is the poster child for why abortion should be legal.
One reviewer from Time magazine specifically clocked the film’s relationship to reproductive agency, calling the film “a wicked argument against planned parenthood.” Now, on first blush, to my twenty-first century ear, that sounds incorrect, backward: Planned Parenthood is today known as an abortion-providing institution. But it wasn’t that in 1968, because abortion was illegal, except in hospital contexts, when the mother’s life was demonstrably in danger.
Founded in 1916, Planned Parenthood started as a birth control clinic. In the 1930s, Planned Parenthood lobbied for the destigmatization of birth control and actively advocated for and funded the development of the birth control pill in the ’40s and ’50s.
In 1965, two years before Levin wrote his novel, partially through the advocacy of Planned Parenthood, the birth control pill was legalized in ten states. The idea of the pill, of course, was that you should be able to “plan” your parenthood, not just to have it fall into your lap against your wishes. But Planned Parenthood was not an abortion provider in 1967-68, or, at least, that wasn’t its public face, as it is now.
The claim that the film is a “a wicked argument against planned parenthood” means that Rosemary’s is the ultimate “planned” pregnancy— planned and prepped for by a whole coven of witches and one very bad husband. In a tongue-in-cheek way, this reviewer clearly sees the film as a defense of the mother’s being allowed to choose her own reproductive fate.
Pregnancy isn’t something that should be “planned” for by entities outside of the mother herself.
In the few months after the release of the film, there was a tidal wave of public will to rethink New York State’s antiabortion laws.
By November 1968, five months after the movie’s June release, while it was still in theaters around the country, The New York Times ran an article about how “abortion experts” convened at a conference to argue that women should have control over whether to carry a pregnancy to term, noting that doctors routinely provide abortion to “known patients who can afford it,” regardless of what the laws are in their state, and pointing out that the newly loosened abortion laws in six states were not loose enough.
In November, the Times ran an editorial calling for the radical reform of abortion law; it then ran a response letter that even urged for the total repeal of abortion law, arguing that a decision about terminating a pregnancy should be left entirely to a woman and her doctor.
In December of that year, an article critical of California’s reformed abortion laws argued not that the reform was too much but that it was too little, citing numerous cases in which women who, by law, should have been able to access abortions (for medical reasons or rape), were denied them.
Public sentiment was shifting, and fast. People had come to understand the horrific costs of antiabortion legislation for women. They had come to believe that the decision about whether to terminate a pregnancy should be just that: a decision. It shouldn’t need to be an emergency situation because it should be a private matter decided between a woman and her physician.
The frustration with abortion law, particularly in New York State, picked up momentum in 1969, while Rosemary’s Baby was still in theaters.
In early 1969, the Presbytery of New York City began to advocate not reforming, but repealing New York’s abortion laws. Women stormed the New York State Legislature in late winter 1969, demanding abortion law repeal. The Episcopal Diocese of Rochester advocated the repeal of New York’s abortion laws, arguing that abortion was a matter to be decided on the basis of individual conscience, not by law.
A scorching editorial ran in March in the Times, critiquing New York’s “savage and antiquated abortion laws” and noting that Jewish and Protestant authorities, medical and legal authorities alike were now championing not just reform but repeal, and that the “intransigent” opposition of the Roman Catholic Church was the main obstacle to letting abortion be decided according to “individual conscience.”
In October, 125 people in New York sued the state to declare New York State abortion law unconstitutional; the suit said that the laws violated women’s right to privacy—a relatively new move in the fight against abortion law.
By November, a judge had decided the suit had enough merit to be heard by a Federal Supreme Court panel.
Where people had been talking about the dangerousness of illegal abortion and about the needless death of women, now they were talking about women’s rights to privacy, to equal opportunity, to freedom of choice.
Emphasizing the enormity of the shift in attitude that took place in 1968-69, an article in the Times ran, which opened as follows: “As recently as two years ago, the idea that American women have a constitutional right to have abortions was heard only from the radical fringes of the feminist movement. Today, a growing number of lawyers and judges are predicting that this right will eventually be recognized by the Supreme Court.”
An article in The New York Times from early 1970 rang the same bell: “A right to abortion. Such a notion, at first hearing, sounds fantastic, illusory,” but it then goes on to recount how the state of California and the District of Columbia had both, in the previous year, challenged abortion laws, on grounds that they violated women’s rights to privacy and autonomy. These cases, according to the article, were good precedent for a federal decision that might overturn the New York State abortion laws as unconstitutional. Where people had been talking about making safer abortions slightly more available in some cases, now people were talking about how abortion restriction was, on its face, unconstitutional, because it violated the rights of women, their rights to privacy, to bodily autonomy, to decision-making about their own lives.
In 1970, the floodgates opened. Washington and Vermont moved to ease abortion restrictions. California’s judiciary decided that antiabortion laws were unconstitutional. Arizona’s State House approved a bill lifting all curbs on abortions performed by licensed doctors. Hawaii passed a law decriminalizing abortion entirely and making it a medical matter between a woman and her doctor, manifesting what a New York Times journalist called “the revolutionary change in public attitudes toward abortion.”
Finally, in 1970, that revolutionary change came home to roost in New York.
In mid-March, having failed to pass even a modest reform bill for the previous three years, the New York State Senate roundly endorsed a total repeal of abortion laws, by a margin of 31-26. The new law would make abortion a matter to be decided wholly and exclusively by a woman and her doctor. A few weeks later, the Assembly approved the radical repeal by a margin of 76-73; New York State would now make abortion a legal right of women and a decision to be made between her and her doctor, privately, and without interference from the law or the police.
By 1970, abortion criminalization was seen as cruel toward women and archaic. It was seen, in effect, as a form of state-sanctioned abuse of women, a restriction of their rights and humanity, and a danger to their well-being.
Many things contributed to this cultural shift: grassroots organizers, protests, medical associations, religious institutions, local politicians, news media pressures.
I would never want to minimize the importance of those movements, institutions, and activists.
But Rosemary’s Baby also played a major role, because over the course of a year, tens of millions of Americans—male and female alike – watched Rosemary get raped and forced to maintain a pregnancy at extremely high physical and psychological cost to herself as well as to the world around her. They watched her innocence get exploited by a flock of abusers. They felt her pain, her fear, and—perhaps most of all – her solitude.
It’s much harder to make reproductive decisions for someone else once you’ve been through a reproductive crisis yourself. And, through the empathogenic magic of Rosemary’s Baby, millions and millions of Americans had been through a reproductive crisis. And they had seen its result: to destroy Rosemary psychologically and to bring Satan’s spawn into the world.
Something had to change, and, mercifully, it did.
Conceiving of Coercive Control
Moreover, whereas the film’s critique of abortion policy was on pace with what was going on in the press and in women’s rights activism, its take on how reproductive violence could be committed by a male malefactor was years—decades, really-ahead of its time. Because, whatever supernatural horrors may arise in this film, there is an acutely interpersonal domestic horror at its heart: Guy is a betrayer, a liar, and the facilitator of acute sexual violence toward his own wife. He may not be the one raping and impregnating her, but he certainly does bawd her out—and to the devil, no less.
Domestic horror is something to scream about, something deeper than the Satanism, deeper than evil neighbors.
As a domestic abuse survivor I know said to me, when I asked her what she’d felt when she saw this movie in the 1960s, “That movie was terrifying. She is so trapped with that husband. So helpless. He breaks her down bit by bit, until there’s nothing left.” When viewers scream with Rosemary, they’re also screaming about Guy.
But why is Guy so disquieting as a character? He doesn’t actually rape Rosemary himself. He doesn’t hit her or throw her around while she’s pregnant-though he does shake her fiercely at one point.
Guy is what scholars and domestic violence activists and advocates now call a coercive controller.
Coercive control, a term coined by domestic violence researcher Evan Stark, describes a kind of domestic violence that, while it may not ever escalate to battery or rape, nevertheless keeps a woman in a state of perpetual fear, dehumanization, and entrapment.
Stark argues that coercive control is a crucial part of understanding the interpersonal dynamics at work in any domestic abuse situation, because what’s ultimately at stake for the abuser is his ability to control his victim. He may use verbal abuse, psychological torture, or emotional terrorism on his domestic partner; he may restrict her access to her friends or family, or to her finances. He may restrict her access to knowledge or education. He may interfere with her reproductive life, either by tampering with her birth control or by restricting her agency once she becomes pregnant. He may control what the woman eats or drinks, or what she wears. He may control what doctors she sees and under what circumstances she is permitted to seek medical help in the first place.
He may control her access to transportation, as by hiding her car or her car keys. He may lock her in her home; he may drug her to keep her under his control. The ultimate goal of this kind of coercion is to induce the victim to question her own reality, her own humanity, and her own basic rights, so that she grows ever more entrapped in the abuser’s web of distortion, mistreatment, and control.
This language of coercive control wasn’t any more available in 1968 than was language about reproductive abuse, but even so, that’s a big part of what we witness when we watch the film.
Guy does control what Rosemary eats and drinks, whom she sees, what doctor she visits. When Rosemary cuts her hair short, and Guy openly criticizes her appearance, telling her it’s an “awful” haircut, he is already trying to make her feel small, weak. When Rosemary wants to see her friends, Guy insists they socialize only with the Castevets; Guy wants to restrict her access to her usual and preferred social supports.
When Rosemary wants to choose her own doctor, Guy insists she see the doctor the Castevets recommend. When she points out the “chalky undertaste” of the mousse, Guy denies that it’s there and forces her to eat it anyway. When Rosemary wakes up from her drug-induced haze, Guy pretends he was the one who forced himself on her – not Satan.
Guy’s chronic gaslighting and undermining of Rosemary’s reality facilitates and enables her becoming pregnant with the Antichrist and carrying it to term.
After the Satan-child is born, Guy does actually lock Rosemary in their home and drug her. Rosemary is trapped, controlled, dehumanized, not so much by Satan but very much by Guy, colluding with their evil, scheming neighbors.
Even though there was no technical language for coercive control in the late ’60s, that doesn’t mean people didn’t see it.
In fact, in 1968, reviewer Kathleen Carroll registered that the central horror of Rosemary’s Baby wasn’t Satanism but interpersonal betrayal, which resulted in Mia Farrow’s entrapment and dehumanization.
“Miss Farrow’s special magic is her fragility. She reminds one of a fawn in captivity. What she does so remarkably well is draw sympathy to Rosemary who is herself a captive fawn, a totally helpless heroine surrounded by evil on all sides with no way out.” To Carroll, Rosemary’s Baby isn’t just a supernatural horror story about witches and Satanists. In fact, it isn’t primarily a supernatural horror story: Instead, it’s an empathogenic story about female helplessness, when an innocent woman is surrounded and conspired against by an enclave of domestic malefactors.
Carroll does not talk about the “evil” as sexual assault, reproductive violence, or even as wife battery, but she does see Rosemary as “a captive fawn,” surrounded by evil on all sides. What Carroll responds to, and what the novel and film both seek to highlight, is coercive control.
So, in the end, what’s absolutely astonishing about this film isn’t just that it forces viewers to contend with reproductive violence and rape, and to think differently about abortion and reproductive rights, but that it associates reproductive violence with other, as-yet-unnameable forms of domestic violence.
Without Guy’s coercion, Satan never would have had access to Rosemary’s womb.
Rosemary’s Baby made readers aware that reproductive violence was not only a horror that women were subjected to entirely against their will, but also that controlling behaviors were largely to blame when that violence happened.
Though directed, paradoxically, by a notorious violator of women’s rights—a complexity I’ll return to in chapter seven—the film Rosemary’s Baby itself stands as perhaps the single most powerful and important filmic contribution to American feminism of the late 1960s.
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