A Not-So-Silent Scream;
Gothic and US Abortion Debate

Jacqueline Garner

Mississippi Valley State University In 1869, a state law was passed prohibiting abortion at any point in the pregnancy. (The Evil of the Age, 1869). A major problem in today’s society is abortion. This article discusses the way that people of the gothic community view abortion and the way that it impacts their society. Abortion is characterized as a ‘systematic business in wholesale murder’. I feel that this article was strong in explaining how abortion was debated in the United States. In the article it states that as a “systematic business in wholesale murder, thousands of human begins are thus murdered before they have seen the light of the world, and thousands upon thousands more of adults are irremediably ruined in constitution, health and happiness. In “The Evil of the Age” is nonfiction, but it resembles gothic fiction in both form and content: it promises to frighten and appall readers. The article also defined concisely; gothic is the literary genre that entertains readers by scaring them. The formal features of the genre include sensational rhetoric; suspense- driven narrative; plots involving persecuted heroines and sinister villains. The article goes in to detail where the Leslie Reagan states that, “the changing legal status of abortion failed to significantly alter the attitudes and actions of many ordinary Americans who continued to believe that abortion prior to quickening was an acceptable solution to an unaware pregnancy. The debate shows where the study of abortion identifies the previously unrecognized but influential role of gothic narratives in abortion politics. Silent Scream which is the point of the debate states that it is no longer enjoys the high profile it did in the 1980s, when President