Life Comes to Judith, by Antoinette Spitzer (1931)

Advertisement for Life Comes to Judith. “Antoinette Spitzer’s heroine in Life Comes to Judith belongs to a comparatively new and, if one may judge by the book sales, an increasingly popular type of amorous adventuress: the young woman on her own,” declared the New York Times’ review. As the novel opens, Judith Zorn is on her own in more ways than one. She’s headed for the Brooklyn jail to interview a woman just arrested for the murder of her husband. She’s left her husband for a lover of uncertain reliability and fidelity. And she’s just found out she’s pregnant. Life Comes to Judith is, I’ll be frank, of far greater historical than literary interest. By 1931, there had been dozens fictional accounts of abortion, almost always depicted as a desperate step taken to avoid the shame and economic hardship of single motherhood, as detailed in Lesley Hall’s Literary Abortion page. And Judith not only contemplates but seeks out a doctor willing to undertake the illegal procedure and is about…