Just one day after feminist icon Gloria Steinem’s death, USA Today revisited one of the most consequential moments of her life: the illegal abortion she obtained as a 22-year-old American in London.
The newspaper’s framing left little ambiguity about how it viewed the story.
‘Gloria Steinem’s touching tribute to doctor who made her abortion possible.’
The September 3 article by books reporter Clare Mulroy described Steinem’s dedication to Dr. John Sharpe as among her ‘most moving work.’
Sharpe was the London physician who helped Steinem obtain an abortion in 1957, a decade before Britain’s Abortion Act of 1967 substantially liberalized the country’s abortion laws.
Steinem never forgot him.
‘You Will Do What You Want to Do With Your Life’
Nearly six decades later, Steinem dedicated her 2015 memoir, My Life on the Road, to Sharpe.
She recalled that Sharpe knew she had broken off an engagement and was preparing to travel to India. According to Steinem, he agreed to help her on two conditions: that she keep his identity secret and pursue the life she wanted.
Steinem concluded the dedication by telling the long-deceased doctor that she believed he would no longer object to being named.
‘I’ve done the best I could with my life,’ she wrote. ‘This book is for you.’
For Steinem and abortion-rights supporters, the episode became a powerful story about bodily autonomy and a physician willing to defy restrictive laws.
For abortion opponents, the same story represents something profoundly different: the termination of an unborn human life being celebrated as the event that enabled Steinem to pursue the future she wanted.
It is that moral divide that makes USA Today’s decision to describe the tribute as ‘touching’ particularly striking.
The Abortion That Helped Shape an Activist
Steinem’s abortion was not merely a private episode buried in her biography. It eventually became intertwined with the cause that helped define her public life.
Steinem later said attending a 1969 abortion-rights speak-out marked the beginning of her activism. She had kept her own abortion secret for years before becoming one of America’s most recognizable advocates for abortion rights and the broader feminist movement.
She ultimately co-founded Ms. magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus and spent decades arguing that women’s equality required control over reproduction.
Her position remained unchanged late into her life.
In 2022, amid the national battle over abortion following the reversal of Roe v. Wade, Steinem publicly recalled her own experience and argued that bodily autonomy was inseparable from equality and democracy.
Two Radically Different Readings of the Same Story
That divide remains as sharp as ever.
To supporters of abortion rights, Sharpe helped a frightened 22-year-old woman make a decision about her own future at considerable professional risk.
To opponents of abortion, the story has a missing character: the unborn child whose life ended in the procedure.
Those competing views are precisely why the language used to describe the episode matters.
USA Today could have simply reported that Steinem dedicated her memoir to the doctor who helped her obtain an illegal abortion.
Instead, its headline characterized the tribute itself as ‘touching.’
That is more than a sterile description of a historical event. It is a framing choice in one of America’s most bitterly contested moral and political debates.
Steinem, who died Wednesday at 92, spent much of her life helping turn that debate into a central component of modern feminism. Her 1957 abortion preceded that activism, but she later identified the abortion-rights movement as transformative to her political awakening.
Nearly seven decades after the procedure, the argument surrounding it has outlived her.
One side sees liberation.
The other sees a life that never got the chance to be lived.
And even in an obituary-week retrospective, America is still fighting over which story gets told.