Thread by @She_Brings_Joy

🧵🪡

Marilyn Monroe was a real person.

Created in the image of God, just like you and I.

She was beautiful, talented, and wanted nothing more in life than to be a mother.

I do not believe she ever had an abortion, despite what Netflix tells you.

However.

Judy Garland did.

She was forced to abort two babies at the demand of her studio.

It’s suggested this is what led to her drug and alcohol abuse.

So did Lana Turner- who suffered a forced abortion with no anesthesia while on a publicity tour- the studio docked her pay $500 and she was back in front of cameras within days.

Jean Harlow was in love, and wanted to get married- but her studio heads wanted her to remain a single bombshell… so when she became pregnant with her lover’s child, she was forced to abort: as bad as a married women would be for the box office, an unwed mother was even worse.

Rumor has it that Harlow at one point became so desperate to have a child she began to engage in anonymous one-night stands in hopes of conceiving: it was said she sometimes didn’t even change her clothes between trysts. She died, childless, at 26 due to a kidney infection most

likely the result of damage done to her body by a childhood bout of scarlet fever.

Ava Gardner was threatened with a violation of contract if she didn’t abort a pregnancy. She was flown out of the country with a studio watchdog with her at all times. The baby was her husband, Frank Sinatra’s.

He wasn’t informed.

Joan Crawford, prototype for all bad moms, was also a victim of the Hollywood morality trap- she’d grown up in abject poverty and abuse, and didn’t want to go back.

Contrary to pro-abortion belief, this is not an example of choice or women’s empowerment.

Bette Davis, Joan’s arch-nemesis, also aborted: no evidence of overt force in her story- but à la Michele Williams, she attributed her career to her lack of children early in life….

Unlike Williams, she actually may have lost everything if she’d carried her baby.

Davis’ mother insisted she couldn’t have both a career by and children. Davis was documented to have terminated multiple pregnancies. 💔

Lupe Velez committed suicide rather than have the expected abortion, despairing after her lover refused to marry her. She couldn’t countenance being an unwed mother, nor could she countenance killing her child.

Dorothy Dandridge was forced to abort her white, married lover’s baby not only due to a studio morality clause… but because their relationship was illegal in some parts of the US.

These are just the stories we know about. Due to the near universal use of morality clauses in star’s contracts, it’s safe to assume your favorite old time film star was involved in an abortion, none of which would have been undertaken with a full measure of freedom by the woman

carrying the baby, due to strict expectations from studios… studios which ignored the rapaciousness of male executives and stars.

Like Charlie Chaplin, who married a 16 year old girl after her mother threatened to have him arrested for statutory rape: he’d been grooming her

for 9 years.

He allegedly told the girl he would marry her, but make her life miserable: he also forced her into threesomes with famous Hollywood actresses, telling her all married couples did such things.

Men like Errol Flynn, another rapist who barely escaped jail time as a star, and previous to stardom, purchased a 12 year old indigenous girl in Papua New Guinea from her father, for the purpose of having a sexual relationship.

Dozens of silent film stars before these have sordid stories too.

Most women in Hollywood were subject to a lethal combination of predatory men in power, strict morality clauses which forbid them marry or have children — and parents (especially mothers) who saw their daughters

as meal tickets.

There are a minuscule number of women who did push back- the most notable being Loretta Young, who was forced to stage a massive deception in order to deliver her child. The baby was promptly given to an orphanage and Young “adopted” her own

daughter at 18 months of age.

The baby was conceived when Clark Gable forced his way into her train car one night, and coerced her into having sex with him.

She didn’t know she had been raped until she was in her 70s, because no one had ever explained to her that rape didn’t

have to be violent.

Twitter is telling me I’ve almost reached my limit for a thread, so I’ll end my lecture on this note:

It’s more than likely if Marilyn had been able to conceive and carry a child to term, she would have suffered the same abuse her Hollywood cohort had.

But she wasn’t able to. Her history of endometriosis (which has been definitively linked to child abuse and childhood sexual assault- both of which she experienced) most likely caused her infertility.

Marilyn Monroe may never have had an abortion. But for pro-choice mavens to

pretend her solitary fortune in avoiding the butchers knife is any indication of women’s empowerment, is ridiculous.

#MarilynMonroe
#Blonde
#BlondeNetflix

I would like to clarify, as well: it’s easy for many of us to dismiss these stories as the stars themselves choosing mammon- but during this time there were also extremely strong “social hygiene” programs happening in the US. These events were occurring during the same time poor

women, like Joan Crawford would be if she were sent back home, we’re being sterilized by the state. Women were being jailed for presumed promiscuity - some estimate more than 100k women were sent to live in overcrowded workhouses over the course of the “American Plan”- in one

case a married woman was removed from a hotel room she was sharing with her husband, under suspicion of prostitution, because she could not produce her marriage certificate.

The fear of venereal disease was, of course, only used to jail women… and it was to protect our

vulnerable troops.

So relieving women of their liberty because they may have, at some time, engaged in sex outside of marriage was in the interests of national security. 🙄

So in no way can we assume these women were just going to go home and have their babies. We have no idea

what they were told would happen to them. They could have been threatened with incarceration, forced sterilization- we only know they were very vulnerable, had no power, and the men who owned them — because they were for all intents and purposes, products rather than people —

had a lot of connections and probably wanted to keep making money off of them. 💔

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