Playboy Magazine’s Unlikely History of Abortion-Rights Activism
Much will be said about Hugh Hefner’s legacy, the polarizing man who created Playboy in 1953 and who died Tuesday at age 91, but a largely unknown story is Hefner’s critical role in the fight for women’s reproductive rights. Playboy was the first major national consumer magazine to advocate for legal abortion on demand. Its coverage began in April of 1963 (before even Planned Parenthood joined the abortion-rights movement) when Sex and the Single Girl author Helen Gurley Brown responded to a question about abortion in an interview. “It’s outrageous that girls can’t be aborted here,” she said. “Abortion is just surrounded by all this hush-hush and horror, like insanity used to be.”
You’d assume that Playboy supported abortion rights only to mitigate the consequences of sexual freedom for men. But Playboy first wrote about abortion from a public-health standpoint, publishing letters from women that detailed the emotional and physical pain caused by botched and illegal abortions. Readers debated the issue of abortion in the Playboy Forum, the magazine’s current-events section. Over 350 letters about abortion appeared from 1963 to 1973; women wrote about a third. Many chose to remain nameless as they shared their gruesome stories.
