In 1921, after the court case in which actor Fatty Arbuckle was tried for rape and murder (and eventually acquitted), Universal was the first studio to insert so-called ‘morality clauses’ in actors’ contracts. The clause read: “[H]e (she) will not do or commit anything tending to degrade him (her) in society or bring him (her) into public hatred, contempt, scorn or ridicule, or tending to shock, insult or offend the community or outrage public morals or decency, or tending to the prejudice of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company or the motion picture industry.”

A breach of the clause would empower Universal to terminate the contract with five days’ notice. Other studios quickly followed Universal.

By signing these contracts, the actors had little control over their lives. The studios dictated whom they dated or married, how much they weighed, how they dressed in public (no pants for women), which roles they played. ‘Lavender’ marriages were arranged for gay actors; uppers were prescribed to keep actors working long hours; divorces were discouraged; drunk driving accidents, suicides, and even murders were hushed up with payoffs to cops and District Attorneys.

One of the most egregious reasons to enforce the clause was when actresses got pregnant, whether they were married or not. The prevailing morality of the times dictated that unmarried women who got pregnant were fallen women, and the studios certainly could not afford their stars to be perceived that way. And a married star who got pregnant lost the carefully cultivated girl-next-door or bombshell image that was sold to the public. Add to that the fact that the studios were machines churning out hundreds of movies a year. Any actress sidelined by pregnancy wasn’t pulling her weight and would be fined or dropped.

In came the fixers who would arrange secret abortions so the actresses could keep their careers. Most came from the lower middle classes, and those that catapulted into stardom and became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams were not about to jeopardize their careers by defying the studios. Back in the early 20^th century, when the average annual income of a family was $1,000 a year, a star like Mary Pickford was making $50,000 a week.

Marlene Dietrich is quoted in Cari Beauchamp’s book “Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood” as saying that abortion was ‘our birth control.’

The most notorious fixer was MGM’s Howard Strickling whose actions are documented in the book “The Fixers” by E.J. Fleming. In 1931, he arranged Joan Crawford’s abortion when she was married to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The couple was estranged at the time and Crawford believed that the father was Clark Gable with whom she was having a torrid and public affair. Irving Thalberg demanded that the two end their liaison and Gable complied. He is quoted by Fleming as saying, “He [Thalberg] would have ended my career in fifteen minutes. I had no interest in becoming a waiter.”

Jean Harlow was another star who had an extramarital affair with actor Max Baer in 1935 while married to cameraman Hal Rosson. Baer’s wife was threatening to name Harlow publicly for destroying her marriage when Harlow found herself pregnant. She would check into a hospital for an ‘appendectomy.’ It was one of many abortions that she underwent. A year later, she got pregnant from an affair with William Powell who refused to marry her. Strickling arranged for ‘Mrs. Jean Carpenter’ to have an abortion at the Good Shepherd Hospital while putting out the word that she was there ‘to get some rest,’ according to Fleming.

Jeanette MacDonald was another star who had a studio-arranged abortion set up by Strickling. At the time, in 1935, she had just thrown over Nelson Eddy whom she had announced she was marrying which caused a furor, then married actor Gene Raymond, and still carried on her affair with Louis B. Mayer.

Lana Turner and Artie Shaw’s marriage ended three months after they returned from their honeymoon in 1941. When she found out she was pregnant, Strickling arranged an abortion for her in Hawaii where he sent her for a publicity tour along with her mother and her agent. According to Fleming, “The abortion took place without anesthesia on her hotel bed. Her mother covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her cries. It was performed by a studio doctor who was paid $500 that was then deducted from Turner’s paycheck.” She was back to work in a week. Later, Turner also aborted Tyrone Power’s baby in 1947.

Judy Garland married her first husband David Rose without the permission of MGM in 1941. The two eloped to Las Vegas and she soon got pregnant. Strickling orchestrated the abortion and made her keep it a secret from Rose. She had a second abortion after an affair with Tyrone Power in 1943. He was married at the time to a woman 20 years older whom he refused to divorce.

In “Miss Tallulah Bankhead,” author Lee Israel writes that Bankhead got “abortions like other women got permanent waves.”

In the biography “The Girl Who Walked Home Alone,” Bette Davis admits to author Charlotte Chandler that she had several abortions so she could keep working and support her family. In 1934, she had an abortion that allowed her to take the role of Mildred in Of Human Bondage, which earned her first Oscar nomination, a role she described as the biggest in her life thus far. She later had three children, the first at age 39.

In the book “The Golden Girls of MGM,” Ava Gardner told Jane Ellen Wayne that she had an abortion when married to Frank Sinatra. He did not know of it. “MGM had all sorts of penalty clauses about their stars having babies,” she said. “If I had one, my salary would be cut off. So how could I make a living? Frank was broke and my future movies were going to take me all over the world. I couldn’t have a baby with that sort of thing going on. MGM made all the arrangements for me to fly to London. Someone from the studio was with me all the time. The abortion was hush hush … very discreet.’”

Then there were the stars who refused to have abortions and chose drastic means to cope with their choice. Lupe Velez was distraught when the father of her child, Austrian actor Harald Ramond, refused to marry her. Rather than abort the child, she committed suicide by overdosing on Seconals washed down by alcohol. For her, it was the only way out.

When Marion Davies got pregnant with her lover William Randolph Hearst, she didn’t abort the baby but gave her to her sister to raise as her own. Rumors abounded that her ‘niece’ Patricia Lake was actually her daughter but they were never confirmed. But Davies supported Lake throughout her life and upon her death, left her half her estate, valued at $20 million. Before Lake died, she admitted that Hughes told her he was her father.

Loretta Young, a devout Catholic, was seduced by Clark Gable when they were filming The Call of the Wild. She refused to have an abortion to appease the married Gable. Instead, she left for Europe for a six-month break because of ‘exhaustion,’ then returned to Los Angeles where she gave birth to a daughter, hiding in a house in Venice. Then she ‘adopted’ two babies, a story conveniently given to gossip columnist Louella Parsons to break. One of the babies was her own daughter; the other was subsequently returned to her biological mother who ‘changed her mind’ about giving up her child. The stories were planted by Strickling, and Young only confessed the truth in her posthumous autobiography.

While the studio system is long gone and having children out of wedlock no longer ruins a career or makes one a social pariah, the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade has returned us to the days of back-alley abortions. The more things change, the more they stay the same.