"Untitled: The Abortion Pastels": Paula Rego’s Series on Abortion

At last, women’s experience of abortion is hanging on the walls of a museum so that we do not forget so easily what abortion is about. Untitled: The Abortion Pastels are great canvases depicting women undergoing abortion. The artist, Paula Rego, was born in Portugal in 1935 and has lived in Britain since 1951. She is a remarkable artist and has a huge production that spans more than 50 years. If you don’t know her work, let Untitled be your starting point to discover a great artist and feminist.

Untitled is a series of ten paintings, done over a period of approximately six months between July 1998 and February 1999. They were painted because Rego was roused to engage with politics in her work in a way that she had not done since her earliest paintings and collages on the subject of the former Portuguese dictator Salazar.^*

In 1998, Portugal had just held a referendum on whether to liberalise the country’s existing law on abortion, which at that time was only available legally to a small number of women in exceptional circumstances. However, an insufficient proportion of the population turned out to vote and the proposal was defeated 51% to 49%. Thus, for want of only a few votes, the situation was not changed. Paula Rego was infuriated by what she saw as people’s deliberate refusal to face up to the issue, and their willingness to accept and maintain the status quo. So she used her art to “speak up”

The very choice of theme in the series Untitled is at odds with long-standing traditions in the visual arts in the West. Twenty-two years before Rego painted the series, John T Noonan wrote that abortion had rarely been a subject of art:

“Birth has almost everywhere been celebrated in painting. The Nativity has been a symbol of gladness, not only because of its sacred significance, but because of its human meaning — “joy that a man is born into the world”. Abortion, in contrast, has rarely been the subject of art. Unlike other forms of death, abortion has not been seen by painters as a release, a sacrifice or a victory. Characteristically it has stood for sterility, futility and absurdity.”

¹

Paintings that might fit Noonan’s description of how abortion would likely be depicted in art are “Henry Ford Hospital” (1932) and “Frida and the miscarriage” (1932) by the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo as testimonies of how her body aborted every pregnancy she had. The long wished-for child with her husband, Diego Rivera, also an artist, was never to be. Untitled can also be seen in the light of Tracy Emin’s graphic exploitations of a woman’s experience of miscarriage and botched abortion in “Terrible wrong” (1997) and “Homage to Edvard Munch and all my dead children” (1998).

What Paula Rego is depicting is quite the opposite, however, as she is making us see that it is the woman’s choice and decision to abort her pregnancy.

In an interview with Ana Marques Gastaõ, Paula Rego describes how she came to do the series:

“The (abortion) series was born from my indignation… It is unbelievable that women who have an abortion should be considered criminals. It reminds me of the past… I cannot abide the idea of blame in relation to this act. What each woman suffers in having to do it is enough. But all this stems from Portugal’s totalitarian past, from women dressed up in aprons, baking cakes like good housewives. In democratic Portugal today there is still a subtle form of oppression… The question of abortion is part of all that violent context.”

²

Rego made Untitled with the express purpose of exhibiting the paintings in Portugal and reopening the debate. All the drawings, pastels and prints have abortion as their subject. Not the legal, hospital-sanctioned abortion, still unavailable to Portuguese women, but situations emblematic of the often desperate measures women and girls may take to rid themselves of the consequences of their — and someone else’s — actions. Exhibited in Portugal to great critical acclaim and much media attention, the series depicts a variety of women, from schoolgirls to society ladies, either preparing for an abortion or coping with its aftermath.

Paula Rego, stepping into the fray both with her 1998 abortion series and after the controversy in 2002 in Portugal over the abortion trial, links the subject of female pain surrounding the problem of illegal abortion (and, by implication, contemporary democratic Portugal) to a dictatorial past that it would seem, after all, has not yet been overcome.

Abortion remains illegal in Portugal, available legally only in exceptional circumstances, and clandestine abortions take place there every day. An estimated 20,000—40,000 illegal and unsafe abortions take place in Portugal each year. In 2003, 11,000 women were hospitalised with complications and five women died from unsafe illegal abortions.³ The existing law threatens both pregnant women undergoing abortion, and those who are helping them, with long prison sentences. Portugal is the only country in the European Union that actively prosecutes women and doctors for illegal abortion. In 2001 and 2002 Portugal once again made headlines with their strict abortion laws, and on 18 January 2002 the trial of 17 women and a nurse accused of performing abortions for them was concluded in Maia, Portugal. Of the 17 women, charges were dropped against only one. Another woman had a four-month prison term commuted to a fine; the remaining 15 were acquitted for lack of evidence. The nurse, however, was condemned to eight years and six months in prison.⁴ Then in mid-summer 2004, once again Portugal made headlines with a new trial of three women charged with carrying out abortions in the city of Setúbal. At the same time some 10,000 women are estimated to cross over into Spain every year to have a safe abortion.

“Paula Rego’s abortion pictures are images of revenge against social injustice, of the triumph of will over circumstance. The details — a discarded watch and pants, comforting woolly socks pulled on with a smart dress, a school uniform worn with the confident insouciance of the rebel — are heartbreaking, but the artist makes it clear that what is happening is the intention of each woman, who fully accepts her role as protagonist in the action. Crucially, they are doing this, they are not having it done to them: it is their right and their choice. Many of the women meet the viewer’s gaze. Others are turned in on themselves, making it clear that what is happening is no one’s business but their own. None of them accepts the role of victim.”

⁵

In an interview in 2001, Paula Rego explains her position on reproductive rights. The interviewer Edward King asks her some matter-of-fact questions about her relations with the Catholic church and about the paintings.⁶ Rego says that she is against the Pope’s policy of not allowing birth control, which she thinks is criminal, but she likes the saints. The series was triggered for her by memories of all the suffering among Portuguese women, which made her angry. She also remembers when abortion was still illegal in England and that made her dress the women up as schoolgirls, English schoolgirls. When Edward Kind comments that as far as he knows this subject has never been tackled before, Paula Rego affirms that it is not the sort of thing artists often do. She herself started out by showing an abortion full frontal but decided against it as she didn’t want to show blood, gore or anything to sicken people or make them turn away from the pictures without really looking at them. Artists want to make people look. She therefore felt it was better to use pretty colours and to make the paintings agreeable, and in that way to make people look at life. The pictures don’t show anything specific, but you see all the props, the plastic bucket, the worn furniture, the rags and then the aftermath of the girl/woman doubled up in pain, feeling ashamed and bruised. And also completely triumphant, not a victim but in control because she has made her own decision.

“What emerges from the abortion polemic that gave rise to these pictures is the enduring impact of Catholic influence on national politics in post-revolution democracy in Portugal… Political and clerically enforced maternity is still a reality in Portugal, and Paula Rego’s Untitled (silenced) works speak loudly about the problems that prevail under the current status quo.”

⁷

Paula Rego is a proud feminist, and her paintings confront the anti-abortion lobby. She makes us see the young girls and the women, some of them clearly unprepared to be mothers, others who had not planned to become a mother once again.

Paula Rego has hopefully started a new era, making it legitimate to depict abortion in art as a woman’s right to choose. It will be interesting to see in the future how the theme is followed up by a new generation of artists inspired by Rego’s paintings. Paula Rego has made it easier for others to take part with their art in the political battle for women’s right to choose.

Notes

* Paula Rego grew up in a Portugal where Fascism was the national ideology and the dictatorship of Salazar was very much present. The church and the state formed an alliance, and national, religious and sexual politics were impregnated with patriarchy, Catholicism and Fascism.