Chapter 1
"Mamma, is it a sin for me to love my children:"
This was the searching question a 40-year-old man posed to his aging mother a few years ago in a large Eastern city. By itself, the query seems innocent enough. It could have come from any father of teenagers accused of overindulging his children, giving them too much allowance, a car of their own, or extra privileges.
But the man who asked this question was no ordinary parent. He spoke to his mother through the steel bars of his prison cell where he faced the death penalty for committing oral, rectal and coital intercourse regularly with his two teenage daughters over a period of five years.
"He had relations with me about twice a month," the man's 16-year-old daughter related to Dr. Frank Caprio, the internationally known Washington, D.C. psychiatrist. And in his classic work, VARIATIONS IN SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, Dr. Caprico quoted the distraught teenager as relating further that: "Once a month he would put his mouth to my sex parts and wanted me to put my mouth on his organ. He also said, 'Would you touch your sister?' Another time he said: 'What would you do if the three of us got together?' My sister told me everything a week before he was arrested. She decided to tell the priest and I felt relieved. I remember also he would have intercourse about three or four times in one afternoon, one time after another. Another time he wanted our dog to have intercourse with me. He had rectal intercourse with me twice..."
Dr. Caprio went on to report that the father was eventually committed to a mental hospital as a psychotic after a psychiatric examination.
The preceding (Case History No. I) is not an unusual incident. Allegations of incest against fathers of young girls come up almost daily in our large metropolitan areas. Yet for each case that reaches the attention of authorities, hundreds and perhaps thousands escape legal or medical attention.
The percentages revealed in the surveys of the Kinsey report on SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN FEMALE will perhaps throw some light on the universal prevalence of this one phase of incest alone. When applying these authoritative statistics to the figures of the 1960 census, it can be reliably estimated that out of the 65 million females 14 and over in the United States, that I% or almost 650,000, have had childhood sexual contacts with their own fathers.
But incest, legally and morally, is not limited to father-daughter or parent-child sex relations. This universally condemned sexual practice includes brother-sister and grandparent-grandchild relations. And although not defined by law in all jurisdictions, sexual activities between uncles and nephews or nieces, aunts and nephews or nieces, stepparents and step-children, and first cousins, are also regarded as incest throughout most of the civilized world.
Again, relying on the Kinsey percentages and applying them to the overall female population, we can authoritatively estimate that over 5% of the women and girls over 14 in this country had some incestuous contact in their childhood. And this figure of almost three and a half million is highly conservative. The Kinsey percentages were based on the answers to their questionnaires, and it is felt by many of those engaged in this type of research that incest is the( least-likely sex practice a person will admit to even under the cloak of assured anonymity.
We see the homosexuals today begging for legal recognition and moral acceptance. The wife-swappers and "swingers" are fighting their cases openly in courts of law, and winning. But we have yet to hear from anyone that all forms of incest should become an accepted or even a tolerated practice.
The law specifically delineates incest as "sexual intercourse between persons who, by reason of blood relationship through marriage, cannot legally marry." The word itself is of moral origin, deriving from the Latin incestum, meaning unchaste.
The possible hereditary defects that may result in births from incestuous relations have nothing to do with its universal condemnation. Even the most primitive tribes of prehistoric times dealt with the practice far more harshly than our contemporary society. The Zulus immediately executed one guilty of the crime, and other prehistoric cultures demanded suicide of the guilty party. The Babylonians punished incest by death or exile. The bawdy Romans considered it "unnatural," and the ancient Chinese cut off the heads of those who committed incest. The taboos among the Hebrews in pre-Christian times were closely related to the legal and moral restrictions of the Western cultures today, particularly in the United States and Great Britain.
In 16th Century Venice, the classic LEGGIE MEMORIE SULLA PROSTITUZIONE tells us that one Zuan Domenego Librer "together with his brother and another accomplice, were put to the torture (for committing pederasty upon each other); and in 1597, a married woman named Isabella Pisani was banished from Venice, with condemnation to death should she return, for having submitted to the embraces of her brother." A hundred years later in Edinburgh, Scotland, Major Thomas Weir and his sister Jane were sentenced to death by strangling at the stake and hanging, for having committed incest with each other.
Yesterday, as today, incest has been as widely practiced as it has been condemned. According to studies made by Dr. S. Kirson Weinberg, "Lot committed incest with his daughters at their instigation because they wanted children. Abraham married his half-sister, Sarah ... Reuben had relations with his father's wife, Billah, and nothing was done. Moses was the son of an aunt and nephew."
Right here in the United States, according to Dr. Caprio, ". . . the Mormons practiced incest until 1892 when both incest and polygamy were outlawed by the Utah legislature."
The noted British poet, Lord Byron, was publicly accused of incest with his sister Augusta by Lady Byron through an article written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the September 1869 edition of "The Atlantic Monthly." Although it was denied by many friends of the late Lord Byron, the account aroused a storm of interest around the world.
At about the same time, however, Queen Victoria of Britain openly proposed marriage to her first cousin, Prince Albert, and their union produced nine children. In fact, marriage of first cousins, a practice defined as incest by 21 of the United States today, was a common practice in the old royal households of Europe.
In ancient Egypt, it was the rule that kings had to marry their sisters. Thus Cleopatra, while cavorting around the Mediterranean with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, was nevertheless married to her brother Ptolemy XIII from 51 to 47 B.C., and to her younger brother Ptolemy XIV from 47 to 44 B.C., after the older brother's death.
The Incas of Peru as well as the Hawaiian royal families followed a similar custom. Hawaiian historian Ralph S. Kuykendall in his HAWAII, A HISTORY, tells us how Kinau daughter of Kamehame-ha I ruled for over a year with her brother at her side. James J. Michener in his epic novel HAWAII has indelibly impressed this Hawaiian custom on the reading public with his story of Keoki's marriage to his sister Neolani.
In Nabokov's world-famous novel LOLITA we see the pedophilic Humbert-Humbert justifying his sexual relationship with his nymphet step-daughter by stating: "Among Sicilians sexual relations between a father and his daughter are accepted as a matter of course, and the girl who participates in such relationship is not looked upon with disapproval by the society of which she is part. I'm a great admirer of Sicilians, fine athletes, fine musicians, fine upright people, Lo, and great lovers."
Incest has indeed become one of the most popular subjects of today's fiction and non-fiction. Whereas 20 years ago, any rational discussion of the subject, much less any story or theme depicting incestuous relations in a tolerant fight, was strictly forbidden, the case is quite different in 1967. The theme is treated openly in such novels as PEYTON PLACE, THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE, A LOSS OF ROSES. Humorous cartoons in every kind of publication from the sophisticated ESQUIRE to the roughhouse TEXAS RANGERS, have highlighted incest humor.
One may well ask the question, why has this sex practice, long considered the most heinous and profane of all erotic relations, suddenly come to the forefront of interest in both best-selling fiction and sexology? Why are so many millions of people fascinated by the most forbidden of all sexual "sins" save forcible rape and lust-murder? Is it simply the same kind of sensation-gripping reaction that one gets from reading about murder, war and mass blood-shed? Or is it, perhaps, that most individuals subconsciously see at least a little bit of their own hidden desires in the image of incest?
It is the latter case that is almost certainly true. For no matter how much the idea of incest repulses us, no matter how much of a hue and cry we raise over the "unnaturalness" of the practice and condemn those found guilty of it, almost all sexual preferences in adulthood are based on incestuous determinants!
The incest motive, whether suppressed, distorted, reversed, twisted, misdirected, inverted, or direct, is deeply rooted at the base of our sexual-likes and dislikes. This is not to say that we all lust after our mother, father, brother, sister, grandparents, aunts or uncles. But the first impressionable contacts of warmth, comfort, security and sensuality, the first close human relationships of which we are aware, are with close relatives-our parents, grandparents, siblings, etc.
The biological sex urge knows no restraints, particularly in the undeveloped stages of inimagine and childhood. It can respond physically to any stimuli that is pleasant to the sense of touch. Yet at the same time our minds are taught that it is "dirty" to "play with your sister." After weaning, the child who still reaches for his mother's breast is told in word, expression and action that this is not to be done, it is "bad."
The child thus first learns the difference between natural and normal. It is natural for him to seek a satisfying part of a mother's or father's body, to want a kind of sensual satisfaction. It is natural because it is physical, a part of nature. But it is abnormal by our legal and moral standards.
A deep confusion often sets in. The forbidden becomes compellingly attractive simply because it is forbidden. The physical desire builds, but it must be repressed, relegated to the subconscious as a "dirty" thought or idea. The parent, grandparent, sister or brother, aunt or uncle, must not be thought of as a sexual being.
The well-adusted person may have little trouble in rationalizing the fact that his mother, let us say, is capable of arousing him erotically. The emotionally stable father may recognize that his voluptuous teen-aged daughter has a body that excites him carnally, and realizes that he must shrug his shoulders and not dwell on the idea.
But for many millions of others in this world, the task is not so easy. As Dr. Albert Ellis states in his excellent book, THE FOLKLORE OF SEX
"Is there, then, an absence of self-conflict in the overwhelming majority of Americans who theoretically and actually abhor incest? Unfortunately not; for, as the last half century of psychoanalytic investigation has shown, many (perhaps most) normal individuals who consciously abhor incest unconsciously have quite strong incestuous desires at various times in their lives. While the universality of Oedipus conflicts, as posited by Freud and his orthodox followers, may well be doubted, few psychologists or psychiatrists today refuse to acknowledge the enormous (largely unconscious) guilt, conflict, and neurotic symptomatology which is being continually generated in large numbers of our populace because of their deeply repressed incestuous urges."
One common form this repression takes in a large number of American men is their almost automatic categorization of females as good or bad. These men often find themselves impotent with respectable women, including their own wives, yet highly aroused with a prostitute or promiscuous girl. The respectable girl is asexualized because of the infantile associations with the mother, whom she symbolizes. Most men with any sense of "decency," consciously or subconsciously abhor the idea of having coital relations with their own mothers, yet a great number deliberately choose such an image for their wives and thus enter into marriage with a built-in problem.
As Dr. Caprio explains it: "The tendency to put women on a pedestal is suggestive of an Oedipus complex. Women are either 'Madonnas' or 'prostitutes.' That he cannot associate sex with women who are 'nice' is attributed to the incest-barrier. To think of them in terms of desiring sexual relations, with them is equivalent to wanting sex with his mother or sister (incestuous inhibitions). His lack of desire for sex with this group is a defense against unconscious incestuous wishes."
Oftentimes we find that this problem is "solved" by the individual in homosexual relations. His homosexuality has thus been manifested by a flight from incest. Later on, we will show how a majority of perversions of the sexual instinct also result from incestuous determinants or the fear of incest.
The seeds of incestuous desire are planted early in life from the standpoint of the innocent pleasures and curiosities of the child. A great number, particularly males whose organs are outside the body, discover the pleasant sensations of sexual stimuli by masturbation or other rubbing contacts. Quite naturally, they seek out these same areas of the body in those closest to them-mother, father, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, grandparents.
Of the 4,000 women surveyed for the Kinsey report on SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN FEMALE, 54% replied that the penis and testicles of their father was the first male genitalia they observed. Another 17% fisted the organs of a close male relative as being the first they had seen.
In cases where this exposure was deliberately conceived to produce an erotic effect, or where the "naughtiness of nakedness" had been drummed into the child, the impression may become indelible. In either case, his interest and fascination is heightened.
If there is any such place as a natural breeding ground for incest, statistics and study tend to show that it is in underprivileged families where large groups live together in close and uncomfortable proximity.
After a study of over 200 cases of actual incest, Dr. S. Kirson Weinberg found that overcrowding seems to create a tendency to these intra-family sex relations where there is also a predisposition to incest. He also found that father-daughter incest happened most frequently in cases where the father dominated the household. Brother-sister incest was frequent where the father was less domineering, and mother-son incest was prevalent in cases where the mother ruled the household.
The Kinsey studies corroborated these earlier findings in its report on the female by arriving at the conclusion that, ". . . in families where there are several children, it sometimes happens that an older child or some adult may give the girl or boy more extended information, or may even direct the physical contacts so they become specifically sexual"
In large families, children often sleep with their parents, cousins, sisters or brothers, grandparents, or other close relatives, and sexual experimentation becomes almost commonplace. Or, the simple expedient of letting a child come to bed with his parents when he has a bad dream or difficulty sleeping in his own bed, has been known to result in incestuous erotic play.
Often, the sexual activity is carried on unconsciously, the subconscious allowing the practice only in a sleep or dream state. The eminent Freudian, Dr. Wilhelm Stekel in his PECULIARITIES OF BEHAVIOR, reported vividly on this aspect:
"Sexual impulses are expressed in dreams even more frequently than the criminal tendencies. Professional experience during the last few years has repeatedly shown me how completely persons may abandon themselves to their sexual propensities during sleep and dreams. I have gathered a mass of observations showing that mothers play with the genitalia of their children with whom they share the bed without having next morning any suspicion of what they had done during the night. I know also of fathers who have done-likewise with their daughters and with their sons during sleep. It is often very difficult to decide whether the somnambulic state was real or feigned, since 'drunk with sleep' suggests itself as a ready excuse. Often only one of the persons was in a somnambulic state; the other either knows it and permits the intimacy or does not even know that the partner is carrying out his part of the adventure while asleep."
Since the infant or child is in the embryonic stages of psychosexual development, his sexual direction has not been established. Therefore, if a mother has Lesbian tendencies and either consciously or subconsciously excites her daughter sensually, she may well be laying the groundwork for future inverted orientation in her child. And the same danger of homosexual preference would hold true for a son similarly contacted by his father.
Our studies of hundreds of cases involving incest in preparation for this report, revealed many instances where mothers and other close relatives readily masturbated or fellated very young boys, sometimes for their own perverted pleasure, at other times with the excuse that it helped to relax the child. It is a known fact, for instance, that the practice of masturbating restless infants was quite a common practice among European nursemaids at one time.
The perversions of the sexual instinct and other neuroses that develop from incestuous contact in childhood, and even more so from the repressed incest desires, are many and varied. In some unusual cases, the conflicts aroused by these parental relations and inter-reactions to the incest-wish or fear of it, have even played a part in greatness.
According to Sigmund Freud, President Wood-row Wilson's deep religious belief and his attempt to "convert" the Allied powers of World War I to "righteousness" was rooted in his "passionate" love of his father and a "conflict between his activity toward his father and his passivity toward his father."
Freud's analysis of Woodrow Wilson was completed in 1939, but withheld from publication until after the death of the second Mrs. Wilson in 1961. The sensational report did not receive wide recognition until excerpts from it appeared in the December 13, 1966 edition of LOOK magazine. Titled "A Psychological Study of Thomas Woodrow Wilson," it quotes the Viennese "father of psychoanalysis" as stating: "He (Wilson) never dared have a fistfight in his life. All his fighting had been done with his mouth ... but when he personally approached battle, the deep underlying femininity of his nature began to control him and he discovered that he did not want to fight the Allies (at the peace table). "
The Kinsey report on the female, however, is one of the first professional studies of overall sex behavior to bring out the sometimes favorable results of childhood sexual contacts between children and adults. These experiences, according to the study, some of the older females in the sample felt that their pre-adolescent experience had contributed favorably to their later socio-sexual development."
Today, many liberal sexologists and officials of various legally organized sexual freedom groups, proposes a highly controversial "sex education" plan whereby uncles and aunts will act as "instructors in intercourse" to their nephews and nieces. (See Case History No. 22).
Few people could ever agree with anything so preposterous as this. But the very fact that an idea like this is being openly put forth and discussed in certain intellectual circles, shows that at least our attitude toward one phase of incest has undergone a drastic change in the last 20 to 30 years.
The whole sense of morality, interpersonal relations and public and private decency would have to go through a complete about-face before incest would ever become an accepted practice. But by recognizing the naturalness and even the normalcy of the incest-wish instead of repressing it, we may find the mental health of future generations greatly improved.
As things stand now, the forbidden aspect of even thinking about relations with a close relative often makes the idea more attractive. It can become an overwhelming compulsion resulting in a serious mental disturbance or an overt act. Our case history studies, for instance, tend to show that both actual incest and the incest-taboo may be at the root of almost every form of sexual deviation and abnormality.
In the normal human being, a man's preference for a blonde as his wife may be attributed to the physical attraction his own blonde mother had for him. If he can marry the blonde of his choice and cohabit with her satisfactorily, there is no degree of neurosis present. His choice of a mate may have been consciously or unconsciously influenced by his admiration of his mother's physical beauty (an incestuous determinant), but with no degree of abnormality.
On the other hand, we find some of the most flagrant and debased cases of fetishism, sadomasochism, homosexuality, and other perversions attributable directly to these same incestuous determinants.
Perhaps the most obvious (and certainly harmless) fetishes affecting the greatest number of males today is the mania for seeing attractive women wearing only stockings and garters or other bits of gossamer attire. In many cases, this can be directly or indirectly traced to a mild repression of the incest desire toward the mother. The male almost consciously recalls observing a forbidden view-his partially dressed mother, the shapely "pillars to the temple" encased in dark nylon, silk or rayon.
In adult life, he must hold back the real object of his view and concentrate on the embellishment. The stockings and other lingerie, even the associated thighs and buttocks, have replaced his mother's genitalia which must be denied, and become symbolic representation of something to be desired, something sensual and sexy, something easily capable of arousing his curiosity and providing pleasure by sight or contact.
"One of the never failing bases (of fetishism) is the incest-wish," Stekel writes in his pioneering work SEXUAL ABERRATIONS. "This incestuous striving is directed at some article of clothing or some object which, because of the displacement of affect, has become the representative of the wish. The wish itself is unattainable and impossible of realization because of the resistance of religion and the ethical feeling. Man is always filled with unattainable desires. The hope of realizing these wishes is then transferred from the world of reality to the realm of fantasies. There is developed a fictitious life in which the fetish assumes the role of the desired person. The repression deflects the original wish from the object and transfers it to the fetish. The impulse is displaced."
The incestuously inspired fetish need not be connected with the mother, of course, but may be representative of whichever member of the family for whom the fetishist must repress his love. A striking example is contained in the following excerpts from one of Stekel's psychoanalyses.
Case History (2):
TRANSVESTITE FETISHISM OF INCESTUOUS ORIGIN
A young man in his 20's employed as a butcher was brought into Dr. Stekel's psychiatric section in a large Vienna hospital dressed in the following: a black corset, a second corset worn under the first, a third corset, a camisole (a short silk negligee), a woman's collar, a thin woven shirt, a chemise (teddies, like women wore next to their bodies in the early 1900's). The man also had on sheer stockings and women's garters.
When this patient was 10 years old he had a burning desire to wear the chemise of his 14-year-old sister. During puberty he often slipped into her room and undressed, then put on one of her silk or rayon undergarments. As soon as the chemise was next to his naked body, he went into throes of ecstasy, his penis gaining a throbbing erection and ejaculating without manual aid.
Following this strong orgasm, he would feel depressed, put on his own clothes again and return to work in his father's butcher shop. In the latter years of adolescence and into his twenties, he began to buy sheer silk women's undergarments for himself.
DR. STEKEL'S COMMENTS: "Armand Silvestre says of the chemise that it is not so much the woman as that object of hers which best portrays her 'spirit.'
"The chemise represents the woman who wears it. By virtue of the transposition of certain specific qualities and the displacement of affect, it becomes the woman herself. In the course of time, the fetish becomes the symbolical representative of the person who was the source of the original provocation. The person is usually some member of the family.
"I have never yet analyzed a case of fetishism in which this root was not to be found. The original object can be either homosexual or heterosexual in nature. The homosexual types of fetishism can be reduced to such a fixation on the father or brother. But not in all cases. The fixation can sometimes be the mother, a sister, and aunt or grandmother; so that the sources of fetishism become intimately interwoven with the homosexual components."
The brief background supplied with this case does not let us know whether or not the young man was ever gratified sexually by physical contact with his sister. More than-likely he was not and the fetish evolved from a severe repression of his incest-wish. However, in other cases we know of instances where glove-fetishism in adult life resulted from the practice of nightly masturbation performed by the mother in inimagine or early childhood.
The glove represented the hand of the mother. Although she wore no gloves at the time she manusteprated the youth, he had to deny the use of hands in later life because they became the hands of his mother. The gloves though, were less personal, and probably subconsciously symbolic. Only through analysis was the connection brought to light
In studying case histories of incest-wishes repressed, as well as actual incest in inimagine and youth, we find that the resultant fetishes and symbols change with the fashions of the times. It will be recalled in this last case that the female lingerie involved was that of a distinct period, the early 1900's. A man in his 20's today would hardly find such feminine under things symbolically attractive if his fetishism derived from the same sources.
More than-likely, he would consciously and or subconsciously be attracted to female attire popular 10 to 20 years ago-a bikini, garter belt and nylons, panty-girdles, uplift bras, panties, baby-dolls.
This fetishism may include also a form of partial-ism, a preference for a certain portion of the body and of a particular configuration. We are all familiar with the fact that most men find the bust, legs, and posterior of the female to be visually stimulating. The partialist goes much further than that and becomes erotically obsessed with one specific part of a woman's body.
There are some men who may become effectively aroused only by a woman with tremendously large thighs. Others demand voluminous breasts and imbue them with genital features preferring to place the penis in the cleavage and perform coitus inter mammae rather than genital intercourse.
The roots of these various forms of symbolism were delineated quite well by Dr. Ernest Jones in THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY when he wrote:
"All of our psychological experience goes to show that the only experiences which can be susceptible of symbolic treatment are our most original and primitive ones, i.e.-those experiences which relate to the body itself, our relations to our family birth, death and love. These experiences persist in the unconscious throughout our lives and it is from them that the more secondary interest of conscious life derive. Since all energy flows from them and never towards them, and since, also, the represent the most deeply repressed portion of our mental life, it becomes understandable that symbolism can be created only in one direction. Only that which is repressed can be symbolically expressed, and whatever has been repressed cannot be expressed except by symbolization. This conclusion is the keystone of the psychoanalytical theory of symbolism.
"Symbols serve to represent the individual's own ego, blood relatives, or the phenomena of birth, love and death. In other words they express the most primitive of ideas."
If these symbols are indeed so important in determining our sexual preferences in later life, many may wonder why all of us are not in some way neurotic and fetishistic in our sexual goals. To be sure, we all rely on symbolism to some extent. But Dr. Stekel aptly summarizes the difference between normality and abnormality in this regard quite succinctly:
"The symbol of the normal human and that of the parapathic (neurotic) are two entirely different concepts. The parapathic exploits the symbols of the normally adjusted human, but he fills them with new meaning."
Although our current study concerns actual incestuous practices more so than the neuroses of repression, we have dwelt on the latter for one very important reason. In order to understand the causes and motivations behind active incidents of incest, we must first comprehend the universality of the incest wish.
We understand that a criminal may steal something because we have felt the urge to steal ourselves, although probably in a relatively minor sense, such as wishing we had a better car or more food to eat. We know the laws of human nature, the sense of hunger, the need for physical necessities of life. And while we feel that we would never steal anything ourselves, there are others whose morals are not so high or whose need is so overwhelming that they do resort to theft.
The same is true of incest. The desire or wish is within almost everyone. Yet only a small proportion of the general population ever allows the incest wish to develop into actual sex relations with parents, step-parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, or first cousins. Indeed, only a minority ever bring up the wish from the depths of the subconscious.
In working with the figures arrived at in the Kinsey research, it is indicated that close to 6% of the females surveyed admitted to some form of incestuous contact during their lives, most of these occurring between 7 and 13 years of age. Thus it would appear that close to 10 million or more Americans have committed incest, and only a minute fraction of that number have ended up in jail or a mental hospital.
No doubt many of those involved have suffered greatly, both physically and mentally. But many others have undoubtedly survived by being able to rationalize their conduct, by having a very low degree of morality, or by expiating their guilt-feelings through self-analysis and cold logic.
But just as the repression of the incest-wish may bring about shattering mental illnesses, so can the depressing deluge of guilt-feelings that arise from the actual commission of incest. The young child may consciously forget incidents in early life and suffer the effects of repression of the memory just as many refuse to recognize the desire itself.
For the adult parent or other close relative of a young child who gives in to a desire for erotic contact, the aftermath is often devastating. He may have been neurotic or psychotic to have ever gone so far, but if he is of average morality, the real "crack-up" will come after the fact.
Physically, there is the same risk of pregnancy in incestual coitus as there is in all intercourse, legitimate or illegitimate, but with the additional threat of hereditary defects showing up in the resultant child if birth is allowed.
At present, a female who has been impregnated by her father or other close relative, cannot legally obtain an abortion anywhere in the U.S. on the basis of incestuous fecundation alone. Yet many prominent Americans are currently working to get the abortion laws changed. And one of the primary reasons they give as a determinant for legal abortion is the incestuously impregnated female.
In THE ABORTIONIST, a book written with Lucy Freeman by a practicing physician who specialized for years in illegal abortions and served time in jail as a result, Dr. "X" recalled two of his own cases that involved incest.
Case History (3 & 4):
BECAUSE OF PATERNAL IMPREGNATION
After pointing out that even primitive societies allowed abortions where young girls were pregnant as a result of coitus with their fathers, Dr. "X" gave his personal argument for legal abortions today in such cases. Using examples from his own experience, he wrote:
"A pregnancy that results from incest should, without question, fall in a legalized category (for abortion) ... they are rare, usually occurring in families who cannot pay for abortions. These families live in crowded rooms where the intimacies of parents are witnessed or heard by children who then become unnaturally aroused sexually. Under such circumstances, when daughters reach their teens, the age-old controls may be lost.
"This happened with a girl of sixteen who first told me the father of her child was a boy friend. As she came out of the anesthesia, she confessed it had been her father who had made her pregnant. She was not angry or hurt but admitted she wanted to sleep with him as much as he did with her, that she felt, since her mother forbade her to go out with boys, she had to find sexual fulfillment somewhere. "I realized what a deep rationalization this was, that the girl and her parents were extremely emotionally disturbed and that to bring a baby by this unholy duo into the world would have been a crime, indeed."
And the doctor speaks of another case:
"A mother brought her fourteen year old daughter who had been assaulted by the stepfather. The mother worked to help support the family, for the husband, a house painter, was often jobless. One afternoon he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking beer when the girl came home from school. The alcohol melted the restraint he had practiced over the years and he forced her to submit to him, as the phrase goes. When the mother came home, she was greeted by a sobbing daughter who blurted out what had happened.
"The mother made no police report, not wanting to cause a scandal, but quietly waited to see whether the girl was pregnant, taking a sample of her urine to the corner drugstore when she missed her menstrual period. The test came back positive and she appealed to the family doctor for the name of an abortionist, saying she wanted it for herself, not even wishing him to know the truth.
"The girl was a quiet, tall, thin child, her womanly shape just starting to form. There seemed deep sympathy between mother and daughter. The mother understood the terror the girl had faced in the rape, and the daughter trusted her mother to help her out of the tragedy. They did not make a big issue of it but merely assumed I would help in such an emergency."
COMMENTS: For "humanitarian reasons" the medical doctor who anonymously authored THE ABORTIONIST, asks for legal sanction of operations involving circumstances such as these. New thinking in both medical and legal circles today support him wholeheartedly.
These are two striking, although brief, examples of the manner in which coital incest occurs. The one, a strange but affectionate and loving sex relation between a daughter and her father in a household undoubtedly plagued by emotional instability and extreme strictness on the part of the mother, the other a case of outright rape by a lecherous and drunken step-father.
Pregnancy, illegal and sometimes fatal abortions, children born with congenital hereditary defects or into a crippling psychological environment-these are often the bitter fruits of incestuous coital relations.
However, relations falling far short of this can have just as potent and telling effect on those involved, particularly in later years. We shall see striking evidence of this in the many case histories to follow. We have changed all names of actual people as well as other identifying factors, to protect the privacy of the many individuals who have so generously contributed to this research.