Gloria Steinem Recalls Pivotal Abortion in New Tributes
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What happened
In her 2015 memoir My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem dedicated the book to Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957 referred the then-22-year-old American, traveling toward a fellowship in India, for an abortion—a decade before English physicians could legally perform the procedure for reasons other than the woman's health. Sharpe asked her to promise not to tell anyone his name and to do what she wanted with her life; Steinem later read the dedication on CNN in 2022. After Steinem died at 92, USA Today published an article by Clare Mulroy describing that tribute as among Steinem's 'most moving work.' Conservative outlets including Breitbart then criticized the coverage.
Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
A reader of left-leaning coverage learns that Gloria Steinem became herself because of an abortion before Roe, not that a London doctor arranged it while the act was still a crime. Right-leaning coverage puts that illegality at the center and makes the news the praise directed at the doctor. A Times headline is built around the doctor's required promises. Right-leaning coverage in Breitbart dates the referral to 1957, when the procedure was still illegal except to protect the woman's health.
The same memoir dedication reads as a personal debt in one telling and as praise for killing in the other. Left-leaning coverage stays with the doctor's charge that she use her life. Right-leaning coverage calls the physician an abortionist and recasts reproductive freedom as cover for "slaughtering unborn babies."
Was the London referral a crime under the health exception already on the books, or only under a wider ban that came later?
Bottom line
Breitbart is answering a USA Today tribute the New York Times never mentions. Miss that and you think both sides were writing Steinem's origin story.
The receipts — 5 facts one side's coverage lacks
- In 1957 a London doctor referred Steinem for an abortion still illegal except to protect the woman's health
- Gloria Steinem got to be who she was because of a pre-Roe abortion
- Dr. John Sharpe of London is named as the physician who made the referral
- USA Today called Steinem's dedication some of her most moving work
- Steinem was on her way to India for a fellowship on nonviolent protest
The Left View
Left-leaning coverage treats the abortion as the reason Steinem 'got to be who she was,' casting Sharpe's two conditions as the hinge of her later public life rather than a legal footnote. The New York Times frames the doctor's insistence that she live as she chose as recognition of her autonomy. Steinem's 2022 remark that people are 'saying thank you to physicians who recognize individual rights' is presented as the moral core of the story, with the episode situated as an origin of her activism under the banner of reproductive freedom.
The Right View
Breitbart attacks USA Today for praising a 'touching tribute' to an 'abortionist' who 'illegally aborted her unborn child,' and for calling that passage some of Steinem's 'most moving work.' It describes Steinem as a 'career leftist feminist activist' who 'coined the phrase "reproductive freedom" as a euphemism for slaughtering unborn babies in the womb,' and notes she obtained the abortion while 'on her way to India.' The outlet reports that USA Today did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Our Take (balanced)
The left's strongest argument is Steinem's first-person claim, anchored in the memoir dedication and the 2022 CNN reading, that Sharpe's referral and his second promise made her subsequent life and work possible. The right's strongest argument is that prestige coverage recasts the death of an unborn child as a touching origin story—language Breitbart locates in 'touching tribute' and 'most moving work'—while treating illegal abortion as moral courage. The unresolved tension is whether the episode is primarily a story of a woman's resulting life and rights, or of an unborn child's death that should not be celebrated.
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