Mary Hughes sat with her sister, Kathleen McCormack Durst in the small medical clinic office on a warm morning in June 1976. She pleaded with her sister to not go through with the procedure; that there was a way out of this mess; that she could leave her husband if she wanted to. But Kathleen, through her pained tears only wept softly into her hands, telling her sister ‘she had to’ – ‘it was the only option’.
A few minutes later the nurse came to fetch the 24-year-old to take her back to the waiting doctors. The last thing Kathleen wanted to do was abort the baby growing insider her. But after the recent violent actions of her husband; the man she had become so blatantly possessed by; it seemed the only choice she had left…