Nick Willing

So she was so, I remember seeing her that Sunday.

She was so furious, mostly with Portuguese women because she didn't expect the men to ever do anything properly.

But the women should know better.

Backstreet abortions will always happen.

If you criminalize abortion, it will happen anyway.

You can't stop people having sex.

It's just an absurd idea.

So she embarked on a series of pictures that she described as propaganda, which were of girls, young girls, mostly schoolgirls in their school uniforms,

Something she remembers herself well from the 50s, recovering from backstreet abortions.

There's no blood.

It's not gruesome.

What you feel is the agony, but also the defiance.

These are women who are survivors.

They're not victims.

They're doing what they feel they have to do to survive.

And that is something which we later discover comes from personal experience.

At the time, she denied abortion.

that she had had an abortion because she knew that in Portugal, the press would latch onto that and minimize her effort because, oh, it's just the personal experience of an artist.

She said, no, it's about what's happening to everybody.

So she didn't want to confuse it, but she did have many abortions as it turns out later.