Marilyn Monroe dreams that she is forced to have an abortion

Marilyn Monroe’s dream of a forced abortion turns uncertainty about her body into a nightmare of presidential power, medical violence, and disbelief. It begins with a missed period and a feared pregnancy by President Kennedy; it ends with Monroe waking in pain and unable to decide whether the operation occurred or whether she only dreamed it.

The fear beneath the dream

The nightmare takes shape amid uncertainty about a missed period. By mid-July, Monroe’s menstruation has stopped, and she insists that there must be another explanation—one she has to discover. She examines her breasts for signs of pregnancy, but the question remains unresolved. When one of her many doctors proposes an examination and a pregnancy test, she says she has no time and never returns. Her fear of doctors and psychoanalysts includes the suspicion that they might betray her confidence and disclose, or invent, the Monroe secrets they do not know.

The possibility of menopause troubles her too. Monroe wonders whether it could have begun so early, confusing her own age, thirty-six, with her mother’s, sixty-two. The narrative links the two women through their shared Gemini birth sign, which Monroe treats as a fateful connection. Bodily uncertainty, fear for her privacy, and the sense of an inherited pattern converge before the nightmare’s imagined operation.

Pregnancy and imagined state violence

In the dream, Monroe is pregnant with the President’s child, but the fetus is malformed. She imagines that the drugs she has taken have caused the condition and that she will be accused of murder. President Kennedy, described in the dream as a fervent Catholic opposed to both abortion and contraception, nevertheless wants to avert a national scandal. The contradiction sharpens the scene: public principle gives way to political expediency, and Monroe’s pregnancy becomes a problem to be concealed and removed.

The imagined solution is an operation carried out without her consent. The fetus is to be surgically taken from her on the pretext that it is malformed and would not survive. The dream turns a private reproductive fear into a struggle over who controls Monroe’s body and whose account of what happened will be believed.

Abduction and awakening

The imagined procedure is preceded by an intrusion. Monroe lies naked beneath a sheet, rigid with animal panic and unable to move or cry out as someone presses a chloroform-soaked cloth over her mouth and nose. She is carried from the house, put into a waiting car, and taken to an operating room. The scene recalls her earlier chloroforming at Hotel C, after which she was transported to Los Angeles in a sem comatose state; the nightmare thus draws on an already frightening experience rather than presenting its violation as wholly unfamiliar.

She wakes fifteen hours later, exhausted, with her uterus burning and dark, thick blood soaking the sheet and mattress. Severe cramps make the imagined operation feel physically present. Her first thought is that it was a terrible dream; her next is that it is better if it was a dream, because no one would believe her otherwise. The awakening does not settle the question. Its bodily detail makes the dream hard to dismiss, while her own immediate response recognizes it as a dream.

The boundary between dream and waking fear

The passage surrounds the nightmare with other signs of unease without confirming that the operation happened. During the earlier panic, Monroe wakes repeatedly drenched in sweat, her heart racing, and fears that someone has entered her home to chloroform her. She calls Carlo for comfort even though she expects he will not answer. Later, while fully awake, she hears a crackle on her private telephone line and suspects it may be monitored, but acknowledges that she has no proof. The narrative also notes that some of her medications intensify her nerves and suspicious thoughts.

That distinction preserves the event’s central uncertainty: the nightmare is narrated with the force of an assault, but the evidence does not establish a real abortion or abduction. Its significance lies in the unresolved gap between bodily sensation and what can be verified, and between the fear of being violated and the fear that any account of violation will be dismissed.