Blue knitting needles

The Blue knitting needles are a pair of long, shiny household needles that the narrator turns toward an urgent and dangerous purpose: attempting to end her pregnancy without assistance. Bought originally for a cardigan, they become a material trace of the limited choices available to her under the criminal prohibition on abortion. Their significance lies both in what the narrator tries to do with them and in the failure that sends her looking for help.

From domestic object to means of action

The narrator had bought the needles during the summer intending to knit herself a cardigan. On a Monday, after returning from her parents’ home, she took them with her because she had found no other solution and had decided to act on her own. Their previous purpose was ordinary and prospective: making a garment. Now their presence registered how an everyday possession could be drawn into a clandestine attempt when safe, lawful care was out of reach.

The choice did not arise from confidence in the needles. The narrator had heard accounts of abortions and knew that knitting needles were among the methods women used, but the object offered no assurance that she could manage the procedure herself. Its availability made an attempt possible; it could not make the attempt safe or successful.

The failed attempt

The evening before, the narrator had gone to see a film with other women from her dormitory and thought repeatedly about what she planned to do the next day. The following morning, she lay on her bed and tried to use one of the needles to induce an abortion. She could not proceed and stopped when she felt pain. The attempt ended in tears and anger at her own helplessness, not in the result she sought.

That failure clarified the limits of acting alone. The needles had seemed to offer a direct means of taking control, but they could not supply the knowledge or assistance the narrator needed. Their practical inadequacy becomes part of the episode’s meaning: the object is neither a successful solution nor a detached symbol, but something that enters the action and helps bring its risks and constraints into view.

From the needles to medical help

After the attempt, the narrator called Doctor N. She said that she did not want to continue the pregnancy and claimed that she had harmed herself, a lie intended to make clear how determined she was to obtain an abortion. Doctor N examined her, told her that all was well, and prescribed penicillin, while making clear that he did not want to know where she was going. The narrator left believing she had failed to persuade him to help, although he was concerned that she might die of blood poisoning.

The sequence gives the needles a specific consequence in the narrative: their failure precedes the call, the examination, and the prescription. They do not lead directly to a safe procedure, but the attempt changes what the narrator does next. The episode also shows how clandestinity shaped communication. Neither she nor Doctor N used the word abortion; the need was acted upon through implication, a claimed injury, and the precautions he was willing to provide.

Material trace and later meaning

In the narrator’s account, the needles belong to the physical evidence through which the past can be reconstructed. The memoir returns to the object not as a generalized emblem of suffering but as a precise possession with an earlier domestic purpose, a particular appearance, and a place in the sequence of events. Its transformation from knitting tool to means of self-induced abortion holds together the ordinary life the narrator was living and the danger imposed on her by the law.

The needles also sit within a broader account of class and reproductive constraint. The narrator connects her pregnancy to the poverty associated with her working-class origins, despite having pursued higher education; she sees it as a stigma of social failure. Later, she describes writing as a way for her body, sensations, and thoughts to become intelligible to others. In that retrospective work, the Blue knitting needles are one concrete trace through which a concealed experience becomes recordable: an object that preserves both the narrator’s attempt to act and the limits placed on her choices.