This sounds so tough doesn’t it, real poverty level stuff that led to her decision as in today’s NYT:

Honesty begins at home, so I should acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years. You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother. I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby lower-middle-class level. And when it comes to my children – the actual extrauterine ones, that is – I was, and remain, a lioness.

Lesse. She was born in 1941 so her fertile years were up till, what, 1986? From another site I find that her second husband, the one above, was making $4.50 an hour in the late 1970s. Minimum wage ranged from $2.30 an hour to $3.10 depending on which year you took. So hubby was on one and a half to two times minimum. Not a fortune but not horrendous. She was a dollar a word freelancer. How much was she selling? Thousand words a week? (I manage that.) Well, that’s $25 an hour for a 40 hour week. A family on 12 times minimum wage is at “grubby lower-middle-class-level”? That would be $138,000 today, adjusted for the changes in the minimum wage. That’s too poor to have another child? Maybe she only sold 1,000 words a month. That’s $6.25 an hour. $20,640 per year for the family. Or four times minimum wage. Which, again, in modern money is $ 45k a year or so.
Not entirely sure I buy that as an argument really.
Oh, and “the actual extrauterine ones”? No M’am. All four are extra uterine. It’s just that two were so prematurely at your insistence. That is, after all, what the argument is about.