'If a Man Wants to Leave His Toothbrush at My House, He Bloody Well Better Marry Me'

Good day, Woman UP'pers. On this All Saints Day, I'm wondering what the rest of you in the coven think about a couple of different pieces in the Washington Post. First, what a great obit of Michelle Marvin, who popularized palimony but never collected a dime of the $104,000 she was awarded for what a judge called "rehabilitative purposes'' after her companion (but not husband) Lee Marvin dumped her and she sued him for a share of the millions he'd made while they were together. (She did award herself his last name, which must have been more self-flagellating than self-aggrandizing after he left her for his childhood sweetheart.)

After an 11-week trial -- of marriage itself, according to her lawyer -- she famously said, "If a man wants to leave his toothbrush at my house, he bloody better well marry me." Then she spent 30 years with (but not married to) Dick Van Dyke.

I remember her as the cautionary, anti-role model of my adolescence, and do wish her obit had shed a little more light on the decades after the lawsuit; does anyone know how the story ended?

Also wondered what others thought about the woman addicted to abortion. (Here's a Post transcript of an online discussion with Irene Vilar, under the headline "Nightmare addiction: abortion.'' It's sub-titled: "Irene Vilar tries to explain the pathology that led her to abort 15 pregnancies."

So my question to my pro-choice sisters: If there's nothing wrong with abortion, either morally or physically, then what does sheer volume change? If, as Slate's Emily Bazelon wrote last year, "sometimes an abortion is a few not ideal hours that give you the rest of your life back,'' then at what point does it become a pathology? (Six? Ten?)