1) There is no reason that a correctly performed abortion should eventuate in a longterm weakening of the lower abdominal muscles, much less of the diaphragm. A temporary weakening, due less to the abortion than to the pregnancy itself, is normal, the anticipated recovery time (anywhere from two to six weeks) depending on how far the pregnancy had progressed. 2) A C-section is far more disruptive, and can result in muscular damage if complications ensue. Recovery time is longer, and it can be as much as three to four months before rigorous exercise is recommended. In both cases, we must again allow for an emotional impact. Postpartum depression and anxiety affect around 20% of women even after a normal pregnancy, and the loss of a baby has to be, at minimum, an aggravating factor.

Of the more credible assertions regarding Callas—of an abortion in 1966; of a C-section resulting in a stillborn birth in the summer of 1960—the former would have been after her retirement, and the latter at a time when her singing had already been in decline for several years and her career  severely attenuated for at least two. Though it would again be presumptuous to dismiss the whole matter out of hand, I find it impossible to make any connection between these procedures and Callas’ vocal troubles.

Other health factors. Here we have medical reports of a condition that would certainly have affected Callas’ overall health, and probably have contributed to her early death. The testimony, from two sources, is relayed in Ellison’s article in language identical with that of Wikipedia’s Callas entry, which is in turn identical with that of an article on one of them in La Stampa. Source 1 is a physician (we’re not told of what specialty) named Mario Giacovazzo, who in 2002 revealed (with what evidence, such as his original clinical notes, we are not told) that 27 years earlier (thus, in 1975) he had diagnosed Callas with dermomyositis. This is a deteriorative condition of muscles and ligaments, presumably including those of and around the larynx, whose standard treatments frequently have negative side effects for the heart. But this diagnosis came ten years after Callas’ last operatic performances and nearly 20 after signs of decline began to appear in her singing, so I’m stumped as to its significance as a cause for the decline.^(I) Source 2 (the one reviewed in La Stampa) is a study presented at the University of Bologna in 2010 by two otorhinolaryngologists, Franco Fussi and Nico Paolillo. Picking up on Giacovazzo’s reported diagnosis, they conducted spectrographic analyses of Callas’ recordings throughout her career that traced the voice’s loss of range and capacity for sustaining tone, which they then attributed to his finding of dermomyositis. But I’m stumped again. According to these reports (I have not seen the study itself), Fussi and Paolillo detected signs of the disease’s impact “as early as the 1960s.” Two problems present themselves. One is that even if we suppose this means the early 1960s, we are again speaking of what are essentially Callas’ post-career years. The second is the very attribution. Fussi and Paolillo are merely seeing in graphic form what knowledgeable listeners have been hearing—and arguing over as to cause—since the years in question, and then tying it into a reported medical finding made two decades after the years in question and disclosed 27 years after that. I am not a scientist, but I have to ask: this is scientific?