 He breaks the news to Meredith and then marries Karen to prevent her from having a dangerous and potentially fatal back-alley abortion.The character of Pat Matthews (Susan Trustman) on "Another World" had the soaps' first abortion in 1964, and suffered the consequence of sterility, until she underwent a procedure and was then able to conceive.Abortion was still illegal in the United States in 1969 when the character of Karen Martin was pregnant, and would remain so until "Roe v Wade" in 1973, when the "All My Children" character Erica Kane (Susan Lucci) would undergo the first legal soap opera abortion the same year (though it was retconned 32 years later).