by Annie Finch
“Body” focuses on the physical experience of abortion, universal and yet so different across times and cultures, starting with the heroine seeking an abortifacient “herb in the merry green wood” in the sixteenth-century English ballad “Tam Lin.” From Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s description of a dehumanizing abortion among “long silent rows” of cots in the 1970s to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s account of a peaceful abortion provided through massage by midwives in India, these writings demonstrate not only the reality of abortion but also its flexibility; abortion is so varied that we are free to reimagine its traditions for ourselves, however we need it to be.
“Heart” centers on the profound emotional aspects of abortion, opening with Gwendolyn Brooks’s haunting poem “the mother” with its unforgettable line “abortions will not let you forget.” Here is the grief of unprocessed emotions, as in Diane di Prima’s “Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, After an Abortion” and Zofia Nałkowska’s tragic portrait of a Polish woman in 1935 suffering from depression after an isolated, traumatic abortion. And here is the loneliness of keeping silent in polite society, depicted in an unforgettably scathing satire by Dorothy Parker. Many of the writings in this section also bring to life the love of those caring people who help us through abortions. Here are supportive friends, the fraught bond between mother and daughter in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Standing Ground,” and Judith Arcana’s tender depiction of the courageous and compassionate abortion activists who helped people find illegal abortions in the days before Roe vs. Wade.
“Will” addresses the personal and political power inherent in our ability to give life, and the courage and determination that the exercise of choice can require even where it is legal and culturally acceptable. Many of these pieces show women reclaiming moral authority over death and life within our own bodies, as a birthright that naturally arises from our reproductive capacities—whether it is Alexis Quinlan brazenly putting reproductive freedom into the terms of an army slogan from the late twentieth century, “be all you can be,” or Edith Södergran, a hundred years earlier, claiming the same right in more clandestine terms. This section includes Audre Lorde’s solitary, secretive abortion in Brooklyn in the 1950s and Marge Piercy’s magnetic rant “Right to Life,” opening with the memorable lines “A woman is not a pear tree/Thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity/Into the world…”; Kathy Acker’s classic of experimental literature “Don Quixote’s Abortion,” which envisions the heroine as a brave knight with a green hospital gown as armor; and Ntozake Shange’s riveting portrayal of a woman’s determination to rid herself of a traumatic pregnancy at all costs.
“Spirit” closes the book with poems, essays, and dramatic ritual ceremonies that place abortion in a spiritual framework. A common theme in this section is the shame and confusion many experience in trying to understand their relationship with abortion in the context of patriarchal religions. Madame X, a Victorian midwife in Kate Manning’s novel, describes her ethics of abortion in the only way possible for her as a Christian (“it was never alive”). On the other hand, Leslie Marmon Silko and Margaret Atwood portray the spiritually healing power of nature to women at this vulnerable time. Like Deborah Maia’s and Ginette Paris’s pieces elsewhere in the book, the rituals in this section show that the relation between abortion and feminist spirituality is reciprocal: the need to come to terms with abortion can spur women to reclaim the thread of women’s spiritual wisdom, and an existing connection with women-centered spirituality can offer a context for abortion in which both life and death are held sacred.1
Patterns and Common Themes
We count on writers to illuminate our feelings, to help us claim and integrate the unacknowledged parts of ourselves and the aspects of others that feel alien or threatening, and to play out the complexities and paradoxes of our thoughts. That is one reason literature has such a vital role to play in the conversation about abortion right now. The political arguments have been made repeatedly; in some ways there is nothing else left to say, and yet so much more needs to be said. The voices in this book bring exact insight, body-knowledge, compassion, strength of will, and intuitive blessing to bear. They don’t provide simple answers, but they do offer patterns:
Abortion as an act of love
In a perceptive and forward-thinking essay, the philosopher Soran Reader points out that mothers choose abortion as a loving act of caretaking, whether for existing children or for the child they choose not to have.2 That our current social structure surrounds abortion with the opposite stereotype shows the gulf between women and those who make the laws and precepts. Yet if the many accounts of violence suffered by women in this book at the hands of government and religion incite anger and grief, note the glimmers of light emerging from the shadows, the premonitions of the way it could be better. The remarkable pieces by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Deborah Maia, and Hanna Neuschwander, for example, show with courage and tenderness that it is possible to support empowering and respectful abortion amid loving community.
Abortion as a normal human activity
Though suspicion and discomfort about women and about death combine into a toxic cloud around the act of abortion, the harrowing experiences described in some of the pieces in this book are caused not by abortion itself but by its control, compulsion, criminalization, censoring, or condemnation. Whether the outcome is unnecessary death, as in the contributions by Langston Hughes and Amy Tan, or the shame and alienation caused by enforced silence, as in Soniah Kamal’s “The Scarlet A,” it is the loss of sovereignty over the truth of one’s own body that haunts and destroys. The great diversity of this book’s perspectives shows that reproductive choices are uniquely individual and complex—and should therefore never be legislated by anyone for another. Abortion is normal; violent control over it is not.
Abortion as symbol and archetype
Like death and birth, abortion has huge symbolic power that can enlarge a writer’s canvas. For some writers in this book, abortion is not so much the topic as a way of talking about a different topic; for example, a connection between putting oneself ahead of a pregnancy and moving to the center stage of one’s own life is evident in numerous contributions including those by Rita Mae Brown, Angelique Imani Rodriguez, and Lindy West. The abortion in Ulrica Hume’s “Lizard” can be seen, on one level, as setting in motion a deeper transformation within the character that may be the real theme of the story. As Katha Pollitt points out in her foreword, male writers have often used abortion as a symbol for sterility and alienation. Langston Hughes’s “Cora, Unashamed” can be seen to continue this tradition, though in a way made more nuanced and complex through issues of race. In Amy Tan’s excerpt from The Hundred Secret Senses the choice to have an abortion seems to have mythic resonance as it calls in destructive forces beyond the bounds of realistic expectation. Pat Falk has written about her poem in this book that “the images of [Barbara Jane’s] death, dismemberment—desecration—have become, in my mind, a metaphor for the female principle that has been de-formed, denied, devalued in women and men, in myself.”
Only freedom is nonviolent—and freedom depends on justice
There is violence in anything that forces reproductive choices against a person’s will. Jennifer Hanratty’s Twitter stream, like Hanna Neuschwander’s essay, shares the pain that women who need to abort much-wanted babies for medical reasons suffer from anti-abortion laws or bias. One surprise that many readers may find in this book is that, while in the U.S. and most of Europe we think of the freedom to have an abortion as a basic liberty, there are, as the pieces by Linda Ashok, Shikha Malaviya, Manisha Sharma, and Mo Yan make clear, millions of women struggling desperately not to have abortions—usually of female babies. Choice is only possible when there is reproductive justice, and writings by Ai, Gloria Naylor, Saniyya Saleh, and numerous others here demonstrate over and over how differences based on poverty, wealth, politics, ethnicity, class, religion, marital status, age, geography, or nationality unjustly restrict reproductive freedo
m. Yet for all the dazzling variety of differences that patriarchy exploits to justify imposing reproductive injustice, the cross-cultural truth-telling in this book exposes core similarities among the injustices themselves—for example, between the situations faced by the protagonists in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman. To recognize such widespread patterns can be as bracing and illuminating as it is horrifying.
Reproductive freedom can be emotionally complex
While this book assumes that access to safe, legal abortion is a fundamental human right, I chose to include many poignant expressions of grief and regret over the choice to terminate a pregnancy, or ambivalence about the ethical and spiritual nature of abortion, by writers including Lucille Clifton, Teri Cross Davis, and Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi. There is no contradiction here. The fact that we may have negative emotions about a particular abortion doesn’t mean that abortion is wrong. As Caitlin McDonnell points out, the possibility of negative feelings is part of the responsibility of choice.
Feelings about an abortion can evolve
The aftermath of abortion is as various as the experience itself, and recovery can be a dynamic and changing process. As Ava Torre-Bueno’s valuable book Peace After Abortion explains, the need some of us feel for emotional healing after an abortion may offer a doorway to confronting other, far older wounds that have nothing to do with abortion. Several contributors told me of the peace of mind they found in writing about an abortion thirty, forty, or even fifty years later; some felt that this anthology gave them permission to write about it for the first time. Abortion stories that need to be told don’t give up. But by contrast, some of the writings describe moving on nearly immediately—with a flirtatious dance in a lesbian bar, a glass of wine in Bulgaria, or a pastrami sandwich in Greenwich village.
The role of connection and support
Many of these writings portray the crucial importance of a caring supporter: the daughter in Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Standing Ground,” Miz Lewis in Audre Lorde’s Zami, the soon-to-be-lover in Rita Mae Brown’s RubyFruit Jungle, the doctor in Gloria Steinem’s memoir, Spirit Mother in Deborah
Maia’s Self-Ritual for Invoking Release of Spirit Life in the Womb, the friend in Sholeh Wolpé’s “Jewel of Tehran.” On the other hand, the absence of such support can be wrenching, as satirized in Dorothy Parker’s brutally funny story or expressed in the mother’s harshness in Deborah Hauser’s “Hail Mary” or the loneliness in the words of Kenyan teenagers in “She Did Not Tell Her Mother.” One subtle, sad discernible truth is that the patriarchy’s wounding of women and gender non-conforming people resonates down through the generations, compromising our ability to tend and cherish one other during our life-and-death moments.
Vision for the Role of This Book
My vision for the role of Choice Words takes the form of three concentric circles: individual experience, collective understanding, and social change. On the individual level, I hope the book will be helpful to people who are dealing with abortion in their own lives or who seek to understand it more deeply, offering compassion, support, companionship, and insight. No matter where you are on this issue, may this book bring you closer to understanding that people who have abortions are full human beings. If you are reading this book in a reproductive health clinic waiting room (thanks to the nearly five hundred backers who supported a Kickstarter campaign to donate copies to clinics), even if you have only a few minutes, here’s hoping you will open the book to some words, perhaps by Leyla Josephine, Busisiwe Mahlangu, or Marge Piercy, that will focus your mind, soothe your heart, or strengthen your will.
On the level of collective understanding, I envision Choice Words as a source of knowledge and illumination within and between cultures and literatures. Even those who don’t normally read much literature will find a wealth of human connection in these pages—stories about lives that matter to us, poems that express feelings we need to understand more deeply, plays and essays that lay out urgent new ways of contextualizing our lives and thoughts. As for literature, when contributors to this book respond to male texts—Kathy Acker to Cervantes, Joanna C. Valente to Richard Brautigan—or illuminate the role of abortion in the imaginations of women writers we thought we knew—Lesley Wheeler on Edna St. Vincent Millay, Yesenia Montilla on Anne Sexton—they reshape literary tradition in unprecedented ways.
Choice Words is, like any anthology, only a beginning. I felt this deeply during the editing process, when my prolonged and diligent hunt for literature from some writers whose perspectives badly need to be heard—including imprisoned and transgender writers—yielded nothing. As Gillian Branstetter of the National Center for Transgender Equality told me, “stigma and silence make it difficult for any person to talk about their abortion, and it is frequently worse for people who feel excluded from the conversation—including transgender men and nonbinary people. That is just why their stories are so important.” Readers who want to learn more about abortion in the trans community will find information and support at local Planned Parenthoods, the Planned Parenthood Federation, the National Partnership for Women and Families, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Abortion Access Fund, and the National Center for Transgender Equality. I hope this book will inspire future editors to continue in these directions and numerous others.
On the level of social justice and reproductive rights, I hope this book will provide a focal point for community organizing and activism. Many are beginning to recognize that control of sexual and reproductive autonomy is integrally related to other forms of authoritarianism and exploitation. Choice Words can be used as a topic for book club discussions as we take the first step towards change, raising awareness; it can be used as a source text for abortion healing circles and consciousness-raising groups as we take the next step towards change, healing ourselves; and it can be used as the focus of community discussions across ideological lines or as a source of readings performed at fundraisers as we move forward together into action.
Conclusion
I write these words sitting in the main reading room in the Library of Congress at a profoundly challenging time for reproductive rights in the U.S. and in many other parts of our planet. Yet I am heartened and moved by the continuity of this chorus of literary voices across eras and continents. Today’s circumstances are driving new voices to speak up without hesitation or shame about the central importance of reproductive justice for human rights all over the world. To bring the power of literature to bear on the topic of abortion at this hinge time in the resurgence of our full and complete human rights has been my privilege and my joy.
Editor’s Note: While I share in the widespread condemnation of recent inolerant statements by Ana Blandiana, I chose to include her work here in view of the historical importance of her contribution to the literature of abortion.
It is also important to note that because of the breadth of times and locations represented in this anthology, some of the language in these literary works may sound outdated or biased to contemporary readers.
1Mary Condren’s brilliant book on the origins of patriarchy in Ireland, The Serpent and the Goddess, offers a stunning case history of such connections.
2Soran Reader, “Abortion, Killing, and Maternal Moral Authority,” Hypatia 23, no. 1 (Jan–March 2008): 136–139.
MIND
YOU ARE HERE
Cin Salach
Oh land of the free and home of the brave
how much courage does it take to hurl lies threats boasts
at those who do not agree with those who do not agree?
How much more courage would it take
to hold each other in each other’s arms
reminding ourselves we’re all made of flesh
whispering into each other’s lives
I disagree with you but I love you.
I disagree with you but I respect you.
I disagree with you but I will not ram my sign down your thr
oat
so your voice is silenced and only mine is heard.
listen to me listen to me listen to me listen to me listen to me
listen to you listen to you listen to you listen to you listen to you
listen to me listen to you listen to me listen to you
This chorus of voices, let’s call them ideas
let’s call them demands
let’s call them rights and wrongs, lefts and rights
this chorus of voices, let’s call them ours
and sing at the top of our lungs
You belong to me you beautiful opinion you
and I shall name you Freedom.
When does life begin? All the time.
With every breath, things start over.
At what moment does conception become reality
become flesh become mine?
Would I need a stopwatch to know?
A so, so, so precise way of measuring time
counting down to the last millisecond 3 2 1 1 1
push breathe push breathe push
Congratulations, it’s a life all right. Mine.
This is America. If you can’t stand the freedom
get out of the country.