In 1965, at the age of 21, pregnant and broke and with a family who disapproved of abortion and premarital sex, Alice Walker lay on her dorm room bed and dreamed of suicide. For three days, she recalled, she kept a razor blade under her pillow and practiced slicing her flesh. When a friend finally located an underground abortionist, Walker remembered that it felt like “she handed back my life.” “That week I wrote without stopping,” Walker recalled, producing most of her first poetry collection, Once. These were poems about her trip to Africa, about suicide dreams, about love, about the civil rights struggle in the South — poems that “clarified for me how very much I loved being alive.” Walker told this story in an interview the year the Supreme Court decided Roe and thought it important enough to collect in her prose book, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983). “I have gone into this memory because I think it might be important for other women to share. I don’t enjoy contemplating it; I wish it had never happened. But if it had not, I firmly believe I would never have survived to be a writer. I know I would not have survived at all.”
Annie Ernaux also found herself returning to her own abortion story decades after the fact in Happening (2000), which describes her pregnancy at 23 when abortion was illegal in France. She attempts one herself with a knitting needle and drifts between unhelpful male doctors and fellow students who proposition her before finally making it to the cramped home of a nurse with a sideline as an abortionist in a poor part of Paris. Later, she nearly bleeds out on her dorm room bed. Ernaux had visited this material in fictional form in her first novel, Les Armoires Vides (Cleaned Out) in 1974 and compulsively returned to it in her mid-fifties. “I have no idea where my writing will take me,” she wrote. “I would like to stall this moment and remain in a state of expectancy.”
Writing and abortion seem often to be twinned, at that place where fear and creation, blood and ink comingle. Violette Leduc, working-class protégée of Simone de Beauvoir, tells in her autobiography La Bâtarde (The Bastard, 1964) of working on an essay the day after a failed abortion attempt: “Writing: it meant entering the struggle; it meant earning my livelihood as religious people earn their right to enter heaven. … the infection was beginning, I went on writing.” To write while running an infection, to write while hemorrhaging blood, to return to your near-death decades later — it was the only way to know what exactly had happened, maybe, and why.
“Abortion stories that need to be told do not give up,” the poet Annie Finch writes in the introduction to the edited collection Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (2020). Abortion stories cannot be suppressed or forgotten because the questions they pose are the ones at the heart of feminist writing and feminist politics: What is inside yourself? Where will writing about it take you?
Everyone who has gone through this — and there are so many of us — finds that pregnancy exists in the body first. If it happens to a writer, the struggle to turn the experience into language mirrors the abortion itself, bringing whatever it means out of the body and into the light. To read the literature of abortion is to realize that abortion can be a kind of birth after all, and even a terminated pregnancy can involve mothering. Something has been unmade so that something new can thrive. What emerges? It might be a small unwanted collection of cells; it might be a child you loved but couldn’t have or a renewed sense of your own independent life. It might be a poem, an essay, a book. It will, most certainly, be a transformed version of yourself.
Abortion plots run throughout American literature, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Toni Morrison, and their valences shift with abortion’s legal fortunes. Abortion in America was, prior to criminalization in the 1870s and 1880s, a sort of public secret: stigmatized but not illegal before “quickening,” when the fetus starts to move, usually in the middle of the second trimester. Literature mirrored this stigmatized state. In the penny press of the 1830s, abortion featured in morality tales about maidens seduced by rakes. For Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing as the movement against abortion began to coalesce, abortion, infertility, and infanticide became gothic tropes, metaphors for the hidden and vulnerable human soul, for creativity stymied, for the viability of the just-birthed nation itself. As the literary scholar Dana Medoro has convincingly argued, in Poe and Hawthorne’s tortured syntax and ambiguous terrors, we see abortion’s concerns written out as ghost stories. In The Blithedale Romance (1852), Hawthorne’s Coverdale confesses to a motive for his murder of the central feminist character, who is rich and fertile but refuses to mother: “There is one secret — I have concealed it all along, and never meant to let the least whisper of it escape.” But of course, as in all good gothic tales, it does.
Complex abortion stories went underground when abortion did. In the Civil War years and just after, the all-male American Medical Association and allied reformers began a state-by-state campaign to outlaw abortion and wrest reproductive care away from midwives. Along with the Comstock Laws in 1873 prohibiting “obscene” printed material from circulating through the U.S. mail (recently revived as a legitimate legal precedent by Dobbs), writing anything about abortion now became a risk. Women who did publish on abortion in these years were activists or medical practitioners writing pamphlets and treatises, like the famous New York abortionist Madame Restell in the 1870s or birth control advocate Margaret Sanger in the 1920s, both of whom were jailed. When it was not condemned or wholly vilified in literature, abortion was just a wink: readers of Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1896 popular tales of rural Maine, for instance, had to know a little something to understand why Mrs. Todd might pick pennyroyal on a walk.
In the early twentieth century, with the rise of the women’s suffrage movement and a self-conscious American feminism advocating for legal birth control — which arose simultaneously with nativist fears over the white birth rate — abortion appeared more and more explicitly in the country’s literature despite the risk of censorship. As literary scholar Meg Gillette has found, rather than a “century of silence” between criminalization and Roe, more than 70 novels in the first half of the twentieth century featured abortion plots and helped make abortion a shared experience that, Gillette argues, created the groundwork for abortion’s legalization in the 1970s.
Indeed, once you start looking, abortion is one thread that runs through canonical American literature: Edith Wharton (Summer, 1917), Dorothy Parker (“Mr. Durant,” 1924), Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy, 1925), Ernest Hemingway (“Hills Like White Elephants,” 1927), William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, 1930), Langston Hughes (“Cora, Unashamed,” 1934), Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun, 1959), John Updike (Rabbit Run, 1960), Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road, 1961), Joan Didion (Play It As It Lays, 1970). In many of these novels and stories, abortion is a metaphor for something else: the dubious viability of the American character (Wharton, Dreiser, Faulkner), the alienated fragmentation of post-World War II affluence (Yates, Didion), the essential inscrutability of women (Hemingway, Updike), the hypocrisy of white America (Hughes, Hansberry), or the hypocrisy of selfish men (Faulkner again, Parker).
From our current polarized vantage point, it’s surprising that some of the abortion writing from this first era of criminalization is amazingly good and that much of it was done by male writers who were by no measure feminists. By good, I mean the concept and the artistic form work together to effectively convey something complex. For every one of Wharton’s stereotypical villainous abortionists or Updike’s solipsistic wanks, there’s a character like Hemingway’s Jig, whose deeper understanding of the world is blocked by her idiotic unnamed lover. “Hills Like White Elephants” is a short story told almost completely in untethered lines of unattributed dialogue, underscoring the man’s attempt to talk Jig into an abortion with repeated inanities that float into nothingness — “It’s not really an operation at all”; “I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig”; “It’s just to let the air in” — until she snaps at him: “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” This is the story of a man too self-involved to realize he can’t understand.
Or take Faulkner’s Dewey Dell, pregnant at 17 and desperately trying to get an abortion to stop the “wet seed wild in the hot blind earth” that threatens her own coherence: “I feel my body, my bones and flesh beginning to part and open upon the alone, and the process of coming unalone is terrible.” Faulkner’s famed lyric modernism developed to describe the divided self that white racism produced in the American psyche, and this is also evocative language for an unwanted pregnancy, the verb coming tugging the adjective alone toward an adverb, the made up unalone gesturing at the need for a different lexicon for the cleavages of self and other that pregnancy can evoke. Dewey Dell’s inability to obtain an abortion — tricked into sex by a pharmacist, her money for an abortion taken by her selfish brother — symbolizes men’s terror at being excluded from the work of creation and their cruel refusal to allow women respite from it.
With the rise of the women’s movement and then the nationwide legalization of abortion in 1973, abortion literature no longer centered on male terror and male selfishness so much as on women’s struggles, women’s pain, and women’s experiences. As women gathered in consciousness-raising groups to share abortion stories; as feminist activists told their abortion stories to packed courtrooms of shocked men; as abortion stories were printed in the major newspapers and hundreds of prominent women signed letters attesting to their own abortions; as abortion became, again, speakable — shoutable! — in the public sphere, abortion literature took on the confessional tone of a consciousness-raising session or a Take Back the Night March. Many feminist novelists took the opportunity to write in explicit and often autobiographical detail about the dangers and hardships of illegal abortion and of single motherhood, as did Rita Mae Brown (Rubyfruit Jungle, 1973), Ntozake Shange (for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, 1975), Alice Walker (Meridian, 1976) and Marge Piercy (Braided Lives, 1982).
Others found the beginnings of a feminist Bildungsroman, as did Audre Lorde in her 1982 “biomythography,” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. “Even more than my leaving home, this action which was tearing my guts apart and from which I could die except I wasn’t going to — this action was a kind of shift from safety towards self-preservation. It was a choice of pains. That’s what living was all about.”
Others, however, moved away from the testimonial to create stories thick with blood, with too-close ties between mothers and children, women and unwanted pregnancies, women and wanted pregnancies that men forced them to abort — stories that push their heroine into the divine and ascetic realm of the female mystic. Felicitas, the heroine in Mary Gordon’s The Company of Women (1980), is troubled throughout by the question of singular or plural pronouns and the ambiguities that pregnancy, abortion, motherhood, and Catholic faith introduce into the question of language itself. Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) is a psychoanalytic fairy tale, as our heroine returns to the dark Canadian woods to meet her aborted child and her dead parents, spiraling her into madness. In both these tales, women’s suffering is beatifying, making each heroine a saint, a divine mystic. Kathy Acker’s eponymous heroine in Don Quixote (1986) follows in this tradition, unifying spirit and flesh and accessing the divine through the mad desperate grief of an abortion ward. In her green paper gown, waking from surgery, she sets off on her novel-length quest as a shining feminist knight.
In the years following Roe and the vibrant successes of feminism’s second wave, a number of novelists noted the emerging right-wing backlash and crafted stories that highlighted feminism’s precarity in a still-patriarchal world. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is set in a Christian republic that has overthrown the United States, outlawed abortion, and forced women into roles as servants, sex slaves, or wives, and its spin-off television series has made Atwood’s Republic of Gilead a contemporary allegory for Trump’s America. John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978) is, Irving has said, “a protest novel” set in the pre-Roe period and meant “to demonstrate this is what it’s like when you take a woman’s right to this away.” Garp’s characters all battle against sex discrimination and violence — Garp’s mother is a feminist icon who mentors women harmed by men, there’s a feminist cult whose followers cut out their tongues in solidarity with a rape victim, and both misogynist and misandrist assassins kill off the central characters. The sympathetic moral center of the book — “a personal hero of mine,” Irving has said — is Roberta Muldoon, a transgender ex-football player.
Irving’s The Cider House Rules (1985) is one of the most influential abortion novels in contemporary literature and is notable for making abortion a story of fathering. The Cider House Rules signifies how much feminism and the gay liberation movement, both explicit influences on Irving, have positively expanded the scope of American men’s lives. Irving’s Dr. Wilbur Larch runs an abortion hospital-orphanage in 1930s rural Maine, where, as he puts it, “he would deliver babies. He would deliver mothers, too.” Larch becomes a father figure to the unadoptable orphan Homer Wells, who develops a moral inclination against abortion and leaves, eventually returning first as a father, then as a doctor. Irving’s novels focus on men’s experiences of feminism, and abortion in The Cider House Rules is a father-son conflict about each man’s character and each man’s feelings. What is remarkable about Irving’s book is that it’s one of the few true male abortion stories: the story of the men who abort or raise “unwanted children,” become father figures to orphans, or father wanted children out of wedlock. That is, it’s a book in which men must figure out what their own relationship to reproduction looks like. Homer Wells becomes the hero of his own life — Dickens’ Great Expectations is his private bible — and gives birth to himself as a complex adult; Dr. Larch creates a son who eventually succeeds him as an abortionist and orphanage father figure. Rather than usurp women’s experiences, Irving’s Dr. Larch and Homer Wells seem to argue for fathering’s intrinsic tie to mothering — ways that we all reproduce and cultivate each other, and ways we all stubbornly insist on our own coherent selves, regardless of gender.
The critic Julia Cooke has recently pointed out a “lost abortion plot” that appeared in the writings of bohemian and fiercely independent New York City women writers from the 1930s, like Emily Hahn, Tess Slesinger, and Margery Latimer. Here, the decision to have an abortion was a plot point — the woman that the heroine became by insisting on her own life was the plot itself. This good socialist realist tradition was revived by another set of New York City women writers several decades later, writing amid the freedom of the post-Roe moment, whose stories of illegal abortions were darkly comic capers along the route to a woman’s coming into selfhood. Alix Kates Shulman’s Sasha Davis in Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), Elizabeth Hardwick’s narrator in Sleepless Nights (1979), and Vivian Gornick’s memoir Fierce Attachments (1987), in which Gornick and her mother “burst out laughing” after swapping horror stories, are all examples of this genre. Thank god, these books seem to say — now that abortion is a choice, it can finally be funny rather than just kill us!
Black feminist writing by Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, and others flowered in the 1970s and 1980s and argued for birth and motherhood as a creative act. Nurturing children, community, and self, these authors proposed, is central to any artistic, political, or world-building pursuit, and requires women’s control over reproductive choices. In an essay on children’s literature and motherhood, June Jordan wrote in 1977, “I believe the creative spirit is nothing less than love made manifest. … I see love as the essential nature of all that supports life.” In the 2016 anthology Revolutionary Mothering, which collects Jordan’s essay and other writing in this tradition, Alexis Pauline Gumbs muses, “Maybe when we say ‘mothering’ in this book we really mean ‘the creative spirit; or ‘love itself.’”
In the 1990s, this argument was politically codified under the term Reproductive Justice, an activist orientation that fought for women to be able to choose not to have a child — or choose to have a child and have the freedom to raise that child in a safe and healthy environment. This orientation drew from the long historical experience of women of color in the Americas — from the U.S. government’s forced sterilizations of Indigenous women, Puerto Rican women, poor women of color, and migrant women, to the experiences of enslaved Black women, who were seen by slaveowners as reproducers of wealth and property and for whom to love a child was also to court great grief. In other words, abortion and motherhood, birth and death, could all be expressions of love in such a world.
Much of Toni Morrison’s writing is devoted to the experience of Black women and girls, and her novels abound with complicated mothers and daughters, with lost children and dead children, with women dead in childbirth, with racist white doctors, with the weight of Black women’s reproductive choices. In a 1989 lecture, “Women, Race, and Memory,” Morrison argued that “demanding reproductive control is to usurp male sovereignty and acquire what masculinity takes for granted — dominion,” and the characters in her novels fight for this again and again. In Sula (1973) and Beloved (1987), mothers kill their children out of love and disappointment, and to protect them; in Song of Solomon (1977), women are forced into unwanted abortions by their partners; in The Bluest Eye (1970), a girl is raped by her father and forced to carry the pregnancy; in Jazz (1992) and Love (2003), women choose abortion without trauma.
As feminist critics from Judith Wilt to Jennifer Banks have argued, Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is about an act of infanticide but can be read as exploring the emotional terrain of abortion and what literary scholar Alys Eve Weinbaum calls “women’s refusal of sexual and reproductive dispossession” in perhaps the starkest and most dramatic form it has ever been faced by anyone. The main character, Sethe, modeled on a woman named Margaret Garner, escapes enslavement, and, when tracked down by slave catchers, kills her baby girl rather than allowing her child to fall into their hands. “I have put her somewhere safe,” Sethe tells herself. Her act also saves her from being recaptured — “now she’s gone wild,” says the slaveholder in disgust. Sethe keeps herself and her living children out of his hands but is deformed with grief and the knowledge of what she has done.
Birth and infanticide, not abortion, is Beloved’s plot, yet the novel proposes an uneasy continuum between them, for it asks: How can you mother well in a violent world that wants Black children enslaved or dead? Sethe is haunted, literally, by the ghost of her baby girl, now a beautiful, rapacious, mysterious woman — Beloved — who personifies all the trauma of the Middle Passage, all the horrors and heartbreaks of mothering, rape, pregnancy, birth, abortion, and infanticide under slavery — all the love and all the loss.
The institution of slavery, Morrison argues, forced infanticide and abortion, murder and self-preservation, birth and death, into devastating alliance. If this alliance makes contemporary feminists, cognizant of the anti-abortion right’s charge that “abortion is murder,” uneasy, it is worth noting that Morrison places the blame on the violent economy of slavery itself. The novel refuses to condemn Sethe for any of her choices and asks readers to witness the soft new happiness she tries to cultivate, a literary form of the solidarity that occurred when the real Margaret Garner was imprisoned for murder in Cincinnati. It is reported that Black women surrounded the courthouse to protest, yelling epithets at the police and encouragement to Garner.
Morrison’s Beloved is set before the Civil War, but it still reads as a modern parable for the feelings that abortion, pregnancy, and motherhood might evoke. Perhaps this is because, even after Roe, abortion was not ever a choice made in a space of freedom. As scholar Mary Ziegler and reporters Amy Littlefield and William Saletan have shown, even before Dobbs, anti-abortion forces in the United States had successfully made themselves the motor of an ascendant Christian right, “winning” the abortion war in terms of actual access to the procedure and in the language we use to talk about it. Think of the barbed usage of words like life, marshaled to restrict reproductive freedom beginning in the 1980s or 1990s, and you will see how political polarization coarsens thought and destroys language. What does literature look like in a world where language is being degraded?
Choice Words is an object lesson in abortion literature and a good guide to the difficulties the political advocacy trap produces for writers. Most of the selections are written by those who had abortions, nearly all of them in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the writing is often unpolished, as if the writer could not bear to edit it.
It is not surprising, then, that in formal and stylistic terms, some of the writing in Choice Words fails, by which I mean that technique and meaning are not deployed together toward effective ends. Most often, the problem is a fall into didacticism, where the reader is simply told what to think rather than being led through an experience on the page: “Well this is herstory, ourstory, goddamn it. / This is my story, / and it won’t be written in pencil and erased with guilt.” Then again, if you’ve ever faced mobs of praying antis blocking the clinic doors — or even just imagined having to push through them — you will still feel the raw power of the words in your body.
Some of the most affecting pieces in Choice Words are ones where we watch the writer tack between her own story and the pressures of political advocacy. Often, the writer loses, but this, too, is part of the story, as it is in Caitlin McDonnell’s “The Abortion I Didn’t Want.” McDonnell loves her unborn child but knows she can’t care for it along with the two she already has, and so the essay opens with her in tears, asking to be held down by the nurses so her body won’t involuntarily buck against the D&C. The opening scene devastates, but the true volta of the piece is when you realize that she is offering proof, not just to an imagined anti-abortion opponent for whom “any expression of sadness is pounced on as regret” but to herself: “I didn’t want my abortion, but if I could close my eyes and return to that table, I would do the same thing.” The devastation, here, is watching McDonnell qualifying her own grief with a defense of bodily autonomy, as if the two were counterposed.
Maggie Nelson gets at this problem of the reproductive body and the language of political advocacy in 2015’s The Argonauts:
Never in my life have I felt more prochoice than when I was pregnant. And never in my life have I understood more thoroughly, and been more excited about, a life that began at conception. Feminists may never make a bumper sticker that says IT’S A CHOICE AND A CHILD, but of course that’s what it is, and we know it …. We’re not idiots; we understand the stakes. Sometimes we choose death.
That Nelson, a queer, genre-defying writer, is one of the few in recent years who have said this in print underscores the difficulty of saying something like this at all. It’s not that Nelson’s necessarily right (there is no right, for every person’s abortion experience is different). What Nelson is doing is insisting that the anti-abortion right doesn’t get to take the word life from us if that’s what we feel a pregnancy to be, and she’s saying that if we feel that way, it doesn’t make us any less fierce about our belief in the right to abortion — in fact, it might make us fiercer. And she’s insisting that this can be said despite bad faith critics who might use it against her.
Nelson’s given us just one example, here, of the ways our speech has been boxed in, and it’s a particularly inflammatory one because, for decades, it’s been a truism that to agree that a fetus might be akin to a life is to give up the whole ball game. But, Nelson’s saying, it’s not. Sometimes we choose death, and sometimes that makes us relieved. But sometimes, we choose death, and it devastates us — what then? What if we’re still glad we did it? To insist, as Nelson does, that abortion is “a choice and a child” is not to give in to one side of the unending, unsolvable, and ultimately beside-the-point debate of whether a fetus is a life but simply to grant both women and the decision to have an abortion the dignity they deserve.
The obvious protest writing in Choice Words underscores the more successful literary writing, which turns the political advocacy trap into a problem to untangle at the level of form. One example is Dana Levin’s 2016 poem “Moo and Thrall,” in which she conveys the unwanted and violent intrusions of anti-abortion protesters on daily life:
I want to tell you about what I saw,
on the quad.
Just-dead flesh-babies twelve feet high.
[…]
Who am I to have to pay
attention?—
I’d wanted coffee and walked into
a carnival of death.
Levin’s annoyance and the unwanted intrusion appear not just thematically but formally, through syntax and lineation. “Who am I to have to pay” proposes an “I” made contingent upon a demanded payment, the poet’s agency suddenly captured. And then, “attention?—” is almost an afterthought, an open-ended question with the hanging em dash. This is what it feels like to have your body be a political battleground, diverting you from what you seek — coffee, maybe, or autonomy — and into “a carnival of death.”
The obvious struggle of the writer on the page is one of abortion literature’s most powerful tools and one of its most vexing formal problems. As Ernaux writes in Happening, “Today abortion is no longer outlawed and this is precisely why I can afford to steer clear of the social views and inevitably stark formulas … and face the reality of this unforgettable event.”
Yet the struggle of the writer on the page is not solely because of political polarization and criminalization but also because abortion is elemental. Ernaux writes, “In my student bathroom, I had given birth to both life and death ….I floated in the midst of the world, bathed in light.” We seek to understand both life and death for our whole lives. Looping, self-referential life-writing is one way to portray this tidal world. In both Ernaux’s Happening and Honor Moore’s recent A Termination (2024), we see a writer drawn to the unknown, unsure of what she’ll find. Ernaux and Moore have both been doing life-writing for much of their careers, often with an explicitly feminist outlook, and the tentative and nakedly exploratory tone of both these memoirs is telling, as if each writer were journeying into the unknown.
Ernaux could not write her abortion memoir until her mid-fifties and found she needed to write it in complete secrecy. Happening is a slim and harrowing masterpiece, and this is achieved because she maintains tight control of her narrative, writing it out in the flattest of voices, a text of such clinical remove that the author’s alienation from her own body becomes both substance and style:
We don’t know what to do with the foetus. O goes to her room to fetch an empty melba toast wrapper and I slip it inside. I walk to the bathroom with the bag. It feels like a stone inside. I turn the bag upside down above the bowl. I pull the chain.
Disrupting the flat narrative are parenthetical asides, fragments where Ernaux the writer rather than Ernaux the student comes to the fore, annotating her own struggle to write: “I have no idea which words will come to me. I have no idea where my writing will take me.” Happening is a study in counterpoint, as Ernaux the writer reflects on why she must write about Ernaux the student; by the end of the book, the parentheses disappear, and Ernaux is speaking to the reader in one voice. She has integrated herself; she has been born; she is grown.
Unlike Ernaux’s, Moore’s abortion in the same era was easily obtained at a clean New England hospital. All goes well. Yet all was not resolved, and more than a half-century later, Moore still asks, “What is it that remains unsaid?” Like Ernaux, Moore is writing to find out.
In Moore’s hands, the self-reflexive, fragmented form spirals her away rather than toward what she needs to know. In a moving passage, Moore imagines meeting her aborted son, all grown up, who asks her, “Mama, I want to know why you didn’t have me.” The paragraph with this daydream ends with a veer into digression, as if Moore can’t bear to stay with the difficulty of her feelings:
Johnny — there, he has a name — it’s from Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, 1930), which L was translating that fall we lived in the Chelsea — I’m thinking now of “Surabaya Johnny,” a woman’s slippery voice. I like the strange word — a city in Indonesia! — the dreamy off-kilter music.
Here is where the pairing of past narrative and present understanding goes awry, for how much more powerful it would have been to have let the reader sit with what Moore first evoked, realizing everything that an imagined conversation with one’s aborted child could mean. To do this, the paragraph should have ended simply:
Johnny — there, that would have been his name.
The true termination at the heart of this book is not of Johnny, though, but of Moore’s innocence. “I did not grieve the loss of my pregnancy, but I did grieve the loss of a younger self who had not yet made a momentous decision on her own behalf.” This is a remarkable insight, and it sets up A Termination as a story of coming into knowledge and coming into adulthood.
But in fact, 55 years have done little to quell the dissociation felt by Moore’s younger self. “I didn’t have a self,” she tells us again and again. Dissociation is the emotional subject of Ernaux’s memoir, stylistically deployed with such clinical precision that its mechanism is laid bare, delivering to Ernaux a finally integrated adult self, one who has learned to understand and reckon with her choices. But in Moore’s memoir, dissociation is the psychological mode of the author herself, both then and now. A Termination shows a writer halfway to figuring that out, and while this is the book’s great stylistic failure, it is also what makes it so moving. One can’t help feeling tenderness for both Moore as a young woman and Moore as a writer, still struggling so many years later to find the right words.
It is the poets who are most often able to hold abortion’s conflicting forces together with precision and grace. Poetry, as a form, allows conflicting sounds and images and rhythms to sit together, line on top of line, as they do in the real world:
Ann Townsend: “Of course I loved you, / even as I set my heel against the dirt.”
Diane di Prima: “I mean to say / dear fish, I hope you swim / in another river.”
Anne Sexton: “and me wondering when the ground would break, / and me wondering how anything fragile survives;”
Leslie Marmon Silko: “They die softly / against the windshield / and the iridescent wings / flutter and cling / all the way home.”
In “the mother” (1963), Gwendolyn Brooks uses her poem to convey the unsayable, noting the failure of language and the impossibility of siting her sadness next to her choice. Are the aborted lost and murdered children or not-yet-lives that were simply “unmade”? “Sweets,” she writes,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
Finally, she just marks language’s lack:
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
In the face of the unsayable, all Brooks has to offer her aborted ones is love, love that pours out of the end of the penultimate line:
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
Though Brooks left specific instructions that the poem not be used as either for or against abortion after her death, anti-abortion activists have often seized on Brooks’s poem as “proof” of women’s regret over having abortions. (It is well worth reading through Annie Finch’s detailed technical analysis of the poem, online at the Poetry Foundation, to see how the refusal of the political advocacy trap is built into the work at the level of line, stress, and meter.) But we should never give up our emotional complexity, just as we should never give up our bodily autonomy, for both are necessary to any feminist project. What Brooks is actually telling us is that abortion can be a complicated love story as well as a complicated tragedy: It is clear that Brooks loved herself, and her writing as much as she loved her aborted ones. She would not have been able to write such a powerful poem had she not.
Jessie Kindig is a writer, editor, and critic in New York City and a contributing editor at Lux.
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