Only a handful of texts - notably excerpts from novels and testimonials from groups of high schoolers - included a prefatory paragraph setting them in context. While this last is useful, there were many moments during my reading when I wished each contribution was accompanied by a date and some information about the author. The anthology closes with a list of author biographies and a timeline of original publication dates. They encourage readers to think about the relationship between literature and activism, and about how Choice Words might be used as a tool to re-inspire a national movement for reproductive justice. This last is reflected in the extensive resources for community organizing, book group discussion, and campaigning for reproductive rights available on the Choice Words Action website. There is also a comprehensive introduction by the editor in which she emphasizes a threefold vision for the collection: that it should resonate with individual experience, foster collective understanding, and inspire social change. The anthology is prefaced by a thoughtful foreword by Katha Pollitt, author of Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, who sees in the anthology a reflection of the fact that abortion rarely constitutes a rejection of motherhood, as popular imagination would have it rather, the majority of women who have abortions are already mothers, and for myriad reasons unable or unready to raise another child. The first of these focuses on how people make the often very painful decision to terminate a pregnancy Body focuses on the physical experience of abortion Heart on its profound emotional aspects Will, on the personal and political power inherent in our ability to give life, the courage and determination that the exercise of choice can require and finally, Spirit on work that places abortion in a spiritual framework. The material is organized into five sections: Mind, Body, Heart, Will, and Spirit. They range from lyric to narrative poems, plays, short stories, Twitter threads, memoirs, flash fiction, rituals, journal entries, and excerpts from novels. Some will flip through it in a health clinic, or pick it up in a women’s prison, where, thanks to a Kickstarter fundraising campaign, many copies have been donated (priority was given to US states where abortion rights are most under attack: Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, Montana, Indiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, Utah, Tennessee, and Ohio). But those who do plow through from start to finish will find some careful curation of the nearly 150 contributions here. Choice Words is published this month in the United States by Haymarket Books, whose titles are chosen for the contribution they make to struggles for social and economic justice.įew will read this anthology as I did: cover to cover. Her response was to spend over 20 years pulling together a 400-page volume of writing by women (and the occasional man) on abortion from the 16th century to the 21st. As she saw it, abortion is “a physical, psychological, moral, spiritual, political, and cultural reality that navigates questions of life and death” and should rightly, therefore, be one of the great themes of literature. She was surprised to find very little writing on the topic of abortion. After aborting a pregnancy in 1999, editor and writer Annie Finch began looking for reading material that might help her come to terms with her experience. And to stories about the decision to terminate a pregnancy.Ĭhoice Words: Writers on Abortion was begun precisely in the wake of such a decision.

About the smug satisfaction - or is it desperation? - of what is sometimes known as DINK: double income, no kids. About the decision to privilege one’s own creative life over family life. But I am also drawn to stories about not having children. I am strangely drawn to stories of traumatic births and post-natal depression, as well as the all-consuming obsession many new mothers have with their babies. Since then, to help stave off a kind of muted panic about turning 30, I’ve begun to read extensively about motherhood. There is something disturbing about seeing her so young - so firm and healthy in every way, when I am already starting to sag.Ī recent conversation with my GP, in which she recommended I change to a method of contraception that would be “kinder to the older woman,” got me thinking seriously about my body and how I want it to age. She has dark hair twice as thick as I know it to be now, and bites nervously on a thumbnail. Her breasts are comic-book-character, barbie-doll enormous. In one of them, she sits on a low wall somewhere sunny, slender-armed and long-legged in high-waisted denim shorts.

SOMEONE IN MY FAMILY recently unearthed a series of photographs of my mother from the late ’70s.

Im pro life onesie