In a State of Expectancy: Writing Against the Abortion Plot

In spring 2017, shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump left feminists across the United States in a state of despair, there was a renewed effort to organise political action in defence of reproductive rights. The media often framed this renewed organisational energy as unprecedented, responding to exceptional circumstances, though it was also picking up where previous fights had left off. Writing in a 1985 essay on abortion, Ellen Willis reflects on her own "second-round weariness" that makes militance against the issue she sees as "the cutting edge of feminism" difficult to summon up.1 But five years later Vivian Gornick would write of her own renewed optimism in finding herself marching alongside women she had marched alongside twenty years previously, together with new women who had joined the movement in the interim period.2 The subject of abortion, as Willis and Gornick see it, is part of the long, endless, exhaustive work of feminism, though, as Willis notes, it has a way of getting enmeshed in "the contradictions of personal life when liberation is a dream deferred."3

That spring, it was common to see the words "my body, my choice," scrawled in smudged pink chalk across grey paving stones, alongside sketches of women's reproductive organs, also in pink chalk, a pink that, like the chant "keep your rosaries off my ovaries," felt cheerily melancholic. Occasionally, though less prominently, you might also find the phrase: "my body belongs to me," less singsong, more plain-spoken in its location of the individual body as the conceptual vehicle for the right to abortion. The pro-choice case for abortion rests on the proposition that women are in possession of their own bodies.4 Narrative accounts of this act of possession are, accordingly, liable to articulate the right to bodily autonomy through the use of the possessive pronoun.

It has come to seem inevitable that narratives of abortion are told in the first person; that abortion is a distinctly singular event. In the first person, we hear how pregnancy breaks apart the coherence of the individual's body and mind. The first person also determines how we hear about the costs of abortion — financial, psychological and social.

Feminist demands for the legal right to abortion rely on the generic conventions of personal memoir to frame the act of abortion as a rupture of the self. Precisely because abortion has seemed anathema to public life, it lends itself readily to representation in private narratives where the complexity and violence of pregnancy and its termination find articulation, so that abortion is a story that is told and retold, and politicised, through personal experience.

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In Annie Ernaux's 2001 book Happening, we find, distinctively, a first-person perspective on abortion that takes on the air of a collective narrative. It is written from the perspective of the older Ernaux reflecting in 1999 on an event that took place three decades earlier, an event that belongs to a different self through an ongoing historical moment. Through the mediation of these historical first persons, Ernaux recounts "the event" of abortion, as it occurred to her, a twenty-year-old student in Rouen, France in 1963. She writes of her memory of abortion from within the position of her waiting, thirty years later in a sexual health clinic, for results that might determine her future. These two acts of waiting position Ernaux as a historical subject whose first-person narrative is not simply an act of personal accounting but the articulation of those historical possibilities. In Happening, abortion, far from an act of individual possession, is a historical process that is "jerked into action" and "drags" its subject along with it.5 Ernaux alerts us to the way that no one, least of all working-class women, have ownership over their own bodies, and that to conceive of the body as something that is possessed and controlled, and pregnancy as something that is chosen or not chosen — a right that is exercised — is to obscure the social forces that condition the history of reproduction.

Ernaux knows that any literary or legal understanding of abortion has to begin with the realisation of the economic and social costs of reproduction. In her work the authentic possession of the self is wrenched open by the historical force of working-class collectivity as it passes through her and is clarified in the act of aborting, the act that determines her future. Ernaux's narrative — which reworks her earlier fictionalised version of the historical personal event of abortion, published as Les Armoires Vides in 1974, situates abortion within the matrix of social historical forces so that we see how individual possession — the defining value of liberalism — is shadowed by social dispossession.

Ernaux writes abortion through an elliptical historical narrative by resisting "the encouragement" from the men around her "to turn painful experience into a personal victory" (or alternatively into unreconcilable trauma) — into the model of abortion-as-personal-memoir.6 She recounts how in her student bathroom, she "had given birth to both life and death" — literally and figuratively, since the birth of a child would have meant death to her.7 The refusal to apologise for the violence of abortion and to see it as an "ordeal" and "sacrifice" that was necessary for her "to accept the turmoil of reproduction," allowed, she writes, "the coming generations [to] pass through me."8 Ernaux speaks here again at once personally — since she sees the act of abortion as a process that allowed her "to want to have children" — and sociohistorically, since the act of abortion is allied to a process of historical change that has led to the conditions that have enabled her, a working-class woman, to become a writer, and thus to tell the history of events that routinely happened to women like her.

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In the draft statement of Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito conjures a fantastical image of the contemporary US, which is disproved in any literature on reproductive politics, in which maternity bears no risk and incurs no cost.9 Reflecting on the period since Roe (a period brought into existence by that law), Dobbs claims that "attitudes about the pregnancy of unmarried women have changed drastically . . . leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law" and "the costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance."10

If the present is represented as a fantastical image of equality, which according to Alito, makes pregnancy a viable choice, which requires no alternatives, then the past of abortion is, too, presented as a legal fiction. Dobbs uses the word "history" 67 times, claiming that "an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973."11 But the history of the criminalisation of abortion is far from static, as the scholar Leslie Reagan and others have shown. It has evolved constantly alongside the shifting economic and social circumstances of reproduction.

My interest in this article is in thinking, in the wake of the repeal of Roe, of the tenacity of certain narratives of abortion, and the way that abortion and history seem to be brought into a conceptual tension. As a literary historian, I am interested in what the history of literature might tell us about this complex history and, more particularly, in how writing on reproductive politics in literature of the 1960s frequently returns to the 1930s to conceive of the limitations of its own political horizon. I want to think about how the legal history of abortion, which has proved hard to shift from liberal accounts of reproductive politics, has occluded other histories that might reveal a more radical vision of abortion not as individual choice but as collective freedom.

Reagan has critiqued the scholarly tendency to narrate the history of access to abortion with a near exclusive focus on two moments of legal change: on the criminalization of abortion in the mid-nineteenth century, and its decriminalisation in the early 1970s. The result, Reagan argues, is to represent a century of illegal abortion as if it is flat and unchanging.12 Even when radical stories of grassroots abortion that occurred before its legalisation in the US are presented — as in Tia Lessin's and Emma Pildes' 2022 documentary on the underground feminist abortion service "The Janes" — Roe is still positioned as the climax of a triumphant narrative about reproductive politics. The risk of this simplified history is that, as Ernaux observes in Happening, there is a failure to connect the history of abortion's criminalization and the impact that it had on working-class women's lives to historical processes and to collective visions of freedom — visions that align women with workers, and which acknowledge the history of those who performed abortions, prior to its legalisation, as not only doctors in white coats, but members of the working class who knew how to use a speculum.

During the 1930s, abortion was widely documented in American literature, frequently by working-class women writers who had undergone an abortion of their own. Indeed, those abortion(s) were frequently the precondition of the stories' emergence into print. As Meg Gillette observes, these representations of abortion well before Roe "taught readers how to shop for illegal abortions and debate America's abortion laws."13 Abortion functions in these novels as a political testing case for a host of other issues: the left, class mobility, women's liberation, racial segregation.14 At a time when there was no literature on abortion in public libraries, fiction provided an essential practical resource not only for the psychic, social and political complexity of abortion but for information about how to acquire it, which forms it took, and the risks associated with it.15

From the 1930s onwards, abortion, though still illegal, came to be situated within the medical community as part of an emergent "gray market" that enabled relatively safe abortion to those who could afford it.16 We get a glimpse of this emerging medical setting in Tess Slesinger's 1932 short story "Missis Flinders," which opens on the threshold of a New York City maternity hospital where its protagonist has spent three days in a bed alongside other women who have recently given birth. Far from the backstreet abortion that lingers in the popular imagination, Margaret Flinders is well cared for in a clinical sort of manner. The nurse is cold and formal, and the process of abortion is given a distinctly bureaucratic guise.

This brief period of tolerance would be followed within the decade by intensified criminalisation, but it created more public space for the narration of abortion stories. As Reagan notes, "the structural transformation that occurred during the 1930s" signalled "the first time" that the medical community acknowledged "that social conditions were an essential component of medical judgement in therapeutic cases."17 The benefits of moving abortion from private unsupervised sites to public medical institutions found representation in literary production of the period, too, as Slesinger's 1934 novel The Unpossessed suggests. In the end scene (which reworks the narrative of the short story), Margaret terminates her pregnancy on her husband's conviction that bearing children is bourgeois. Abortion — envisaged here as an empty shadowy vision of pregnancy — becomes indicative of the left's failure to think of sexual and reproductive politics from a woman's point of view, outside a model of possessive individualism.18

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A half-century later, Vivian Gornick gives us an image of the more provisional domestic arrangements that afforded less affluent women access to abortion — through whisper networks and underground grassroots organisations — which are linked to the complex movement of feminist history in which Gornick emerges as a writer. Towards the end of Gornick's memoir Fierce Attachments (1987), she recounts the abortion she had with her legs up against the wall in an apartment on West-Eighty-Eighth Street, with Demerol injected into her veins in 1965. Her mother in turn recounts one of the three abortions she had during the Depression in a basement of a Greenwich Village nightclub "for ten dollars, with a doctor who half the time when you woke up you were holding his penis in your hand."19 Gornick looks at her mother "in admiration" for she had taken on the challenge of her daughter's account and matched her "clause for clause, and raised the ante with each one," transforming her experience of abortion into a story about its risks in the 1930s, which makes the shock of her daughter's story look relatively tame in comparison. What is so interesting about Gornick's narrative is that it doesn't take the straightforward march of feminist progress for granted. Instead, in the exchange of these oral histories, we see how a private narrative about the provision of abortion has to account for its relation to class, access and public life. If Gornick had a safer abortion in the 1960s, it was not only because abortion was easier to access, as it became more costly, but because Gornick — in aspiring to become a writer — had entered a different class position.20

The economic circumstances of the Depression led to an expansion of abortion provision and to the emergence of abortion clinics, such as one in Chicago which conducted 18,000 abortions between 1932 and 1941.21 It was in this context of shifting attitudes to abortion, under the pressure of economic necessity, that the feminist, anticapitalist writer Ruth Lechlitner, who was part of the New Masses and Partisan Review crowd, published her 1936 poem "Lines for an Abortionist's Office." The poem opens with an apostrophe to the state to permit abortion, as a kind of welfare, if only by closing its eyes to it. In a mode that is characteristic of Lechlitner's work, which is preoccupied with the dispossessed urban and rural poor, this poem does not speak of abortion from the first-person position. Instead, abortion appears here as a political tool that is essential for visions of collective freedom. The poem ends with a hymn to the abortionist's instruments as the condition of a socialist vision of love:

In a 1935 article in the Partisan Review, Lechtliner argues that, for it to be an "expression of collective consciousness," revolutionary writing needs to avoid the "narrowly individual, bodyless and temporal" and mere concerns "with separate, isolated cases and happenings," and must reject the "sentimental close-up" of the individual "I."23 By shifting abortion from an individual to a collective concern (speaking to a vision of what the state might be), Lechtliner articulates a political vision that not only concedes abortion but is distinctly in favor of abortion in its ecstatic imperative to take up surgical instruments as a call to arms; an invocation of what public "Life" might yet be.

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In Lessin's and Pildes' documentary, Eileen Smith, one of "the Janes," who performed an estimated 11,000 abortions in Chicago between 1968 and 1972, lays on the dining table a crumbled bag from which she excavates a speculum, handling it familiarly and ordinarily, as one might a soft peach. She instructs the viewer that "sometimes you have to start with a small dilator, to just try to get inside of the cervix." Opening the blades of the speculum, she tells the camera cautiously, conspiratorially: "I haven't done this in a long time." Yet it is striking how young the faces of "the Janes" look.

The documentary shows how this recent radical history emerged from the women's liberation movement and relocated abortion from the hospital to the kitchen table, where it was positioned within the framework of knowledge passed down between working women through the generations. The underground network took abortion into their own hands, which radically drove down the price of abortion (to as low as $50, or $100). And when "the Janes" took control of the means of production, they would also do abortions for free, shifting the demographic of who could afford reproductive justice. As Marie Leaner, one of the members notes, the organisation was "revolutionary" in its conception of a world where reproduction was, for a brief moment in time, not contingent on economic and class status.24

In Happening, Ernaux alerts us to what is at stake in imagining the history of abortion, reminding the reader of the incongruity of public history and reproduction, when she reflects that there is "no museum in the world called The Abortionist's Studio."25 Implicit in this framing is the idea that the labour of abortion, performed by the working class, is a cultural art of the highest order. Abortion allows the working-class women in Ernaux's work to evade the fate of their mothers and to move, through desire, to a vision that permits women the violence of wanting something of their own. In her own writing, this desire is for a literature that is closer to the unadorned reality of everyday life; that is commensurate with the political and cultural scope of the discovery of the young woman, unconfined by the social law of reproduction. Ernaux is unequivocal that abortion is a violent act; it is the separation between life and death. She compares it historically, through their temporal alignment, to the death of John F. Kennedy, thus refusing the idea that abortion occurs, uniquely, in the private realm, outside of historical time.26

This violence, Ernaux suggests, is the precondition of freedom. She notes that the woman who performed her abortion had a name that linked her to exiled parents who had fled Franco's Spain (abortion was legalized during the Civil War in the area controlled by the Republicans); and that this woman was a nurse who would have "spent all day emptying the basins of the sick and pregnant, enjoying the same authority as doctors who barely noticed her."27 Abortion was where she could be paid, by women, what she was due.

By narrating an abortion a decade before its legalisation, Ernaux tells the story of desire and its costs, and feminist politics and its affordances, so that we see "the inevitably stark formulas of the rebel Seventies" within a longer history of the provisional methods by which women took the power to end things into their own hands so as to articulate a different vision of what life might be.28 To refuse the impulse to forget the violence of abortion — making that violence a personal event; "a thing of the past" — is to recognise it, Ernaux writes, as a collective history that is still unfolding.29

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Acknowledgements: With thanks to Clair Wills and Charlie Jeffries for discussion on the history of abortion; the UK-based Post45 group, who encouraged me to pursue some of the ideas in this article in a workshop at Maynooth University last June; and to my mother for reading an early draft. This article has been written with funding from the Leverhulme Trust.

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Dr. Jess Cotton is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cambridge University where she is working on a postwar study of loneliness. Her academic articles have been published or are forthcoming in American Literary History, ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, and New Formations. Her book on John Ashbery is out next month with Reaktion Books / Chicago University Press. She has written about Ernaux's work on several occasions for Jacobin Magazine.

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