The Author of the Abortion Is “I”: Against Redemptive Forms and Genres

The authored thing

I wanted to be the author of my abortion. I wanted to be responsible for my life and body, to live in relation to that responsibility.  I resented the expectation that one derives some sort of achievement or self-discovery from that event. I did not want to author a literature of social significance. I did not want to sell a catharsis. I did not want to perform an emotion that resembled regret. Nothing was realized. Nothing matured. Nothing was ruined.2

An abortion is an event, a physical experience, and a decision — but saying "I did this" is different from saying "I had this" or "it was done to me."  By setting the conditions for successful communication, the frame influences a story's articulation of agency or autonomy. A frame that develops in relation to the expectation of judgment puts the speaker in the position of persuading or defending. It tilts the focus towards determining what constitutes a 'moral' abortion or a 'good' choice.

Abortion stories incline toward literary forms associated with redemption, forgiveness, absolution, or atonement. The testimony, a statement used as evidence to demonstrate innocence, exists in relation to judgment as administered by legal and carceral systems. Similarly, the confessional form originates in the Christian rituals to expiate sin. Both imply that innocence and atonement is simultaneously desirable and possible.

The criminalization of abortion complicates authorship with questions of authorization. How does embodiment (as the source of authorship) complicate the biopolitics of collaboration in fertilization? To say an act is chosen — to identify with the act of choosing — doesn't lessen the pressure of performing contemporary femininity, a construct that tangles with essentialist notions of gender (i.e. women are naturally nurturing and sacrificial etc.). The discourse of choice narrows the ways we can define our autonomy.

I'd like to explore alternative possibilities for speech. Against atonement, towards a narration of shamelessness, with an eye to the irredeemable, my abortion insists I was its author. I return to it for my own reasons, which may or may not be ours. This is the we and not-we of embodiment: no "we" fits a "me" entirely. I chose it. I did it. I wrote it. I shaped, and was shaped, by it.

The thing with "no place in language"

Authorship foregrounds the specific embodied experience of each person's abortion. Annie Ernaux, for example, writes abortion by combining varying textual actions, among them, confessing, answering, reporting, worrying and writing.3 Her novel, Les Armoires Vides (later translated into English as "Cleaned Out") was published in 1974. It follows a young female protagonist named Denise Lesur navigating an illegal abortion in France.4 For the next twenty years, Ernaux published novels about parents, marriage, childhood, infidelity — until the year 2000, she returned to abortion with Happening.

The protagonist of Happening, an unmarried Ernaux-like character, speaks in first-person about getting pregnant, exhausting various options for a safe abortion, and eventually attempting to self-administer abortion with a knitting needle before finally locating an illegal abortion provider. The abortion lands her in the hospital emergency room, on the brink of death. Leaping between recollections and diary entries from that time, the text embodies an ongoingness wherein the abortion keeps happening in the speaker's head. Ernaux titled the book after its epigraph, which quotes a line from self-described "confessionalist" Michel Leiris:

Comparing her abortion to a stigma that evokes the stigmata of nail wounds through the palms of a crucified Jesus, Ernaux employs Catholic imagery to indicate how abortion marks her. Shame rolls into misgivings about the presentation of her literary material. How does one deal with such an event in writing? How does the act of recollection reshape the event?

Writing the book about her abortion resembles the abortion to Ernaux, who knows she won't have any control over how it is read. Losing power over her text is worsened by the anticipation of possible "aftereffects," the awkward silences, the grotesque humiliations. Fear of future consequences and misinterpretation recurs throughout Ernaux's writing, as she reinterprets the self again and again over time, throughout her oeuvre, thus expanding fiction to include a sort of speculative nonfiction that hinges on errors of memory.

"This thing had no place in language," Ernaux wrote of her abortion. Yet she feels driven to record this thing four decades after the fact, tasking herself with guilt: "If I failed to go through with this undertaking I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy."6 The unlanguaged thing may be the gauntlet a writer picks up to carve space for the unspeakable, the unthinkable.

Words, spectacles, and memorial gestures

My high school copy of the Scholastic Dictionary offers the following word-collage:

The synonym of abortion is "downfall"; the antonym of abortion is "achievement": life happens in language.  Connotations are ontologically clingy; they attach themselves as part of socialization and often persist as inexpressible associations. Experience isn't a form of transcendence that exists outside the discursive regimes used to explain it, as we observe throughout this cluster. Discourses formulate language's limiting conditions: we find ourselves in the available words. Any speaking 'subject' implicates the society and culture in which various truth claims are negotiated.

Words contour the terrain of possibility and how we locate ourselves inside it. I'm thinking of the noticeable, the public, the visually salient, and the gaze that asserts itself in the power to define what it sees. "Spectacle is the right to capture, to capture what is deemed abjection, and the right to publish it," Christina Sharpe writes. Spectacle "has a long life and a big sound."8 It scores the tempo and stages the scene. It tells us which voices matter and how they should speak. Spectacle pre-scripts relational negotiations of autonomy and visibility.

If monuments standardize affective responses to historical events, virtual monuments create global communities of shared memorializing. The National Memorial for the Unborn, for example, serves as a virtual, fetus cemetery complete with burial rituals and flowers.9 A website created by the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, the Memorial is a visual spectacle designed to normalize the belief that a fetus can (and should) be continuously tended or nurtured in a digital space. Its presence on the web provides opportunities for community-building around continuous memorialization practices, including a list of "affiliate" memorials and a designated Memorial Day on the second Saturday of September every year. The fetish-industry grants the afterlives of fetuses a timeless digital presence.

Anti-abortion activists often describe coming to their positions through consciousness-raising sessions with other women. To former abortion-clinic owner Carol Everett, the National Memorial for the Unborn is "as significant as the Vietnam Memorial." Redemptive agitprop changed Everett's relationship to her own abortion, making her an apostle for anti-abortion politics. "The National Memorial for the Unborn gives women who lost children to abortion a place to mourn," Everett declares on the website, "I'm pleased to be able to have a plate for my child." The language, itself, serves as a locus for redemption where the failure of abortion is corrected by the successful commemoration of the child.

Purity and power: The problem with testimony

Catharsis, self-realization, purification, grooming, salvation, self-improvement, ambition, status-seeking: these buzzwords verbalize late capitalism's obsession with purity, hygiene, and sanctity. This lexicon encourages us to evaluate abortions, to classify them, to determine a good/bad binary or administer a proper/improper typology. American purity-mania has religious components (i.e. the Right's Culture Wars), secular components (i.e. obsession with spiritual practices, fitness regimes, and various constructions of hygiene), and more overtly political components (i.e. ethnocentrism, racism, obsessions with linguistic purity, and anti-immigrant xenophobia) — all of which inflect reproductive politics.

Legal language reflects these cultural norms surrounding whose life is valued and why. Legislative actions intending to citizen the fetus create an imagined subject whose innocence relies on never having existed outside the host's body.10

And in courts, a testimony stands in for the firsthand authentication of a fact. By definition, a testimony is "a solemn declaration usually made orally by a witness under oath in response to interrogation by a lawyer or authorized public officials."11 Testimony also refers to "a public profession of religious experience." Some Protestant churches encourage the sharing of congregant testimonies during religious services and gatherings. Serving as an authenticated self-exposure that draws authority from the presumption of judgment, the testimony exists for the purpose of the judgment, whether by god, jury, comrades, or peers.

The judgment creates the audience, and it determines how the audience relates to the text. Given this multilayered representation of the speaker, testimonies straddle multiple epistemological realms, including ethnography, class and sociological analysis, history, politics, etc. When the testimony aims to serve a project that is radical or unconventional, like the testimonies that advance women's bodily autonomy, it does so by refusing a grammar (for example, fetus, not baby); pleading for ethical mitigation (the life of the mother, poverty, sexual assault, etc.); or building sympathy through conventions of feeling. But the form of the testimony remains intact.12

Aside on solidarity and exemplarity

Considering abortion alongside authorial agency asks us to read current legislation as a text that refuses both authorial intent and embodiment for persons who can become pregnant.

The structural assumptions that guide mainstream feminist activism hinge on gender exemplarity. In Lauren Berlant's words, "this politics of identification, in which the public testimony and witnessing of female struggle plays a central theatrical and political role, is founded on a paradox in the social construction of female marginality."14 To the degree that feminist activism presumes  "a political constituency in all women," it builds empathy through consciousness-raising. But the ordinary maintenance of broad solidarities adds to the hustle of late capitalism's intense affective demands, which have expanded to include virtual gestures of solidarity, pay-to-play empathy, and continuous physical collaboration.15

Historical definitions of Black literature have centered the authentic testimony of survival narrated in first-person voice, beginning with the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. Avery F. Gordon reads this feature of the narratives of enslaved persons as efforts to expose the immorality of slavery "by producing a morality of verisimilitude, by forging a congruence between realism and sympathy."16 How discomfiting to observe an overlap between the MFA's emphasis on "finding your voice" and the leveraging of Black testimonial writing for exemplarity-based pedagogy.

The problem with exemplarity is that we have no rules to help us determine in advance what to say about an example. An example is a thing which could go any way — could be taken as a story of freedom or a story of humiliation. The example exists in relation to what we have already decided to make of it. Abortion, when used as an example, is overdetermined by the political exigency to provide an example. And the example, itself, is complicated by the purism of our desires to theorize a sensitive, ethical, child-respecting termination.

Confession and confessional shame in poetry

As practice and form, confession connotes a desire for redemption and restoration through connection to the divine and/or one's community. Confession, or bearing witness to one's complicity in systemic wrongdoing, is the first step in this process; it sets the stage for memorialization as well as expiation.17

In poetry, the label "confessional" suggests a poet has said too much. Disdain for "confessionalism" bubbles through contemporary poetics.18 In The Poetics of Wrongness, Rachel Zucker engages confessionalism by reframing the terms and re-imagining the parameters. Ducker approaches the intersection of meaning and connotation in the confessional by offering Michel Foucault's "parrhesia" as an alternative:

Setting aside the poetics of forgiveness for a moment, let's go back to the garden where the first confession took place. Two naked humans stand near a tree with a snake and a sexy fruit. Eve is the one who chooses to eat it. After tasting the fruit, Eve sees the world differently. Adam is the one who decides to repent of this taste by telling God what she did (or what she made him do). In offering Eve's crime to a male-identified deity, Adam brings the confessional form to bear on Eve's choice — and with it, the mechanics of apology, punishment, and redemption. Adam's betrayal of Eve secures a relationship with divine judgment that favors his own sex. Maybe patriarchy begins with men betraying their partners for power. Maybe confession was the first hiss in Eden?

Thinking through the "snare of atonement"

Thinking assumes a commitment to the labor of articulating the unbearable, the unassimilable, the unacceptable. So I return to Annie Ernaux's confrontation with "the thing that does not exist in language," and to Hélène Cixous's injunction to think the unthinkable:

Each of us is shaped by irredeemable moments, or events that cannot be easily digested. The desire for aesthetic or ethical purity makes confession alluring. We are enticed by what Cixous calls "the snare of atonement," or the hunger to reclaim lost innocence by being cast as a victim in a ritual that gives our crime away to others for judgment and use.

To resist this, the writer must stand in a relationship of avowal with their crime to protect it from "the terrible fate of being forgiven." This snake-like quality of confession is visible in how "it disavows what it avows," turning its narrator into an appendage of expiatory apparatus. Even the defiant confession assumes a supplicatory posture. The problem with confession is that it "puts into play something . . . impossible and terrible: erasure." In imagining that verbal disclosure can offer reprieve from the burden of selfhood, "confession treats ritually what is absolutely untreatable," Cixous insists.21

Against confession, Cixous urges "avowal," a statement that stands in the unflinching horror of selfhood. (She names Thomas Bernhard as one who is "orgiastic in his avowals."22) It is tempting to read Annie Ernaux's confessionalism as expiatory, even as it resists the narrative arc of redemption. By continuously refashioning previous narratives in her books, by altering the tempo markings or time signatures of those books, Ernaux systematically deprives narrative of its epiphanic quality. We learn nothing. We refuse to become better people. And this is an expensive claim for late capitalism's self-improvement culture to accept.23

Against apologies and towards the apologia

According to Merriam-Webster, an apology is "an expression of regret for a mistake or wrong with implied admission of guilt or fault and with or without reference to mitigating or extenuating circumstances." The apology begins in the admission of wrongdoing. Contrast this with the ancient Greek and Roman conception of the apologia as speech in defense of accusation intended to clarify the reasons for an action, belief, or position.

There is no curtain of shame hanging over the apologia — and it feels particularly useful in post-Roe v. Wade time for its refusal of expiation. In the US, these rituals of supplication serve as the public terrain where a human evidences the self as worthy. The political use of redemption becomes a facet of how we navigate the politics of forgiveness, both prior to publication and after publication. Systems of justice demand the performance of contrition in return for the performance of forgiveness. This particular dynamic haunts the abortion story.

Perhaps literary forms like the "apologia" and the "avowal" supply narrative alternatives to the redemption-seeking forms? A few years ago, I wrote a poem about choosing to take the abortion pill rather than undergo dilation and curettage at the clinic. At that point in time, I needed the entirety of that choice to rest on me — for the choosing as well as the act of termination. To underscore the absence of regret, I wrote this poem as an apologia, and titled it, simply, "Apologia." The poem was published in an online journal, but it's not there now, because I took it down in solidarity with other women writers who protested the misogyny of the journal's editor.24

The apologia seeks to explain by avowing, or by standing in Cixous' space of avowal. That rhetorical form works for me as a way to "author" abortion and to consider the question of authority — to ask who is capable of authorizing the choices in a life. 25 Refusing rituals of atonement, redemption, and forgiveness acknowledges that forgiveness can also be a form of violence. Since "all violence has a history," as Cixous observes, the work of writing requires us to notice the escalations of dissimulation — to study how each violent act covers another act, and how this cover becomes the terrain for a new violence. There is no escape from this particular violence, since violence is present in our performance of virtue as well as our rationalizations. There is no way to know what the unthinkable will ask of us as humans.26 

"The more stress we lay on our torments, the more inseparable they seem from our unredeemed condition," Emil Cioran wrote, in one of his usual litanies of monstrousness.27 Is there a 'good' way to describe one's experience with abortion? Is laughter appropriate? 28 Is intransigence acceptable? Is carving the possibility for a less trauma-inflected response unethical?

Is one abortion ethically or aesthetically superior to another?

I did it all. I did everything. I purchased a silver mermaid necklace on Coney Island as a reminder. I wore the mermaid for years — a souvenir.

---

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

---

References