How does poetry figure abortion? Perhaps the most influential and enduring critical examination of this question comes from Barbara Johnson’s essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion.” Johnson’s essay turns to poetic…
Contemporaries Essays
Feminist Eugenics: Coerced Sterilization and Mandated Maternity
Towards the end of The Bell Jar, as Esther Greenwood sits in yet another doctor’s office, babies proliferate. In “page after page” of the issue of baby talk she flips…
“Cultural Problems Demand Cultural Solutions”: Performing Abortion Stories for Culture Change
“I’M HAVING AN ABORTION! And I’m going to need some help.”1 Jane’s announcement comes near the beginning of the 2018 play This Boat Called My Body, a production of For…
Labor and Restitution in Emma Campbell’s Abortion-Seeking Art Work
On the morning of October 22, 2019, the people of Northern Ireland woke up to the legally enshrined guarantee that the act of seeking an abortion would no longer be…
Abortion Stories for Accomplices
After decades of defending Roe, the demands issued by abortion rights activists before 1973 may surprise you. What began as a united front suffered an irreparable split. The coalition hoping…
Stories from the “Safe, Legal, and Rare” Era
It’s one of my first musical memories: the high, breathy voice, the worried pleading half-rhyme: “Papa don’t preach/I’m in trouble deep.” 1 It was instantly appealing; like any child, I…
Subjects and Verbs: The Past, Present, and Future Tenses of Abortion Rhetoric
In her 1991 film S’Aline’s Solution, the American artist Aline Mare narrates her personal abortion story.1 Integrated into video that captures Mare’s abortion process is a repeated voice-over conjugation of…
From Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open
From Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open Forthcoming AK Press, November 2023 I didn’t set out to write a…
Grow Abortion Power: Herbal Abortifacients and Abortion Storytelling
When writers use the names of specific herbal abortifacients in fiction, they conjure an imaginary in which abortion could be accessible and possible across genres, worlds, and time. Likewise, when…
Without Opening My Mouth
A few months after moving to New England for graduate school, I went home to Utah for the holidays. I was homesick: I wanted to be farther from the center…