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…
Contemporaries Essays
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…
The Author of the Abortion Is “I”: Against Redemptive Forms and Genres
“To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff — on some occasions, perhaps, once and for all — of those for whom you have claimed to be speaking; and…
Producing Abortion Epistemologies: Knowledge in / as Community
Looking at my nightstand, I noticed Tylenol and a chocolate bar and chuckled to myself. The juxtaposition of the objects seemed so obvious they bordered on cliché. If you know,…
In a State of Expectancy: Writing Against the Abortion Plot
Women have said again and again “This body is my body!” and they have reason to feel angry, reason to feel that it has been like shouting into the wind….
Abortion After All: A Dialogue on Reproductive Justice in a Post-Dobbs World
Heather Latimer, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Karen Weingarten, Associate Professor, Queens College, City University of New York We’ve been discussing abortion politics for more than ten years….