Site Archives

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

Abortion’s Poetic Figures

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…

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, 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…

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

“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…

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

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…

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

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 Now, Abortion Forever, 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…

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

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…

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

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…

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

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…

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

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…