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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…

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

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…

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

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,…

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

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 Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

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….

Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, Contemporaries Essays

Three Vasectomies, or, What is an Abortion Story?

2004: Vasectomy #2 In a creative writing workshop in college, I wrote an essay about being groomed by one of my high school teachers. (Maybe you did, too. It is…