Choice Words
Page 1
CHOICE WORDS
© 2020 Annie Finch
Published in 2020 by
Haymarket Books
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Chicago, IL 60618
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ISBN: 978-1-64259-200-9
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
For my sister
Mary Dabney Baker Finch (1952–2018)
with sorrow that your
secret youthful abortion
wounded you and
many others
CONTENTS
Foreword
Katha Pollitt
Introduction
Annie Finch
MIND
You Are Here
Cin Salach
First Response
Desiree Cooper
From The Women of Brewster Place
Gloria Naylor
Motherhood
Georgia Douglas Johnson
(Amber)
Debra Bruce
From The Kitchen God’s Wife
Amy Tan
The End
Sharon Olds
A Million Women Are Your Mother
Saniyya Saleh
“Oh Yeah, Because You Could Choose Not To,” from Now for the North
Emily DeDakis
From The Millstone
Margaret Drabble
The Abortion I Didn’t Want
Caitlin McDonnell
Free and Safe Abortion
Ana Gabriela Rivera
Merely by Wilderness
Molly Peacock
From Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft
Cora, Unashamed
Langston Hughes
You Have No Name, No Grave, No Identity
Manisha Sharma
Five Months Vulnerable
Burleigh Mutén
From Past Due
Anne Finger
Abortion
Ai
From Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
Lindy West
The Pill Versus the Springfield Mine Disaster
Joanna C. Valente
You Don’t Know
Judith Arcana
Ghazal
Jenna Le
From What Have You Done for Me Lately?
Myrna Lamb
Post-Abortion Questionnaire—Powered by SurveyMonkey
Susan Rich
BODY
From “Tam Lin”
Anonymous Balladeers
The Business of Machines
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
From Heat and Dust
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Psalm
Alina Stefanescu
On the Death and Hacking into a Hundred Pieces of Nineteen-Year-Old Barbara Lofrumento by an Illegal Abortionist, 1962
Pat Falk
From Self-Ritual for Invoking Release of Spirit Life in the Womb
Deborah Maia
And There Is This Edge
Lauren R. Korn
Tugging
SeSe Geddes
From Happening
Annie Ernaux
Saraswati Praises Your Name Even When You Have No Choice
Purvi Shah
“Recruiting New Counselors” from Jane: Abortion and the Underground
Paula Kamen
From “Box Set”
Sue D. Burton
Birth
Wendy Chin-Tanner
The Scarlet A
Soniah Kamal
Sorry I’m Late
Kristen R. Ghodsee
Pelican
Mahogany L. Browne
Names of Exotic Gods and Children
Valley Haggard
Date of Last Period
Amy Alvarez
Remembering How My Native American Grandfather Told Me a Pregnant Woman Had Swallowed Watermelon Seeds
Jennifer Reeser
From “Make Your Own Way Home”
Leila Aboulela
An Avocado Is Going to Have an Abortion
Vi Khi Nao
yolk (v.)
Emily Carr
This Doctor Speaks: Abortion Is Health Care
Sylvia Ramos Cruz
In Which I Am a Volcano, from Terminations: One
Lynne DeSilva-Johnson
Cold Cuts and Conceptions
Julia Conrad
My Excuse: I Had an Abortion. What’s Yours?
Laura Wetherington
The Jewel of Tehran
Sholeh Wolpé
HEART
the mother
Gwendolyn Brooks
Places
Mariana Enriquez
Women’s Liberation
Judith Arcana
Cardboard Pope
Galina Yudovich
From Granica (Boundary)
Zofia Nałkowska
Interred
Pratibha Kelapure
She Did Not Tell Her Mother (A Found Poem)
Kenyan Teenagers and Annie Finch
The Lady with the Lamp
Dorothy Parker
From Rubyfruit Jungle
Rita Mae Brown
From La Bâtarde
Violette Leduc
I Am Used to Keeping Secrets about My Body
Josette Akresh- Gonzales
Weather
Lisa Coffman
Of the Missing Fifty Million
Shikha Malaviya
My Sister Grows Big and Small
Linda Ashok
Tweets in Exile from Northern Ireland
Jennifer Hanratty
The Virginity Thief (A Letter to My Man)
Thylias Moss
Abortion Hallucination
Larissa Shmailo
Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, After an Abortion
Diane di Prima
What Was, Still Is
Alida Rol
From “Abortion”
Anne Finger
Song of the Emmenagogues
Lesley Wheeler
From The Hundred Secret Senses
Amy Tan
Nothing but the Wind
Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi
Haint
Teri Cross Davis
The Memory of Abortion Unexpectedly Returns
Leslie Monsour
Gretel: Unmothering
Lauren K. Alleyne
Moo and Thrall
Dana Levin
From La Nove de los locos (The Ship of Fools)
Cristina Peri Rossi
Abortion
Bobbie Louise Hawkins
From Come in Spinner
Dymphna Cusack and Florence James
From “Standing Ground”
Ursula K. Le Guin
Dear Elegy the Size of a Blueberry
Katy Day
“Farewell, My Love,” from The Sacrament of Abortion
Ginette Paris
Afterlife
Joan Larkin
WILL
Through the Blood
Busisiwe Mahlangu
Right to Life
Marge Piercy
From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Audre Lorde
The Spring of Life
Ann Townsend
From for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf
Ntozake Shange
From “Introduction to ‘The Idea’ and ‘The Idea’”
Hilde Weisert
Not Yours
Angelique Imani Rodriguez
Being a Woman
Jennifer Goldwasser
An Abortion Day Spell for Two Voices
Annie Finch
I Think She Was a She
Leyla Josephine
Regarding Choice
Alexis Quinlan
We Women
Edith Södergran
“Don Quixote’s Abortion,” from Don Quixote
Kathy Acker
American Abortion Sonnet #7
Ellen Stone
After the Abortion, an Older White Planned Parenthood Volunteer Asks If My Husband Is Here & Squeezes My Thigh and Says, “You Made The Right Decision,” and Then “Look What Could Happen If Trump Were President, I Mean, You Might Not Even Be Here.”
Camonghne Felix
New World Order
Lisa Alvarado
From Daughter of Earth
Agnes Smedley
The Abortion
Anne Sexton
Confession #1
Yesenia Montilla
From Frog
Mo Yan
Getting into Trouble
Jacqueline Saphra
The Children’s Crusade
Ana Blandiana
A Promise
Gloria Steinem
SPIRIT
Poem for Myself and Mei: Concerning Abortion
Leslie Marmon Silko
A Good Woman Would Never
Sylvia Beato
Abortion Isn’t Beautiful
Nicole Walker
Magdalen
Amy Levy
The Year the Law Changed
Carol Muske-Dukes
I Bloomed
Angie Masters
From “Corona and Confession”
Ellen McGrath Smith
The Promise
Tara Betts
From “A Healing Abortion Ceremony”
Jane Hardwicke Collings and Melody Bee
A Birth Plan for Dying
Hanna Neuschwander
On That Day
Arisa White
New Religion
Mary Morris
Hail Mary
Deborah Hauser
At Advent, the Waiting Room
Daisy Fried
From A Book of American Martyrs
Joyce Carol Oates
Tunnel of Light
Julie Kane
Lizard
Ulrica Hume
Beneath the World: Two Poems to The Child Never to Be Born
Sharon Doubiago
Prayer to the Spirit
Starhawk
the lost baby poem
Lucille Clifton
Abortion Child
Jean Valentine
“Fire Section” from Abortion: A Healing Ritual
Minerva Earthschild and Vibra Willow
An Abortion
Frank O’Hara
From “Principles of Midwifery,” from My Notorious Life
Kate Manning
Christmas Carols
Margaret Atwood
Nicolette
Colette Inez
From “Lily’s Abortion in the Room of Statues” in Among the Goddesses
Annie Finch
Chapel of Forgiveness
Cathleen Calbert
From Surfacing
Margaret Atwood
Mourning Sickness
T. Thorn Coyle
Lullaby
Claressinka Anderson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CREDITS FOR REPRINTED TEXTS
CONTRIBUTORS
TIMELINE OF PRE-TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY WORKS
FOREWORD
Katha Pollitt
Women have been ending pregnancies for thousands of years, but it’s hard to think of many classic poems or stories in which abortion makes an appearance, and most of what exists was written by men who disapproved of it. Think of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, in which working-class women in a pub gossip crudely about a friend who took pills to “bring it off,” or Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which an aimless expatriate tries to persuade his sweet, passive girlfriend into an abortion she clearly doesn’t want. With few exceptions, abortion figures in men’s writings as a symbol—of modern alienation, of a larger sterility.
It took women writers to give the subject both bloody realism and emotional and social complexity. Even before the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, women wrote about abortion as simultaneously a personal experience and something more general: a necessary form of self-defense against poverty, stigma, exhaustion, crushing social expectations, one’s own sheer fertility, and brutal men.
The experience of abortion is something millions of women share, but there is no universal abortion experience, because every woman is different. Nearly every kind of abortion you can imagine is represented here. Abortions legal and illegal, safe and dangerous, and fatal; abortions despite the wishes of others and abortions at the behest—the compulsion—of others; abortion as a claiming of self and abortion as an abnegation of self. There is abortion as tragedy, and also abortion as an occasion for wry comedy, as in Vi Khi Nao’s “An Avocado Is Going to Have an Abortion”:
An avocado is going to have an abortion. What is the grapefruit going to do about it? It hasn’t gotten it pregnant. Certainly not.
In “First Response,” Desiree Cooper captures the multiplicity of abortion, and also its ubiquity:
Joyce didn’t have sex until she was married eight years later. Trish went back to work like nothing ever happened. We made a donation every anniversary. We were pregnant with memory for the rest of our lives. We never thought about it again.
In the popular imagination, abortion is the rejection of motherhood—women who have abortions are coldhearted “career women,” child-haters, feckless sluts. In real life, the majority—about 60 percent—of American women who have abortions are already mothers. It’s not surprising, but it is important, that in these pages we find abortion most often placed in the context of motherhood, especially for Black writers. Georgia Douglas Johnson’s abortion poem is “Motherhood”; Gwendolyn Brooks’s is called “the mother.” In “the lost baby poem,” Lucille Clifton writes:
if i am ever less than a mountain
for your definite brothers and sisters
let the rivers pour over my head
There is one kind of abortion you won’t find here, though, and that is the mythical one of anti-abortion propaganda: the frivolous abortion for no good reason, the abortion of sluttish, worthless women who just can’t be bothered, the abortion for “convenience.” As Marge Piercy writes in her poem brilliantly titled “Right to Life,”
I am not your cornfield,
not your uranium mine, not your calf
for fattening, not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators do not hold
shares in my womb or my mind.
This is my body. If I give it to you
I want it back. My life
is a nonnegotiable demand.
Abortion is always serious. As serious as birth.
INTRODUCTION
Annie Finch
I had an abortion in 1999. Searching for literature to help me absorb my experience, I realized that I had rarely read anything about abortion (and I have a PhD in literature). I was astounded to discover that there was no major literary anthology about one of the most profound experiences in my life and that of millions of others. A physical, psychological, moral, spiritual, political, and cultural reality that navigates questions of life and death, abortion should be one of the great themes of literat
ure.
Choice Words is the result of the twenty-year search that grew out of this initial sense of shock and loss. As I put out calls for poetry, novels, short stories, and drama and reached out to writers and scholars for recommendations and leads, I discovered that major writers had indeed written about the subject, but that much of the literature was hard to find, unpublished, or buried within larger literary works. The project was dispiriting at times, and I had nearly given up when a traumatic presidential election and an enraging Supreme Court appointment renewed my energy to complete the book.
Over the years, the anthology grew to encompass lyric and narrative poems, plays, short stories, tweets, memoirs, flash fiction, rituals, journals, and excerpts from novels. Here are writings that invoke grief, defiance, fear, shame, desperation, love, awe, tenderness, sorrow, regret, compassion, hope, despair, resolve, rage, triumph, relief, and peace. Here are writers from the sixteenth through twenty-first centuries, across ethnicities, cultures, genders and sexualities, including U.S. writers of diverse backgrounds and voices from Bulgaria, China, England, Finland, India, Iran, Ireland, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, South Africa, Sudan, and Syria, sharing how class, patriarchy, race and ethnicity, wealth, poverty, and faith traditions impact our understanding and experience of abortion.
Choice Words includes courageous, iconic texts that speak out ahead of their time, such as Blandiana’s “The Children’s Crusade”; Brooks’s “the mother”; Clifton’s “Lost Baby Poem”; Lamb’s What Have You Done for Me Lately?; Piercy’s “Right to Life”; Saleh’s “A Million Women Are Your Mother”; and Wollstonecraft’s Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman. Some of the pieces included are moving first-person accounts ranging from contemporary high schoolers in Pakistan to feminist legends such as Audre Lorde and Gloria Steinem. Others express the imaginative literary vision of major writers such as Margaret Atwood, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ursula LeGuin, Gloria Naylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Sexton, Ntozake Shange, Leslie Marmon Silko, Edith Södergran, Amy Tan, Mo Yan, and so many more.
The powerful literary writing in Choice Words depicts the collective courage of our struggle to gain back reproductive freedom and make clear that bodily autonomy is necessary to human freedom and integrity. They describe the tragic emotional and physical toll of cultural, political, and religious attempts to force us to have children, to force us to have abortions, or to surround our reproductive choices with shame, silence, and isolation. These are the words we need to learn from now.
ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
Choice Words is organized into five sections: “Mind,” “Body,” “Heart,” “Will,” and “Spirit.” “Mind” focuses on how people make the often agonizing decision to terminate a pregnancy, and how we carry the weight of that decision alone in times and cultures where abortion is not openly spoken of: the oppression of silence. From Debra Bruce’s tale of a young woman harassed out of her decision by protesters to Gloria Naylor’s portrait of poverty and domestic conflict from The Women of Brewster Place to Lindy West’s contemporary account of a matter-of-fact choice, this section offers graphic evidence that the final say on abortion needs to rest only with the person whose womb holds the embryo, since regardless of others’ influence, this is the mind, body, heart, will, and spirit that will live with the decision forever. As Caitlin McDonnell writes, “However painful the decision-making process, however fraught it is with ambivalence and paradox, it is ours.”