Choice Words

Writers on Abortion

Annie Finch, Annie Finch

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642592009
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A landmark literary anthology of poems, stories, and essays, Choice Words collects essential voices that renew our courage in the struggle to defend reproductive rights. Twenty years in the making, the book spans continents and centuries. This collection magnifies the voices of people reclaiming the sole authorship of their abortion experiences. These essays, poems, and prose are a testament to the profound political power of defying shame. Contributors include Ai, Amy Tan, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Camonghne Felix, Carol Muske-Dukes, Diane di Prima, Dorothy Parker, Gloria Naylor, Gloria Steinem, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Rhys, Joyce Carol Oates, Judith Arcana, Kathy Acker, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lindy West, Lucille Clifton, Mahogany L. Browne, Margaret Atwood, Molly Peacock, Ntozake Shange, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Sharon Doubiago, Sharon Olds, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Sholeh Wolpe, Ursula Le Guin, and Vi Khi Nao.

HEART

THE MOTHER

Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed

children.

I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and
your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

PLACES

Mariana Enriquez

This is what it’s like to grow up in a country where abortion is illegal. Teenage girls in a provincial town, scared because the pill is expensive and they can’t pay, because they don’t know how to use a condom—this isn’t taught in schools and their parents don’t know they’re already having sex—and pregnancy tests are bought, together with antacids and aspirin in the drugstore. Silent crying in the bathroom when the test shows positive and then trying to find help. Drink rue tea. Throw yourself downstairs. Put some parsley in your vagina. Nothing works, the blood doesn’t appear, and it’s time to visit the “places,” because that’s what we call them. “A place” where a “señora” sees to you.

Places don’t have names or, rather, they can’t be named. They are ghost houses, anonymous houses, with facades that are so inoffensive they look suspicious. One of the “places” is an apartment. The stairs are very steep, narrow, and in almost total darkness. The door of the apartment is white. The woman who answers the doorbell keeps her face in the shadows, wants to know who told you about the “place,” and asks “how far gone” (referring to months of pregnancy). “Tell the truth because after three I don’t do it.” She then says the price and gives a date for the procedure.

That’s it. No advice, no medical history, no preparation, no who will do it, no what to do afterwards. The amount is high. Then the money’s stolen, usually from parents. Or the computer is sold. Or marijuana is sold. If your boyfriend agrees about the abortion, he might contribute. But usually boyfriends don’t know what’s happening because boys tend to like the idea of being fathers and then they become one more obstacle.

In one of the “places” on the outskirts of town, the clinic where the abortions were done coexisted with a small puppy mill. Rumor had it that the doctor was no such thing, but a vet who knew how to deal with human patients.

A girl from my school, Bernie, had her first abortion there. She told us about it as she smoked a cigarette in the schoolyard. She said it wasn’t a dirty place, despite the animals. And if she got pregnant again, she’d go back to see them because they were cheap.

Bernie was strangely pretty: she had a squinty eye and she had attitude. I was fascinated by it. At school, they said she was a tart, but insult tends to come with admiration and, with Bernie, the admiration was evident. The gray skirt of her uniform, which she wore very short, pulled up and folded over her belt, was the envy of everyone. Her long legs and laddered tights. The multicolored barrettes she wore in her hair and the adolescent rage in her blue eyes. The way she leaned against the wall, her white shirt, the cutest boy in the school kissing her in front of a female guard.

They expelled her. I don’t know why, maybe for smoking or for all sorts of misbehavior or some stupid thing. After she stopped coming to school, we still saw her in the street, in bars, at concerts. She was a famous girl, which is what bold, pretty girls tend to be.

We didn’t see her for some weeks and soon the word got around. Bernie had died in the street. She’d bled to death. Well, not exactly. She died in hospital, but she was close to death when she was found on the sidewalk. Someone who lived nearby called an ambulance when he saw her lying on the curb in a pool of blood, with a perforated uterus. I imagine her long white legs, covered in blood. Her hands full of blood as she tried to staunch the hemorrhage.

She was near the famous clinic with the dogs but not too near. About five hundred meters away. Did she walk there alone, mad with pain? Did the people who did the abortion dump her in this place? After how long? Had they put her in a car so they could leave her far away? Had someone been capable of holding her hand, lying to her, telling her not to be afraid, that she was going to be fine? I can’t stop wondering why they didn’t take her to a hospital. Why they punished her like that.

WOMEN’S LIBERATION

Judith Arcana

Every week we went to a meeting,
but not like now. No one stood up
and said, My name is Jane and I’m
an abortionist. No. Because we didn’t
want to stop, we weren’t trying not to do it.
We sat in apartments, passing the cards.
One card is Sandy from West Lafayette,
eighteen years old, coming in on the bus.
She’s got about sixty-three dollars, she thinks
she’s nine weeks pregnant. The next card is
Terrelle, who’s thirty-two and angry. Her
doctor gave her an IUD that didn’t work;
he says there’s nothing he can do.
Here’s Mona, fifty-four years old, has one
hundred dollars, wants to keep this secret
from her family. And Carlie, a long term—
twenty weeks pregnant, may have ten dollars,
twelve years old like Mona’s youngest—she
got herpes from her brother when he did it.
Every week some of the cards were passed
around for hours; none of us wanted
to counsel those women, take one
into her life. The longest of long terms,
they lived far away, had no one but us,
no one to tell, no one to help, no money.
They needed everything. Cards went around
the room while we talked: dilation, syringes,
xylocaine, the Saturday list. At the end
of the meeting, all the cards were taken.

CARDBOARD POPE

Galina Yudovich

Stranger on the sidewalk says,

don’t kill your baby. he’s holding a sign and running after women
and careful not to step in the parking lot where
guardians in orange watch for violations.
Across the street is a shop selling
PARROTS PARROTS PARROTS

of glorious yellows and greens and blues unbothered by abortions.
Nun on the sidewalk says,

they kill babies in there. she stands with a line of
churchgoers, church pray-ers, hallowed be thy name,
and all the rest of it, again and again, but more
around Easter, when the sin is worse.
Angry Old White Man on the sidewalk says,
you’re no better than Muslims
who go around killing people. he spends his days
with his sidewalk family. Sanctimony is thicker than blood.
Cardboard Pope on the sidewalk says,
give me your baby. there’s a man named Frank who
tells brown people in Spanish that his name is Francis, like the Papa.
he wants your baby too. i want to ask who does he offer his prayers to.
are his vigils for dead women—
dead from bleach, dead from poison, dead from knitting needles in
their vaginas?
where is his burning candle for sepsis, for bleeding tissue, for suicide?
But i have signed a pledge of non-engagement.

silence is political.
inside, the women reach home base, safe, Ollie ollie oxen free.
they battle cardboard popes to be here. They want to explain to me

why not now:

money, school, work, no man, bad man, too many kids to love.
they cry or they don’t. they say sorrysorrysorry for:
crying, not crying, asking questions, needing to check when someone
can drive them.

they say sorrysorrysorry for using my tissues, for
being pregnant, for not understanding why before, for needing
another one, for their kids running around the office.
i think, do they apologize to the Cardboard Pope, ask for:
absolution, forgiveness, mercy, understanding, unconditional godly love.
inside there is propofol and cookies for when you wake up and
doulas to hold your hand or ignore. Inside there is sisterhood telling you:
don’t cry, oh my kids are teenagers too, i can give you a ride.
outside there is Papa Frank, and there is no baby to give him.
he wants nothing from you now.

FROM GRANICA (BOUNDARY)

Zofia Nałkowska

That night had been a bad one for Justyna, full of dreams and sudden awakenings, damp and sticky from sweat. “What’s the matter with me?” she thought and sank back into sleep. S...