Choice Words Read online

  CHOICE WORDS

  © 2020 Annie Finch

  Published in 2020 by

  Haymarket Books

  P.O. Box 180165

  Chicago, IL 60618

  773-583-7884

  www.haymarketbooks.org

  [email protected]

  ISBN: 978-1-64259-200-9

  Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

  This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

  Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please email [email protected] for more information.

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub.

  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.”