In Absence of Literature

Book Review | “Choice Words: Writers on Abortion”

By Alex Moni-Sauri

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“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 literature.” This observation summarizes the central credo of poet and author Annie Finch’s new anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion. The project began in 1999, following Finch’s own abortion – when she looked for literature to help her process the experience, she realized she had read almost nothing about it, and could find no major literary anthology on the subject. The discovery of this absence and the grief that accompanied it started Finch on a twenty-year search for poems, stories, plays, and other writings on abortion, culminating in the publication of Choice Words in 2020.

The scope of this collection and the time it took to assemble is both impressive and disheartening – how is it possible that writing on abortion is really that hard to find?

Art Mimics Life

It’s not an absence I had felt before, but on immediate reflection I could only think of a handful of poems by Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks, some flashbacks in The Handmaid’s Tale, and one short story by an author whose name I don’t remember. Katha Politt offers other examples in the foreword: 

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’s a strong reminder of how art and culture often reflect the dominant ideologies of society under capitalism, which develop from material conditions that both necessitate and confirm them. In this case, at least in the US, the dominant narrative around abortion is that it’s a personal problem, a moral problem, something to hide and to shame, something apparently unsuitable for literature.

In the effort to constrict reproductive rights, a common and frequently life-saving medical procedure is criminalized, marked by shame and secrecy, and made dangerous and inaccessible. The isolating, fragmenting effect of this cultural and structural attitude toward abortion is also reflected in its absence from literature.

Against a literary backdrop of silence and narrow symbolism, this book’s mission is not just to fill the void but to express a collective nature, a variety of perspectives, circumstances, and outcomes intersecting one human experience.

The Missing Piece

I was a little jumpy with Finch’s introduction: is there a bit of gender-essentialism in her language about the “birthright that naturally arises from our reproductive capacities”? Is there anything about trans and gender-nonconforming people who have abortions? What claims are made about the movement for reproductive rights? Which problems are identified, which steps to take? Is it suggesting only that we need more cultural representation, or more women in office?

Some of these concerns were addressed in Finch’s introduction. Trans and gender-nonconforming people get a mention a couple pages in, as Finch explains that her “prolonged and diligent hunt for literature from writers whose perspectives badly needed to be heard – including imprisoned and transgendered writers – yielded nothing.”

In a point about the role of literature in conversations about abortion, she writes that “[t]he political arguments have been made repeatedly; in some ways there is nothing else left to say, and yet so much more needs to be said.” Here, it seems that the main political strategy available to us is to make good arguments, and literature plays a defeated secondary role of allowing us to express those arguments to each other when they inevitably (“repeatedly”) fail to effect change at the level of policy.

Later, Finch writes that the stigmas and stereotypes against people who have abortions demonstrates “the gulf between women and those who make the laws and precepts,” ignoring the reality of women like Kyrsten Sinema and Hilary Clinton, who help make our laws and precepts.

Choice Timing

As I was reading Choice Words, Roe v. Wade was challenged directly for the first time in almost 50 years. In 2021, the US saw escalating attacks on reproductive rights all over the country. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research organization, “[a]s of December 31, 108 abortion restrictions had been enacted in 19 states. This is the highest total in any year since abortion rights were affirmed by the US Supreme Court in 1973.”

This is why I was ready to bristle at the introduction. The stakes are very high. I feared that, without a framework of Marxist analysis, the effort to capture a multiplicity and represent distinct individual experiences of abortion would abstract the issue too far from its political and economic context, obscuring both the obstacles and the path forward in our fight for reproductive rights.

Such a framework, even if just in the introduction, would identify the structural economic forces that make this procedure so difficult, restricted, criminalized, or forced upon people in the first place, and could meaningfully transmute feelings of personal shame and isolation into a collective experience, pointing to collective struggle.

So much of the pain expressed in this anthology is the pain of social stigma, secrecy, and shame; the feeling of being faced with impossible choices, of not having a choice; the pain of powerlessness, poverty, and patriarchy. This is the experience not just of abortion, but of abortion under capitalism. I wanted a frame that would hold these voices in context and name our right to safe, accessible abortions as the class issue that it is.

It would be boring to suggest that every piece of art and cultural product be evaluated for its most obvious political or propagandistic potential – we would have a world of political cartoons and echoing op-eds that nobody would like to live in. Literature can be measured by its contribution to our daily lives as working people. Is it available, accessible, enjoyable? Does it offer solace, humor, joy, a sense of solidarity, a form of escape? Does it speak to its audience, or does it speak down?

The Role of The Book

On this basis, Choice Words makes a great case for itself. There’s work from Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, Anne Sexton, Amy Tan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lindy West. The range of genres and forms included makes it very dynamic, and it’s thoughtfully organized but doesn’t require a linear read; it lends itself equally well to flipping around as to reading straight through. This is one way I imagine it could have a powerful impact: leafed through in waiting rooms of Ohio clinics, where donated copies will be distributed thanks to a Kickstarter campaign with nearly 500 backers.

In a section of the introduction called “Vision for the Role of This Book,” Finch explains her hopes for the impact this book could have “in the form of three concentric circles: individual experience, collective understanding, and social change.” As such, it does a great job of capturing the idea that abortion is as natural and as nuanced as any matter of life and death; it does not do as good a job of identifying the systemic mechanisms that so effectively weaponize a common medical procedure. Such a perspective would light up this collection with purpose and political clarity. For now at least, Finch leaves the question open.

Choice Words
Writers on Abortion
Edited by Annie Finch
April 2020
haymarketbooks.org/books/1459
420 pages, $29