Three Books About Abortion

On the personhood of pregnant people

In the past few months, I’ve read three books on abortion. My own abortion story is included in my memoir manuscript, a book about women and whales that I began writing in earnest in 2020 when our right to an abortion had been more or less protected for nearly fifty years. I was writing it in 2022 when the Dobbs decision removed the protection of Roe. And I am writing it now in 2024, when, well, we all know what is happening in 2024.

The first book was You or Someone You Love by Hannah Matthews. Hannah is an abortion doula, which is a profession I did not know existed before reading her book, and now tops my list of professions to pursue if this administration guts government science like their project says they plan to. I think I’d be okay at performing the actual abortions, so maybe abortion doula will be my gateway to training for abortion midwife, which seems like what I could be doing when we get assigned to our Districts. Have I recently googled “do midwives perform abortions?” Yes, I have. (Yes, some of them do.) Midwife is always on my possible career list, as delivering calves was always my farm chore of choice, and I feel at home around a uterus. So delivering babies and providing abortions in the fishing district. That’ll be me.

Anyway, this book is wonderful. By the end you feel like Hannah is your friend, holding your hand, helping you structure your heart space around the subject of abortion. The book is part memoir, part informational, teaching the reader through individual stories of women, and not just the ones we are primed to feel the most sympathy for. The ten-year-old girl who was raped by a family member and the college student whose IUD failed and who is just trying to finish her degree. The mother whose wanted child miscarries after the first trimester but leaves her with an infection that must be treated by abortion to save her life and the mother of four who does not want to stretch her finances, energy, and health further by carrying a fifth pregnancy. The woman who was date raped, but didn’t know she was pregnant until fifteen weeks and the incarcerated mother with alcohol and drug dependency. I am making these up, but Hannah covers an even broader range of pregnant peoples’ scenarios in her story.

The most important thing to me about Hannah is that she is there for people who have to go through the process of abortion, she does this with love and respect and allowance for the entire rainbow of emotion, and she brings them care packages full of comfort items and snacks. Be like Hannah is the lesson here.

There are many lessons in the book. Did you know kelp (Laminaria) is used to soften the cervix? I did not know. I love that the ocean I live beside provides such a crucial tool for this work, that it is the key to our softening. This makes all the sense in the world to me.

some of my kelp friends

The chapters are each titled, “Abortion is,” beginning with “Abortion is Mine,” and I am full of gratitude for the way Hannah shares her own story of having an abortion, with its complicated twists and turns, its cocktail of emotional states, its resemblance to the real life of a woman, so unlike the oversimplified caricatures of women-who-have-abortions the patriarchy would like us to imagine. People who have abortions are people you know, they are You or Someone You Love, even if they’ve never told you. Normalizing our abortion stories is good, difficult work that goes against the self-punishment and isolation that we have been prescribed for as long as abortions have been had.

Chapter twelve, “Abortion is Pain,” touched on something I’ve never heard acknowledged. That even when we want and need reproductive health care, and even when it is delivered with compassion, that physical care can remind us of times when we’ve been violated in the past. These “physical echoes,” Hannah writes, “Of bracing for a penetration it didn’t want, trying desperately to put up some defenses, and then, being penetrated anyway,” are yet one more aspect of abortion care that requires us to see nuance, to allow the full human range of experience. Yet we guard these types of responses to our abortion care, fearing the usual: that they will be taken as evidence of wrongdoing on our parts, that they will be held up as indicators of our flawed moral character. Hannah goes places in her exploration of the experience of abortion that we should go but maybe haven’t gotten around to going yet, and she brings us along. When we get there, we find we do not cede the moral high ground to those who would like to claim it from us. Later, Hannah makes the point that for some, abortion is the first truly consensual experience they might have with their bodies; those who take away our choice, who rob us of agency and ignore our consent, who deal in shame and victim-blaming, are the ones who have no place on the moral high ground.

Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win by Jessica Valenti is a concise and informative guide to what is going on in America with abortion rights. I still have a tiny bit of hope that some people who, like me, having been once ardently pro-life as a young woman, can become aware and awake to the violence and anti-lifeness embodied by the pro-life movement. Jessica seems to have neither hope nor patience for them (aka younger me), but her main point about that is that abortion rights are incredibly popular, and she feels we don’t need “them” nor need to change minds for abortion to be supported by 81% of Americans. I would like to be open to the possibility that women and all people could have 100% support for their bodily autonomy one day, and I don’t like the idea of writing off someone who grew up like me in a pro-life echo chamber, who maybe hasn’t had the privilege of leaving home and broadening her horizons and learning more about the realities of the world and the circumstances faced by humans other than herself yet, but maybe she will. So I’m just saying up front that this is the single area I feel differently than Jessica about, though I do understand her assertion, and the math checks out. Abortion rights are popular, and most people do not think they should be regulated by government at any stage of pregnancy.

Jessica maintains unswerving focus on the abundance of nefarious stuff in the anti-abortion movement, considering it well worth her time to “preach to the choir” rather than try to convert anyone. She is relentless at documenting the tactics anti-abortionists use to distort language, attack democracy, and push abortion bans through against the will of most Americans. You can refuse to call your abortion ban a ban, call it a consensus, or a reasonable standard, or worse yet a protection of rights/choice, but when it removes abortion rights, it’s a ban. You can call your crisis pregnancy center a health care option, but when it offers no credible health care and lots of propaganda aimed to force women to stay pregnant when they may not want to, you’re being deceptive. You can say you’ve given abortion back to the states and then attack democracy to ensure the public doesn’t have a say in their access to abortion after all. The thing about Jessica is she documents every seemingly unrelated move they make and puzzles them out so those of us who want to keep track of the firehose of threats and changes can follow the plot. I really cannot recommend her Abortion Every Day newsletter enough. But if you don’t want the daily play-by-play, her book is a great way to get up to speed.

The quote I bookmarked as I listened to the audio book was on a topic I may devote a whole essay to. “Those who put the health of their pregnancy above their own lives are martyred, depicted as the ultimate mothers, and perfect women.” I am familiar with the rhetoric that works hard to valorize women who die in sacrifice for their pregnancies, which Jessica flags as a tactic being used to dampen alarm as maternal mortality has inevitably increased following the end of Roe. Pro-life friends have slipped me books about such women, intended to sway my conviction that abortion should be unregulated. (I read the books. It didn’t work.) I have no intention of being a martyr, and this should never be expected of anyone. I also think that if someone wants to continue their pregnancy and forgo lifesaving treatment for their own lethal condition, then that should also be their choice! A compelling story of sacrifice loses its power if choice is removed. I appreciate that Jessica articulates the inconsistencies in a baffling belief system that points to martyrs as a justification to legislate the rest of us. She doesn’t miss a detail, and she demonstrates how the ethical thing is for women to have bodily autonomy, across the board.

The third book I preordered as soon as I heard it would exist: Pam Houston’s Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom. Don’t you love that? Reclaiming Personhood. Pam is one of the best writing teachers I’ve ever had the pleasure of learning from. I’ve been reading her books since Cowboys are my Weakness, since before I had my abortion, so my inner fangirl wells up when I remember being accepted into her Orion workshop in 2021. Then I attended her January 2024 Writing by Writers workshop with Lidia Yuknavitch which is why I can only say Pam is “one of” the best writing teachers I’ve ever had. I have peaked, workshops are now ruined for me if it can’t be with the two of them.

The years of Pam’s reproductive lifespan coincide with the duration that Roe was on the books. This is the unique lens through which her sixty short chapters weave together the story of abortion; her singular story and our collective story, intermingled and overlapped. One thing Pam says in her workshops is, “You have to invite the subconscious to the art-making party.” What sets her writing about this subject apart is the art of it. The way you can absorb facts all day but not be moved by them until they are wrapped in the bark of a dying mother tree.

“If you look close, you can see where eight-foot sections were peeled away from the living tree. An entire crew of men worked for ninety days at her destruction…

“There she still stands, another landmark, reminding us whatever safety we thought we had was only an illusion.”

Pam weaves in language from the joint dissents written by Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor following the Dobbs decision, another landmark in this story, in our collective story. Another gutting. The layers of meaning of landmark, she lets them wash over her reader, the way they enfold every aspect and impact of our personhood being revoked, mother earth being treated in like manner, how it is all a very fucking big deal.

A Mother Tree and landmark of mine…

The structure of the book with its short chapters reminds me a bit of her novel Contents May Have Shifted, with short pieces laid beside one another to vibrate and harmonize, without need for explanation. For example, this one-sentence passage is one half of a chapter:

In Wyoming, several members of the legislature had a meeting to discuss and ensure that the extreme language they were using to pass the total abortion ban in that state could not be, at some time in the future, turned around to prevent them from giving abortions to their cattle, a practice they believe in for optimizing the health of the herd.

Cows take up a significant portion of my heart space, and I have thoughts about how their female bodies are treated. The patriarchy will compartmentalize to preserve its own interests, while trampling on the interests of any body who may become pregnant. This sentence lays it bare with no need for additional comment.

Here is an excerpt from Without Exception, here is where to buy it, and here is a great conversation between Pam and Katie Yale about the book.

Pam states early in the book, “My primary job as a writer is to hold two or more contradictory ideas about the world simultaneously.” If that is the writer’s job, then it seems like it is also the reader’s job to hold more than one idea, to be able to absorb facts and interrogate my biases, to renovate my heart space as needed. These books were like a newly installed set of windows, letting in some more light, and much needed fresh air.