In 1934, Langston Hughes published the short story “Cora Unashamed,” about a Black woman who forms a close bond with Jessie, the neglected daughter of the wealthy white family for whom she works. When Jessie gets pregnant as a teenager, Cora can understand better than anyone else what she’s going through, having once endured the same experience. “No trouble having a baby you want,” she calmly tells the girl’s hysterical mother. “I had one.”
But unlike Cora, Jessie’s family forces her to have an abortion—which will lead to devastating consequences for Jessie and shatter Cora’s heart. In the end, in the sea of Jessie’s high-society relatives and neighbors and classmates, only this overworked, overlooked servant is able and willing to testify to what Jessie truly wanted, and what she lost.
If one overarching theme can be discerned in such a variegated collection, it’s this: No abortion takes place in a void.
I wasn’t surprised that Hughes, one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, had written such a powerful and haunting story. But I was a little surprised at where I found it: in the pages of Abortion Stories: American Literature before Roe v. Wade, a recent Penguin Classics collection of writings on the topic. In both fiction and nonfiction selections, from a possible veiled reference in an Edgar Allan Poe story to an impassioned Congressional speech by Rep. Shirley Chisholm, we see how the subject gradually moved out into the open over the years—and the widely differing ways it was seen and addressed.
The book is designed, in the words of editor Karen Weingarten, to counter “the assault on abortion” and align abortion rights with the civil rights “that now must be strenuously defended or won again.” Weingarten goes on to write, “We must be able to articulate this without embarrassed euphemism, to clearly see that this is a fight to establish reproductive bodies as fully human, deserving of rights, liberty, protections, and thus a fight for democracy itself.” So the complexity and diversity of the attitudes displayed in the book are fascinating—perhaps even counterintuitive. For every piece like the Chisholm speech advocating for the repeal of abortion bans, there’s one or two more that reckon with the heavy emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical consequences of abortion.
Some selections movingly portray the desperation of overwhelmed mothers in poor and/or enslaved families, making the strongest possible case for the practice. But other selections show women recoiling at the very idea of abortion, or men manipulating their girlfriends or mistresses into getting rid of what might blemish their own upright reputations. (Another selection I was intrigued to find in this context was Eugene O’Neill’s one-act play titled simply Abortion, as I had first encountered it in a Christian college classroom.)
Still others hint at regrets even from those who are convinced that a child wouldn’t fit into their lives. In an excerpt from Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley, the passionately independent protagonist, Marie, feels “concentrated hatred” for the coming baby that threatens to wreck all her hopes and dreams. She has an abortion and later goes on to have a second one. Yet after that first abortion, she looks at her husband and thinks, “How dared he smile when a child had been taken from my body, and now my body and mind called for it …”
The ending of any life, born or unborn, has effects that ripple outward and impact many lives, often in wholly unexpected and deeply painful ways.
In her introduction, Weingarten acknowledges, “Among less-canonical novels that I didn’t include are Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, which provocatively depicts why a Black woman might not choose to have an abortion.” She does include, however, Black poet Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “the mother,” which famously laments “the children you got that you did not get,” arguing that “the speaker’s relationship to abortion is more complicated because she mourns abortions while also not condemning those who choose to have them.” Weingarten believes that “this ambivalent and humanizing position is too rarely represented in our present moment.” While that may be unfortunately true for too many current pro-life leaders who have adopted a heavily punitive attitude toward women, for a long time it was not true at all, as this very collection of writings proves.
If one overarching theme can be discerned in such a variegated collection, it’s this: No abortion takes place in a void. The ending of any life, born or unborn, has effects that ripple outward and impact many lives, often in wholly unexpected and deeply painful ways. Literary efforts to deal with the subject, if they’re honest, will reflect this, whatever the authors and editors believe about the ethics or the necessity of the practice. And to their credit, the authors and editors of this book tend to be very honest.
Less honest is classicist Sarah Ruden’s new book Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas about Women. Ruden is dissatisfied, not to say furious, at how writers ancient and modern have dealt with sexual and reproductive issues. But to make her argument, she frequently has to distort the stories and ideas she’s examining out of all recognition.
Thus, if the narrator in a poem by Ovid expresses anguish that an abortion has left his mistress ailing, it must be because the man is “self-righteous,” not because he genuinely cares. “Granted,” Ruden acknowledges, “there are gestures at sympathy. … But they are rhetorical gestures; they seem to be made only to disarm his contemporary readers, who would likely be shocked that he ventures so officiously into such a sensitive subject at all.”
In contrast to Abortion Stories’ commitment to exploring many different points of view, Reproductive Wrongs commits to finding faults with as many as it can.
Elsewhere in her survey, Ruden has problems with early Christians’ promotion of a new model of marriage, since it disrupted the comfortable and stable arrangements that high-born Romans had going—namely, the kinds of arrangements where the husband could have sex with other women so that the wife wasn’t always having to bother with pregnancies, and “even modest households kept slaves to tend babies (or else hired nurses) and cook and clean.” Her attitude throughout this whole section, implying that the arrangements were inferior because they worked better for the poorer Christian families with no slaves, is so classist as to be jarring.
In contrast to Abortion Stories’ commitment to exploring many different points of view, Reproductive Wrongs commits to finding faults with as many as it can. Early monastic celibacy offends Ruden, because it could lead to men perceiving women as “walking temptations, daughters of the arch-traitor Eve.” But Charles Dickens celebrating early marriage and large families in a story like “The Chimes” also offends her, as it leads directly to “the production of factory and mine and cannon fodder.” Whatever era Ruden is visiting, the pro-family view, as many of us would now call it, cannot win—it’s either denying people pleasure or tying them down to unfair obligations.
In short, Ruden enjoys the contrarian position. But she keeps so busy arguing against every moral philosophy and guideline she brings up, that she often fails to realize what she’s arguing for—and that a lot of it is pretty distasteful by her own standards, let alone the standards of any decent society. When the eugenics movement is under discussion, she contorts herself so far as to somehow come up with this: “But through miracles of tact and pragmatism, [Margaret Sanger] strove in the cause of family limitation even in cooperation with the Ku Klux Klan. Nevertheless, on her worst day she was a heroic champion of family planning. …”
If an argument requires that a woman be praised as a heroine in the same breath that acknowledges her cooperation with the Klan, it’s time to throw that argument out and start over.
The one principle Ruden holds to throughout is that no one else should have any say in a woman’s family planning efforts, up to and including abortion. But to make that point, she ends up rhetorically trampling over the rights of others, from ancient Roman slaves to modern abortion survivors. (Though she makes a fair critique of the ways Gianna Jessen, one such survivor, has been used by opportunists over the years, the very existence of such a category of people irritates Ruden).
Throughout our lives, beginning but not ending with our lives in the womb, we need others, and others need us.
Reproductive Wrongs, not surprisingly, is shot through with the hyper-individualism that is deeply woven into the pro-choice ethic. And there’s a lesson in that not just for pro-choicers, but for pro-lifers as well. As this ethic steadily and relentlessly takes over our society—as Nietzschean will-to-power subsumes Christian consideration for “the least of these”—even the modern pro-life movement shows disturbing signs of embracing that ethic, as the government billing itself the most pro-life in history slashes to the bone funding for maternal health, the disabled, and pretty much any family who needs any kind of help caring for the babies they’re bringing into the world. Many of us mourned, and rightly so, for the child aborted after a diagnosis of Down syndrome in a recent high-profile case. But how many of us mourned when the government threatened to take away the resources that keep adults with Down syndrome alive and flourishing?
If abortion doesn’t take place in a void, then neither does childbirth or childcare or care for the disabled. “For none of us lives to himself,” Paul tells us in Romans 14:7 (NKJV), “and no one dies to himself.” Throughout our lives, beginning but not ending with our lives in the womb, we need others, and others need us. If Abortion Stories and Reproductive Wrongs have one thing to teach us, it’s that no human life exists or ends without touching other human lives, and when we forget that, we make the world a harsher, more dangerous place for everyone.
