Abortion Stories
American Literature Before Roe v. Wade
From a colonial-era field guide entry on an abortifacient plant to Shirley Chisholm’s 1969 speech to Congress on the necessity for legal abortion, this collection of poetry, fiction, memoir, oral histories, and essays helps readers understand how abortion was accessed, understood, and portrayed in the United States before 1973. Even when illegal, abortion was always a reality for women, across race and class, though it was mostly an open secret only obliquely mentioned in journals, letters, and occasionally a scandalous news story or work of fiction inspired by headlines—like Edgar Allan Poe’s lesser-known 1842 sequel to The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
As whispered knowledge among women gave way to increasingly medicalized illegal abortions, the discourse became more fraught. The first work of American literature with the word abortion in the title—the harrowing one-act play Abortion (1914) by Eugene O’Neill—dramatizes how illegal abortion enabled wealthy men who had affairs with working-class women to protect their social status while endangering those women’s lives. (It was never performed in O’Neill’s lifetime.) Only later do we begin to see literature by women coping with their own abortions, freely chosen or not. Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “the mother” (1945) mourns the choice without condemning women who make it, which editor Karen Weingarten calls “an ambivalent and humanizing position . . . rarely represented in our present moment.”
Weingarten also includes rare first-person accounts of abortionists, such as Ruth Barnett, whose experiences with the often despairing women seeking illegal abortions convinced her that antiabortion laws “belong in the dustbin of history.”
