Tag: NOR 32

Something Has Tried To Kill Me: Race, Poetry, and Reproductive Rights

.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Sarah Green

I first heard Lucille Clifton’s “the lost baby poem” when I was nineteen years old listening to some Napster download of a warbly and far away Ani DiFranco reciting it onstage: “the time i dropped your almost body down . . .” That year, although emergency contraception had recently hit pharmacies, a long holiday weekend in Ohio found me saved instead by a friend in my dorm who carefully counted out pills from a blister pack until they added up to the amount of ethinyl estradiol and norethindrone that would resemble a morning-after dose. To be clear, this was not an abortion. But I found myself thinking about the potential baby. I counted the months—it would have been a Pisces. I read Diane di Prima: “how am I to forgive you this blood? / Which was [. . .] to grow, and become a son?” Still, as I finished up a spring semester Incomplete and made an appointment to get on birth control, I knew I was lucky to be able to move on so smoothly.

Of two abortions she had as a young woman, Ani DiFranco—who would go on in mid-life to give birth to two children—writes in a 2019 LitHub essay: “I used to periodically count the ages that my first two children would’ve been if they had entered the world as such. [. . .] It was an exercise in the terrifying math of the near miss. Your life as you envisioned it could have effectively ended three, five . . . ten years ago. Just imagine. What kind of shell of your former dreams would you be now?”

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Abortion Is Like Art: Red Clocks and the Facts of the Body

.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Madeline ffitch

“Two years ago the United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned, because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give consent to be moved).”
—Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

When I was in graduate school, a friend and I were invited to write a “docu-drama” about abortion access before 1973, when Roe v. Wade enshrined it in federal law. The project was a collaboration between the Women’s Studies, History, and English departments. History grad students supplied us with nearly a thousand pages of research, and we sifted through testimonials from people who’d sought illegal abortions, interviews with the Jane Collective, sobering statistics about how common it was before Roe for women, especially those who were low-income and not white, to be injured or to die from illegal abortions. Somehow, we gathered all these voices and patched together a draft of the play, after which one of the faculty sponsors invited me into her office. The draft was too cavalier, she told me. She let me know how important it was to emphasize that getting an abortion is never an easy choice. She shared with me that she’d had an abortion, and that although she believed strongly that her right to choose should be legally protected, ending her pregnancy was the most painful decision of her life, as it was for most women. To make it seem otherwise would be playing into the hands of the other side.

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