"This is the first volume of its kind to bring together a diverse collection of writings on abortion published before 1973, when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in every American state. These stories, poems, essays, and memoirs reflect a range of representations and responses to abortion during this era, but when read together, they demonstrate how when abortion is illegal, women's lives are always more precarious and limited. In this volume, you will read stories that will elucidate and enrich a view of abortion as one element of human experience--woven into stories of love and death and medicine and motherhood and enslavement and emancipation. Featuring luminaries like Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edgar Allan Poe, Lucile Clifton, Eugene O' Neill, and Shirley Chisholm, as well as rare firsthand accounts of abortion providers and seekers, this reproductive justice-minded collection brings together diverse representations of abortion to show how access to abortion is often race and class dependent, and demonstrates how the repercussions of an illegal abortion also vary depending on such factors"--
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Foreword by Rebecca Traister
Introduction: A Short History of Abortion and Its Representations Before Roe by Karen Weingarten
A Note on the Text
ABORTION STORIES
Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium by Maria Sibylla Merian (1705), translated by Wijnie de Groot for this collection
“ The Mystery of Marie Rogê t: A Sequel to ‘ The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ ” by Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
WPA Oral Histories by Formerly Enslaved People (reminiscences of life during the mid-nineteenth century)
“ The Great ‘ Trunk Mystery’ of New York City” by Anonymous (1871)
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896)
Abortion by Eugene O’ Neill (1914)
Summer by Edith Wharton (1917)
“ Motherhood” by Georgia Douglas Johnson (1922)
“ Engaged” by Genevieve Taggard (1922)
“ Mr. Durant” by Dorothy Parker (1924)
Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley (1929)
“ Missis Flinders” by Tess Slesinger (1932)
“ Cora Unashamed” by Langston Hughes (1934)
“ A Cold Front” by William Carlos Williams (1939)
“ the mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)
Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956)
The Abortionist by Dr. X as told to Lucy Freeman (1962)
“ One Woman’ s Abortion” by Mrs. X (1965)
“ Facing the Abortion Question” by Shirley Chisholm (1969)
They Weep on My Doorstep by Ruth Barnett (1969)
The Abortees’ Songbook by Patricia Maginnis (1969)
“ the lost baby poem” by Lucille Clifton (1972)
Afterword by Renee Bracey Sherman
Acknowledgments
Suggestions for Further Reading
Credits
