Lacey Louwagie's Blog

Recently, I dug out my trusty (and dusty, and dead) Kindle, recharged it, and used it to preview some files I was working on for a client.

One of the books languishing on my Kindle’s homepage was The Valedictorian of Being Dead by Heather B. Armstrong.

I thought, not for the first time, I’m pretty sure this is the same person who wrote It Sucked and Then I Cried, a memoir about postpartum depression that I read on my honeymoon (romantic, right?)

I decided to look her up real quick and confirm that it was in fact the same woman. (I really enjoy reading multiple memoirs by the same author and putting together the trajectory of a life.) But the first result that popped up read: Heather Brooke Armstrong (née Hamilton; July 19, 1975 – May 9, 2023) was an American blogger …

Was.

Heather committed suicide mere weeks before I decided to look her up again. The Valedictorian of Being Dead. I felt a twisting in my heart for her two children and I began reading the book that day.

Two years ago, I received a text from a friend letting me and other close friends know that a college classmate had recently died. She had an elementary-aged child and a newborn. It didn’t take too long for one of us to ask the question we had all been thinking, and the friend who gave us the news confirmed that, yes, she had committed suicide while in the grip of postpartum depression. Mere days after posting smiling photos of her family on the campus where we all went to college. And, if her maternity leave from her medical practice was the standard American fare, her death came right around the time she would have been returning to work.

As I viewed the last photos her husband posted and re-read the texts and read the stories shared on a fundraising page for her children’s future, my husband told me I should stop “dwelling” on her death. I had hardly known her in college, and her death didn’t impact me in any “real” way.

Except that in her life I saw my friends who were mothers of young children. In her life I saw me. For although I had never considered taking my life, I was slowly emerging from what had been the hardest year of my life. My first year as a mother of two, spending endless days trying to meet the constant needs of a baby and a three-year-old, sleep-deprived, losing my temper more often than I’d like to admit (and hating myself for it), hundreds of miles away from my dearest friends whom I hadn’t seen in almost two years. Because did I mention that we were in the middle of a pandemic? A pandemic that made me feel guilty for sending my older son to part-time preschool or allowing carefully vetted (and vaccinated) caretakers into my home once a week or more so that I could take a shower in peace or nurse my baby undisturbed. I didn’t know if I had postpartum depression of if this was just par for the course, having a new baby in a pandemic. I didn’t know if other mothers were struggling as much as I was. But I did know this: I had glimpsed the dark place my classmate had been in, and it broke me inside to know she couldn’t find a way out.

When my husband later apologized for being dismissive of my need to process the death of a woman I hardly knew, he told me it was because he was “terrified” of the idea that I could relate to her and he needed to push such realities away.

My best friend and I, both vaccinated, decided that we would chance an in-person meeting with our children that summer, meeting halfway between our respective homes. Like the classmate who had died, my best friend also bore the weight of a demanding career, of being the main breadwinner for her family, and of young children cooped up at home during the pandemic. I had discussed it with my husband, and there was one thing I needed to make sure she knew before that weekend was over. That if she ever found herself in that dark place, I would pack up my kids and cross the states between us and I would be there. Because nothing could be worse than that. Than a dead mom.

Suddenly every judgmental thought I had ever had about other mothers came back to haunt me. I made a vow then to do my best to break the toxic cycle of mom-shaming, even if such shaming happened only in my own mind. Because I don’t know what other mothers are grappling with that drives them to make the choices they do.

Too much screentime for the kids? Mom distracted by her phone? Long hours spent in childcare? Boxed mac and cheese again for dinner? Posting constantly on social media to “prove” what a good parent you are?

Who cares? WHO CARES? Because moms are doing whatever they can to get through the day and carry their secret burdens and stay in this world to kiss their children goodnight. And sometimes, we just have to let that be enough.

Heather B. Armstrong was dubbed “Queen of the Mommy bloggers” for her candid blog posts about her parenthood journey. For many, many mothers, she was one of the few antidotes to rampant mom-shaming. By writing honestly about the scarier sides of motherhood, about what it was like to mother while depressed, mother while addicted, mother while imperfect, sprinkling her sarcasm and dark humor throughout, she reminded thousands if not millions that they were not alone. And she endured — you guessed it — shaming and disdain for it. People who knew her surmised that this contributed to her decision to end her life. So, if saying nasty things to or about someone in a public forum makes you feel better about yourself, maybe think twice about hitting send.

In the Valedictorian of Being Dead, Heather writes about how she agreed to be part of an experimental treatment for depression that entailed being put into a coma — flatlining her brain waves — ten times in the span of a couple months. She agreed to it because she was suffering through what had been her worst depressive episode to date. Nonetheless, she writes sentences like this one frequently throughout the book: “I knew that I would not ever attempt to take my life, although I wanted nothing more than to be dead.” (emphasis mine)

Because I read this after Heather had already died, passages like this one struck me differently. I wondered if she wrote them to convince herself. I wonder if she wrote them to convince her ex-husband and the rest of the public that she was a fit mother, since one of her biggest fears was that her children would be taken from her. And I wonder how many times her mother and her children returned to passages like that one to reassure themselves that she wouldn’t leave them. At least, not like that.

She encounters a lot of people in the course of her treatment who are skeptical, who think that she’s either incredibly brave or crazy for participating in the study. When I told a friend about the book, she looked skeptical. “Has she tried regular therapy? EMDR?” Heather claims neither bravery nor insanity, simply desperation. I understood this, too. So did those who loved her most, which is why they supported her participation in the study.

I’m fortunate that I have never encountered a depressive episode as bad as Heather’s. But I do know what it’s like to live with a chronic, sometimes debilitating condition. I’ve had frequent migraines since I was 15 (a physical condition comorbid with depression and anxiety), and I have tried so many things to remove the specter of migraine from my life. Medications. Dietary changes. Acupuncture. Chiropractic. Meditation. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Neuromodulation devices. Journaling. Most of it has helped some. None of it has removed the burden from my life, only lessened it. Similar to Heather, I feel an increasing desperation to “solve” this problem now that I have young children. If a doctor approached me asking me to be part of a promising study on curing migraines that involved going into a coma 10 times, I would ask him if he had a pen handy.

I wonder if this affects the reception of the pilot study’s outcomes. I wonder if Heather could have had access to these treatments again, had she contacted her psychiatrist. Now that she is gone, this second memoir of her depression stands as a memorial to the struggle that ultimately claimed her life. It raises more questions than answers, despite the clean narrative arc, complete with an epilogue in which she informs the reader she has not wanted to be dead once since completing the experimental treatment.

I didn’t know Heather beyond her public persona. Two memoirs and an occasional blog post. But I’m still so sorry that she succumbed to the lie that the world would be better off without her.

It isn’t. And it’s not better off without you, either, no matter the lie your brain might be telling you. Do what you need to do. Put your kids in front of the TV. Eat too many cookies. Call your mom, your best friend, your pastor, your doctor. Just stay with us, for as long as you can.

And for the rest of you: turn your judgment dial down to 0.

I’ll try to do the same.

Having “crossed over” from one side of the abortion debate to the other during my life, I continue to find stories of political, personal, or moral “conversion” compelling. I also wanted to be fair to both sides, to read from both sides, and to do my best to keep my heart open to both sides. The two “anti-abortion” personal stories I read elicited both empathy and frustration from me.

Redeemed by Grace: A Catholic Woman’s Journey to Planned Parenthood and Back by Ramona Trevino

In anti-abortion circles, Planned Parenthood seems to be synonymous with Satan, even though it provides dozens of services outside of abortion. The immediate assumption from the subtitle of the book is that Ms. Trevino converted from a “pro-choice” to a “pro-life” position during the course of her work with Planned Parenthood, but that’s not the case. Ms. Trevino makes it clear from the start that she is anti-abortion. She experienced a crisis pregnancy at age 16, which led her to marry a man who was abusive. When she finally extricated herself from that relationship, she was drawn to Planned Parenthood because she hoped she could help other girls avoid the hardship she endured. However, she is only willing to work at her facility because it does not perform abortions; women wanting abortions must be referred to another location.

She feels a lot of anxiety over providing abortion referrals, and her story is sympathetic as one of someone who finds her job responsibilities conflicting with her personal ethics. But this book really lost me when Ms. Trevino allowed conservative Catholic radio to begin dictating her morals, never bothering to fact check any of what it taught about contraception. (For example, the depo shot does not cause miscarriages. She also referred to the Guttmacher institute as the “research arm” of Planned Parenthood even though the two officially separated decades ago.) She ultimately came to swallow the Catholic line about birth control contributing to a “culture of death” and being part of the “slippery slope” that ends in acceptance of abortion. While this is an intriguing moral argument, it has no basis in fact. It’s well documented that access to birth control reduces abortion rates and that “abstinence only” education, which Ms. Trevino comes to see as the “solution” to teen girls’ risky sexual behaviors and flagging self-esteem, are an abysmal failure.

Ms. Trevino’s willingness to turn a blind eye to reality in favor of the world she wants to exist ended up making this a really off-putting read for me. It also was not the “conversion” story I expected. In it, we have a woman who was always anti-abortion (but moderate) and then went through the more radical shift to also become anti-contraception. Honestly, the moral stakes just felt so low here. That’s why I felt compelled to add yet another book to my abortion books self-study …

Unexpected Choice: An Abortion Doctor’s Journey to Pro-Life

“What changed me? Was it people carrying around disturbing photos of abortions just to make a point? The anti-abortion zealots calling me names and threatening my life? Was it the activists loitering outside my clinic, yelling hate through the window? That couldn’t be the reason because the more they tried to stop me, the more determined I was to continue.”

– Patti Giebink, “Unexpected Choice.”

Patti Giebink performed abortions for the only Planned Parenthood facility in my state before she had a professional and personal falling out with her supervisor and left. First off, can I just say that it was really refreshing to read an anti-abortion perspective from someone who actually understands what abortion is? Dr. Giebink doesn’t just throw out buzz-words, but instead gives medical definitions for some of those that conservatives throw around with such abandon (such as what a “partial-birth abortion” actually is). She lays out the details of her clinic work with, well, clinical detachment, and she also makes it clear that during this point in her life she was running in pro-choice circles. After her second marriage ended, she moved across the state by herself and was encouraged to join a conservative Christian church. Dr. Giebink found community there, began to engage spiritually with scripture and with the ideas presented by her church’s “take” on it, and gradually came to regret her role performing abortions.

I kept waiting for the moment when her conversion became clear, but it’s kind of murky and gradual. She mostly says that she came to realize that the Christian god is a “God of Life” and, in interpreting everything from conception onward as “life,” could no longer adhere to pro-choice sentiments. She repented of her role providing abortions, and then aligned herself with the political powers that tried to make abortion illegal in South Dakota (I wonder if she’s sleeping peacefully at night now).

Because she has personal experience with abortion healthcare, she does not demonize those who are pro-choice the way other “pro-life” books do. Overall, her take is more nuanced than a lot of what comes from this side, and she openly condemns preaching a shaming attitude toward abortion from the pulpit. Dr. Giebink and I could find a lot of common ground if we ever met for coffee.

And while I can respect her moral conversion and her desire for others to reach the same conclusions that she has, I get off the bus with equating a change in your own morals to the need to legally enforce those morals on everyone else. It also very much feels as if the Christian community that has embraced her also uses her as a sort of “token,” trotting her out as a “success story” on radio talk shows and mega-church rallies. Really, they want to reduce her to someone who repeats the party line, when it’s clear that her take is more complicated than that.

I also took issue with the chapter in this book where she trots out a lot of “false equivalency” research, including studies that have not been published in peer-reviewed journals (because she claims everything secular has a “liberal” bias). That was frustrating to me, as I would expect her to understand the importance of solid research and the danger of misrepresenting shoddy research as such. It just brings up this question again for me: for people who are vehemently anti-abortion, why is the moral argument not enough for them to make their case? Misrepresenting reality is one of the things that ultimately drove me away from the anti-abortion perspective, and caused me to generally mistrust many who remain within it.

I should also note that both anti-abortion books were published by religious publishers (Ignatius Press and Focus on the Family, respectively), so the particular biases within them were not surprising.

That brings me to the end of my (non-exhaustive) “abortion reading list” and I’m taking a much needed break from it. (But you’d better believe I’m still going to be showing up to vote with this issue in mind.) I’ll write another post summing up some of my final thoughts on the project.

My previous posts:

Introduction / Academic Books / Fiction / Pro-Choice Personal Stories

Ah, the lure of “If Only …” to writers.

If only I could quit my job, then I could really focus on my writing.

If only I was independently wealthy. If only my kids were older. If only I had my own writing space. If only I could get an MFA. What’s your personal “if only” that you believe is the magic circumstance that would transform you into a REAL writer?

For Nell Stevens, that “if only” is, “If only I could get away from the distractions of the world.” She goes down the “If Only … MFA” route to find that other students, crushes, socializing, and working STILL distract her. So when the students in her program are offered fellowships to write anywhere in the world, she chooses the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of South America and on the edge of the Antarctic. There, she is the only inhabitant of a guest house on Bleaker Island. The island itself is home to just one couple who lives there part-time, managing sheep and cattle herds.

The length of Nell’s stay in the Falklands and her ambitions for her novel basically equate to doing NaNoWriMo abroad without any competing responsibilities. Sounds both lovely and maybe a little crazy-making.

It’s not entirely surprising that even after pursuing the ultimate “if only” writing destination — a practically deserted island — Nell’s writing goals still elude her. Certainly some circumstances are more conducive to writing than others, but no matter how we order our lives around our writing, we still have to wrestle with ourselves and our motivations. I related to a lot of this, Nell’s desire to get away from distractions, the exhilaration of a good writing day and the utter despair of a bad one. Like Nell, I have made decisions about my life that I hoped would be more conducive to my writing. I quit a full-time job for freelance work back in 2008, believing that more control over my schedule would allow me more freedom to focus on my own work. This sort of ended up being true. Mostly, I spent more time submitting my work and I did get published more during that time than during any other period of my life. But what I didn’t factor in is that I would be working more hours than I ever had before to make ends meet as a freelancer, that setting work-life boundaries would feel nearly impossible, and that daily earning goals would be a tyrannical master. I ended up making a big move so that I could cut my rent bill in half. That move led me to meet my husband so the changes I made in pursuit of my writing ended up paying dividends in my life’s story, but it was not the magic bullet I hoped it would be for my productivity.

Nell also learns more about herself and has time to reflect on her life, her memories, her goals, and who she might be without the noise of the world around her, although the great novel she hoped to write remains elusive. In large part, this is a book about making peace with artistic disappointment and finding a way to move forward, anyway. I appreciated that aspect of it.

I was also really into the descriptions of the weather and setting (a string of subzero days in my RL is what reminded me that I owned this book and reading it felt apropos to the season). The overheard conversations from island residents give just a glimpse of what it might be like to live in the Falklands full-time. Stevens intersperses fictional pieces with the memoir, both excerpts from the attempted novel and a handful of short stories with clear connections to Nell’s real life. Nell’s fiction style wasn’t quite my cup of tea (except for “Character Study” near the end, which was amazing), so I found these sections to be distracting. They very much felt like the work of a “young writer” trying to prove herself. The slog of getting through the fiction (which felt kind of forced on me when I’d wanted a memoir) to get back to the Falklands narrative was the main reason that I gave this book just three stars. But there is no doubt that Nell Stevens is a talented writer or that she managed to make something meaningful out of her time on Bleaker Island.

View all my reviews

I need to start this post with a disclaimer. I read five personal stories from women who were in some way connected to the abortion debate. To keep this post from being even longer, I divided the personal stories into two posts: those written by women who believe abortion should be legal, and those written by women who believe it should not. I use the terms “pro-choice” and “anti-abortion” because I do not feel “pro-choice” and “pro-life” accurately sums up the two camps. People who believe abortion should be legal hold a wide spectrum of beliefs about its morality; and those who feel it should be illegal don’t always hold as high a regard for “life” as their name would imply.

This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wickland

“Flower Grandma sighed and held my hand tight. Tears welled in her eyes.

‘I know exactly what kind of work you do, and it is a good thing. People like you do it safely so that people like me don’t murder their best friends. I told you how proud I am of what you do, and I meant it.'”

– Susan Wicklund, describing her grandmother’s reaction when she confessed the details of her profession for the first time in This Common Secret.

I first came across this book when I was shelving it as a library clerk. The cover caught my attention. The farmhouse surrounded by trees looked like the ones I’ve driven past my whole life, like the one I grew up in. The rural image was deeply familiar to me. And I also knew about the secrets we keep in such communities beneath a facade of conformity and functionality.

I found the book again at a booksale put on annually by the local Lutheran college, and I purchased it there. Eight years later I finally cracked the spine.

What I most wanted from this book was light shed on the idea that “those things don’t happen here,” and it does provide that. Dr. Wicklund shares stories of her interactions with patients in a wide array of circumstances, as well as her own deeply personal reasons for deciding to pursue this career. The harrowing story in the opening chapter should give at least a moment’s pause to anyone who believes abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

What surprised me about the book was how incredibly threatened Dr. Wicklund felt throughout her career. She received death threats at her home and place of work; had her home surrounded by protesters while her adolescent daughter was trying to get to school; wore disguises and bulletproof vests and and hid in the trunks of cars so she could get to work unharmed.

All this, at a time when abortion was legal throughout the country.

Medical abortions might be incredibly safe for women, but they are still dangerous for doctors.

And although I believe that the question of abortion should be addressed in the moral and not the legal realm, I wish we could at least find enough common ground to agree that expressing your deeply held convictions should not result in professionals living their lives in constant fear of violence. Because while abortion was legal while Wicklund was practicing, I often felt that the peril she faced was much greater than the peril faced by the women providing illegal abortions in The Story of Jane. The women of Jane were mostly anonymous. Dr. Wicklund was a constant target.

This book has an obvious pro-choice slant, and Wicklund clearly selected cases with the least moral ambiguity in the decisions women made to have abortions — although she does include a couple stories of abortions she regretted performing. She also perpetuates an often misquoted and inflated statistic about how many women previously died from illegal abortions. But for the most part, she cites her sources. And there is no arguing with the lived experience of her and her patients.

I’m glad I started my foray into personal stories with this one. Anti-abortionists want nothing more than for the public to believe that abortion doctors are profit-driven murderers. Yet the number of abortion providers in the country continues to plummet, and reading Dr. Wicklund’s story it’s easy to see why. No amount of money would motivate most people to put their lives, families, and mental health on the line the way Dr. Wicklund did. In one scene, she invites a regular protester to have coffee with her, and in this interaction the protester sees that she is a person with her own moral compass, not a monster. She did not change his convictions, nor was that her goal. More of these conversations should be happening. But they can’t if abortion doctors and others who are pro-choice fear violence when they share space with those on the other side.

Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict by Irene Vilar

“My story is a perversion of both maternal desire and abortion, framed by a lawful procedure that I abused.”

– Irene Vilar, Impossible Motherhood

I tried to take in every personal story I read about abortion with compassion and an open heart, but sometimes that was harder than others.

Ms. Vilar’s story is the “worst-case scenario” imagined by people on both sides of the abortion debate, that women will use the availability of legal abortion as “birth control.”

On the surface, Irene Vilar is one of those oft-maligned women. She takes her birth control unreliably, then lets her pregnancies continue for far too long before ultimately terminating them — fifteen times. But there’s more to her story than that. Isn’t there always?

Beneath the cycle of birth control failure, pregnancy, and abortion is an isolated woman attempting to cope with her abusive, predatory partner and a lifetime of trauma. As a child, Irene witnessed her own mother commit suicide. Although she does not say it explicitly, it seemed to me that her repeated unplanned pregnancies were her body’s expression of the ambivalence she felt about her adult relationship. She wanted children, but her lover insisted that he would drop her the moment she tried to “ensnare” him with any, frequently badmouthing his previous lovers who had “sold out” in response to their biological clocks. Deep down, she wanted to drive him away, and pregnancy seemed the surest way to do that. But once the pregnancy was underway, the pattern of abuse kept her from having the courage to actually leave. She terminated pregnancies rather than the relationship.

When she finally breaks free from him, she reflects on the fact that she hated the abortions–the pain, the judgmental doctors, the ending of possibility. What got her “high” (her words) was the uncertainty of whether a pregnancy would occur, then the possibility of becoming a mother and forming a new relationship to her child.

What this memoir painfully instilled in me is the knowledge that, if abortion is legal, we must accept that some women will use it in ways that we don’t agree with. And we must understand that there is always, always more to the story than we assume.

May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment After Abortion by Kassi Underwood

“What that story didn’t say was, the same conservative system that set up so many of us to get pregnant by accident, was the same creepy system that made bringing a child into the world seem like a brutal thing to do.”

– Kassi Underwood, May Cause Love

This was probably my favorite book that I read for this project.

Although I did feel like it went on about 100 pages longer than necessary, and while the ending felt pretty trite, it doesn’t insist on a single narrative around abortion. And it deeply explores why painting abortion as an issue with only two distinct sides (abortion is no big deal vs. abortion is murder) silences and damages women.

Kassi grew up in a conservative Southern home. She never thought she was the type of woman who would get an abortion. Until she found herself pregnant as a freshman in college, drinking too much and cheating on her long-distance boyfriend with a drug addict (the father). Her only options seemed to be having an abortion and following her life trajectory as planned, or having the baby, moving back home with her mom, and delaying or cancelling the plans she’d had for herself.

Although she chose the abortion and felt it was the “right” decision, it also haunted her. For years, reminders of it would trigger post-traumatic stress flashbacks. But she feared expressing these difficult emotions would give fodder to those who want to make abortion illegal. Not expressing them felt inauthentic.

First, she makes meaning of the abortion by getting sober and pursuing career success: “I wasn’t just wasting one life anymore–I was wasting two,” she says of her decision to clean up her act. Eventually, though, she knows that achievement alone won’t heal her wound, and she goes on a personal journey toward healing through various channels: a Buddhist ceremony for abortions, miscarriages, or stillbirths; a Catholic retreat for women to heal from abortions; private therapy sessions and interviews with academics studying abortion. Each of these experiences gives her another piece of the puzzle, until she can begin to feel gratitude for her abortion not because she had more opportunities without a child, but because it set her on a path toward deepening her spirituality that brought her all the way to Harvard Divinity School.

The vision she holds of a culture that has space for the complicated reality of abortion is one that resonates with me.

We would honor life and death, grief and suffering, friendships and romance, a love of one’s own body, mother wounds and daddy issues, the divine. There would be listening and validation, but no coddling, no insistence that abortion was universally the “right decision” or the “wrong decision.” If one of us determined that the wrong decision had been made, then we would embrace this admission as an integral personal acknowledgment of wrongdoing, not an indictment of reproductive rights.

And although her personal story is very different from my own, I’m grateful to Kassi for refusing to accept the easy narrative. Perhaps I had some hope that doing this self-directed reading study would help me “clarify” my own complicated feelings about abortion. It hasn’t. When I read something stridently pro-choice, there’s this little voice in my head that says, “But what about …?” and when I read something vehemently anti-abortion, an even louder voice asks, “But what about …?”

And maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe we’re only really in trouble when those little voices of doubt are so threatening that we’ll trample anyone who reminds us there could be more than one right answer. Or perhaps no right answer at all.

It may be a little late for the “New Year’s Resolutions” post, but “better late than never” is my motto since becoming a parent (only after becoming a parent did I understand that it would seem “reasonable” to put certain tasks off for YEARS at a time).

This year’s top resolution is to get more of my family’s food from local sources. We’re upping our CSA farm share from half to full this spring, and planting two apple trees. I’ve also begun buying cheese, eggs, honey, and other goods through a local online farmer’s market. Next year we’ll probably put in a garden (that’s one of those activities we’ve delayed years I mentioned earlier.) I’m reading books about canning with an aim toward actually doing it. I’ve always theoretically understood the benefits of eating local, but I’ve finally gotten around to reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. And while I find the descriptions of what’s in season on her family’s property and what they’re doing with it to be a little tedious, I can’t shake knowledge of the environmental impact of burning fuel so I can have strawberries in January. (By the way, it’s very hard to explain to a five-year-old and a two-year-old why we don’t buy strawberries at this time of year when they see them RIGHT THERE in the store.) I’m not going “all-in” like Ms. Kingsolver’s family did. I’m not ready to give up chocolate or bananas. But I’ve always lived by the philosophy that it’s better to do something than nothing, even if my efforts will never be perfect.

(But these tomatoes sure look perfect.)

My writing resolution is just to finish the short story I’ve been working on since my two-year-old was still swimming around in my belly. Why yes, that was one of my New Year’s Resolutions from last year. But the death of a member of my writer’s group set me back quite a bit. I still find myself wondering what he would have thought of the story’s ending, which is finally in sight now. I have no regrets about taking the break I needed to grieve.

I did succeed in submitting an earlier short story to market and got to collect a rejection email for my effort. (It’s filed in my “if at first you don’t succeed … ” folder.)

I’m not setting up a reading goal or project for 2023. I’ve got a shelf of books I deem “high priority” that I’m going to make my way through before they become irrelevant or my enthusiasm for them fades. And I’m going to enjoy the library now that my book downsizing project has resulted in less guilt about the amount of unread books I own. (Which is still ridiculously high. BUT fits on the allotted space. Good enough for me.)

I also bailed on my goal to get rid of half my cookbooks, but since I cut my actual book collection in half — something I never would have imagined I would get the gumption to do at this time last year — I feel pretty okay with that. I’m still downsizing the cookbook collection in line with our family’s changing dietary needs. (I can no longer have gluten, and my husband needs to watch his cholesterol. My five-year-old is still notoriously picky and mostly wants to eat foods involving gluten and saturated fats. Meal planning is a delicate business around here.)

Overall, I’m pleased with what I was able to make of the past year, and I look forward to further striving in 2023. Happy New Year!

“When I was starting out, I thought that I would write for six months and do other things for six months. But it turned out that once you’re a writer, you’re a writer, and that’s what you do, and you can’t escape from it. It is who you become and who you are. To tell you the truth, I feel guilty all the time because I feel like I’m not writing enough or not working enough. I have an intense work ethic where I feel like it can never be enough and I can never have enough time to tell all the stories. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know.

-Alice Hoffman, interviewed in Writer’s Digest, October 2019

I only read a couple novels on the topic of abortion, and both were from the young adult genre. I know there are probably hundreds of novels out there that deal with this topic, but this was never meant to be an exhaustive project — just a way to prioritize books already on my TBR around a theme. I have a lot of young adult books in my collection because I do a monthly recommendations column for girls ages 8-14, and publishers send me books for this age group (mostly unsolicited. Yes, I get free books without even asking. Please don’t hate me.) I also used to be a teen services librarian.

In both these roles, I’ve noticed a lot of books circulating about teen pregnancy, but not a ton about teen abortion. I’ve read three books that address teen abortion, all from a pro-choice perspective. I’ll only be reviewing two of them here, since the first one I read 14 years ago.

Rebel Girls by Elizabeth Keenan

“God, so what if you did?” Sara exclaimed suddenly. “It doesn’t matter! It’s none of their business! And it seems jerkish that anyone is talking about it at all, like, no matter what, they’re in the wrong. Isn’t Roe v. Wade about privacy, anyway?”

– Elizabeth Kennan, Rebel Girls

This was the first book I read for this project, when the shock and surreal quality of Roe v. Wade being overturned was still fresh. As such, what most struck me while reading was the general assumption that Roe v. Wade was a done deal, whether you agreed with it or not. Characters could debate the morality of abortion or the stigma surrounding it without its place as an established right ever being in question.

This book takes place in the early 1990s, so it’s historical fiction about, ironically, a time when women had more rights than they do now in this regard. It was published prior to the overturning of Roe v. Wade as well (September 2019). Athena is a pro-choice girl at a Catholic school whose younger sister Helen is staunchly pro-life. This causes Helen a lot of distress when a rumor begins circulating that she had an abortion over the summer.

Rebel Girls is more about the stigma surrounding abortion than abortion itself. It’s a pretty simplistic treatment of the topic and there aren’t a lot of surprises. It also feels as if it was written in a bit of an echo chamber — despite the fact that both pro-choice and pro-life characters populate the book, most of the pro-life characters are portrayed as manipulative, one-dimensional, misinformed, and, well, somewhat evil. While this “dark side” of the pro-life movement definitely exists, amping it up in this book means it’s not going to reach across the divide. Pro-life readers will feel alienated from the very arguments it’s trying to make. But maybe the author doesn’t intend to bridge the gap. Maybe she just wants to show how hard it is to maintain feminist ideals in a high school environment. In that regard she’s pretty successful, and I can imagine some burgeoning feminists feeling really “seen” by this. But for the most part, this book is populated with stock characters making stock arguments that even a sympathetic reader such as myself found a little tedious.

Borrowed Light by Anna Fienberg

“See, you’re not going to read this anymore now, are you? Well, are you? You won’t approve of me, I bet. You might say–well, what a creature, a sluttish girl with no moral backbone.”

– Anna Fienberg, Borrowed Light

The YA book about abortion I read 14 years ago, I Know It’s Over by C.K. Kelly Martin, lead me to this one. I Know It’s Over is about a teen boy coping with the end of his relationship with his girlfriend and her unplanned pregnancy. I emailed Ms. Martin complimenting her on her thoughtful, nuanced treatment of the topic of abortion. It was the first time I had ever come across it in a YA book, and I read a LOT of YA books. She wrote back and told me she had rarely encountered abortion in YA books, either, except for in an Australian book called Borrowed Light. Well, I think it’s obvious what happened next. I tracked the book down and, in typical Lacey fashion, let it languish on my bookshelf for a decade or so.

This is an incredibly interior treatment of the topic. Callisto, a teen girl who feels desperate to please others, becomes pregnant because she can’t bear to turn down the sexual advances of a boy who is interested in her. She lives within a suffocating environment of unspoken and unaddressed grief at home. Her parents’ relationship is toxic, and her mother struggles to be emotionally present for Callisto or her five-year-old brother. The entire first half of the book is devoted to Callisto mulling over her predicament; at the halfway point, she makes a decision and executes it on her own, one of the first times she feels as if she is doing something totally for herself.

Despite the very intimate nature of the storytelling in Borrowed Light, and despite the fact that it takes place in Australia and not the United States, it dovetails with a lot of my non-fiction reading. Callisto isn’t thinking about politics as she considers her decision, despite the fact that abortion had only recently begun to be decriminalized in Australia when the book was published (1999). And most real women seeking abortions are not thinking about politics, either, according to The Turnaway Study. Most of them are mired in their own personal circumstances and making choices for their future, just as Callisto was. A sizeable minority of women seeking abortions — about twenty percent — feel that abortion is morally wrong but that it should be legal.

This book briefly and poignantly addresses how the politicization of abortion interferes with girls and women being able to fully process their own experiences. After describing a politician who claims abortions skyrocket in the spring because women don’t want to look fat at the beach, Callisto observes,

“People like him make it so much harder. I mean, when they’re waving placards and spitting at you, you can’t admit a moment of weakness. You can’t tell about the feeling afterward, the sadness. You just say you’re fine.”

God, can I just say my heart is breaking right now typing that up? The conversation around abortion has become so toxic, and apparently not just in the U.S., that the lived experiences of real women are being silenced and suppressed. Yes, this was a work of fiction, but this “silencing” is explored more fully in May Cause Love by Kassi Underwood, a memoir that I’ll write about in a future post. And I still find just writing about this topic on my blog to be terrifying, feel the pressure to “choose a side” and adamantly defend it. But what if we spent less time defending our own viewpoint and really listening to those most affected by this? What if we took a step back from the political and returned to the personal? But unfortunately, the politics are robbing women of the ability to make decisions about their personal lives, to wrestle with their own morality, or to even voice an opinion on abortion that does not easily cleave to one camp or the other.

My apologies for the tangent, but this is a thoughtful and thought-provoking treatment of the topic of abortion for young adults. Callisto ultimately finds the abortion to be an empowering experience, as many of the women reported of their abortions in The Story of Jane. But there are more layers to it than that, for those who are patient enough and quiet enough to let them unfold.

Next up will be two posts about the five books I read in which brave women shared not just their opinions about abortion, but their personal stories. They are not stories I will easily forget.

(If you missed my introductory post or my review of the academic books I read, you’ll find them in the links above.)

After almost six months, I’m wrapping up my self-directed abortion books study. Originally, I was going to talk about the books in the order I read them, but instead I decided to group them topically. I read three books that I would call “academic” treatments of abortion.

Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice by Kathy Rudy

I acquired this book years ago when I did some work for a colleague and got paid, partly, in books. It appealed to me then because I’d come to feel out of touch with both the “pro-life” and the “pro-choice” movements. This book takes the premise that neither camps encompass the complicated or nuanced issue of abortion, arguing that we can’t really talk about abortion across this divide because abortion means different things to different groups. To pro-life Catholics, abortion means murder. To feminists, it means control of one’s body. These are gross oversimplifications, of course, but it’s these oversimplifications that inform our attempts at dialog across ideological differences.

One of my first thoughts when I started this was, “Oh boy, I’m out of practice reading academic texts.” Kathy Rudy’s writing style reads like a dissertation, which would be off-putting to anyone who isn’t used to reading in this style — or anyone who’s already done higher education and doesn’t really want to go back there. And that’s really a shame, because the central argument of this book and the solution it proposes to the abortion divide is one I would like to see more Americans get behind.

Rudy’s argument is that, since we’re not even talking about the same thing when we discuss abortion “across party lines,” we should stop fighting this battle in the legal arena. Abortion should be regulated by the medical community, not the legal system. And those who hold strong convictions about abortion should put their energy into converting others to their way of thinking, not changing laws.

Ultimately, what this means is that those who have a strong moral conviction against abortion need to put their energy into making birthing and possibly raising a child an appealing option. That entails creating a culture in which children, and just as importantly, those who raise them feel fully embraced, supported, and celebrated. The American culture lacks this value system and does very little to support mothers and families; as such, if you hold a strong moral conviction that every or nearly every conception should result in birth, then the onus falls to you to create subcultures within our country that offer generous support for women facing crisis pregnancies. Right now, too much of the response to crisis pregnancies from the pro-life community is a few boxes of free diapers and a boatload of shame and guilt for contemplating abortion.

Essentially, focusing on the legal battle allows those who are pro-life to let themselves off the hook easily when it comes to crisis pregnancies. If abortion is illegal (as it now is in my state), they’ve satisfied their moral obligation to save embryos and fetuses. They can walk away feeling morally superior while women and children continue to suffer. Taking the abortion debate out of the legal arena forces those who feel strongly about the choices of others to put some skin of their own in the game — and if you aren’t willing to do that, please step away from the pregnant woman.

The Turnaway Study by Diana Greene Foster

[T]his study is about the lives of women and children and how they are affected by access to abortion services. I am not attempting to engage in a moral or political argument, though people will, of course, bring their own beliefs and perspectives to the issue of abortion. But it is important for our opinions to be grounded in an accurate understanding of reality.

– Diana Greene Foster, PhD, The Turnaway Study, emphasis mine

Everyone who deigns to make laws governing abortion should read this book.

The study design is brilliant. It followed 1,000 women over ten years who either received a wanted abortion, or were denied a wanted abortion because they arrived after the clinic’s gestational cutoff date. It then compared outcomes across the two groups on a variety of factors, such as economic stability, relationship satisfaction, goal attainment, etc.

Something that is worth noting is that the vast majority of women in the group that were denied an abortion said they did not regret carrying the pregnancy to term. The vast majority of women in the group that received an abortion also said they did not regret that outcome. While people in both camps might try to claim the side they’d like to support their own stance on abortion, what the study really revealed is that women are resilient, and able to make peace with the lot life hands them.

Another important point of note is that when women cited particular reasons for wanting the abortion, such as lack of economic security or an unhealthy relationship with the father, they were pretty much always right in the fears they had for their life and the life of the unborn child. That is, women who feared not being able to afford a child (or another child) did, in fact, suffer greater economic hardship after carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term than those who received their sought-after abortions. Women who felt their relationships were not stable enough to support a child saw those same relationships fall apart within the next year or two in most cases. Women are remarkably astute at foreseeing the challenges that they face and making the best decisions for themselves and their families. Which is why we would all do well to trust them with those decisions.

And if you still feel you have a moral obligation to reduce abortions, this book offers some pretty clear targets for where activists should be focusing their energy.

Women get abortions for economic reasons. They get them because they can’t afford to financially support a child, either because they do not earn enough, do not have a safety net, or cannot afford to take the time off work required to give birth and recover, not to mention the cut to productivity that comes from sleep deprivation, taking time off work to care for sick children, etc. A financial safety net for families that included guaranteed paid maternity leave, high-quality subsidized childcare, or help attaining necessities such as housing and food are just a few programs that should be top priority for those who oppose abortion. Women get abortions because they do not want to be trapped in unhealthy relationships. Women who did not receive a desired abortion in the Turnaway Study were more likely to be raising children alone at the five-year mark. They needed to exit the unstable relationship for their and their child’s good, but because the child tied them together, it often took longer to extricate themselves. Women who received the desired abortion cut ties to the unhealthy relationship much more quickly, freeing them up to pursue healthier relationships in which they could raise their future children. So if children growing up in stable, two-parent homes is high on your “family values” checklist, denying women access to abortion actually impedes such relationships. If you want to strengthen the traditional family unit (two parents, children) AND reduce abortions, support programs that make it easier for women and children to leave toxic relationships. This could take the form of better access to domestic violence shelters, grants or loans to help financially dependent women leave abusive partners, or free mental health support and counseling for those in foundering relationships. Women get abortions because they feel they do not have the emotional or mental wherewithal to raise a child. If you want to reduce abortion, support low-cost or free access to high-quality mental health treatment for girls and women before they find themselves facing a crisis pregnancy. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel A. van der Kolk is an important primer on the lifelong (and inter generational) effects of trauma for anyone who doubts the importance of shoring up parental mental health.

Also, somewhat counterintuitively, access to abortion actually increases the number of children women bear. Women who were denied abortion were more likely to follow the birth of their baby with tubal ligation, whereas women who received their abortions often went on to have additional children when their situation stabilized. So if you want babies for babies’ sake, abortion access supports that. If you, like me, want all children to be wanted children who have the best chance possible of a stable upbringing, abortion access is crucial.

A note on adoption as the solution to crisis pregnancies: in the study, the women who placed a child for adoption were the only ones to consistently express regret about their decision. They were also unlikely to make the same choice with subsequent pregnancies.

The study also exposes that abortion restrictions based on making the procedure “safer” are complete hogwash. The complication rate for abortion is extremely low — women are about 14 times more likely to die from complications of giving birth than to die from a medical abortion. That doesn’t even take into account the myriad stresses and dangers pregnancy poses to women who survive it. (Pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, and hemorrhage, to name a couple of the most frequent offenders.)

After reading this book, essentially the only argument one can make against abortion is a moral one. There is no justification for continuing to legislate based on straw-man arguments related to women’s health (mental or physical), familial stability, or “love of children.” Those who oppose abortion on a moral basis are entitled to their convictions. Let’s just be honest about the arguments we’re making.

The Story of Jane by Laura Kaplan

I considered categorizing this history of the Jane Collective in Chicago — an underground abortion referral and provider network that operated from 1969-1973 — under personal stories because it was written by a member of the collective. But it is a journalistic history based on interviews, primary documents, and research. It is not a memoir, and the writer does not disclose who she “was” until the afterward in the book. (All Jane members are given pseudonyms.)

Even though this network operated before I was even born, I found quite a bit of information that remains relevant to the current conversation on abortion rights — particularly since many states have been flung back fifty years by the Dobbs decision. I can’t help but wonder if the extreme detail given in some sections of this book are meant to serve as a primer for those who may be motivated to revive such networks.

I found myself reflecting particularly on three points illustrated by the Jane collective.

Abortion providers have a dangerous job. I was struck by how much the members of Jane were willing to risk for women to access abortion. Many Jane members had children who still lived at home, putting their entire family’s stability at risk if they faced criminal charges. While the police mostly looked the other way, there was a raid on the collective that resulted in charges against seven women. (The charges were dropped because Roe v. Wade passed before the women went to trial.) While we might want to believe that providers no longer take such risks in places where abortion is legal, this belief is unfortunately naive. Currently, abortion providers face death threats, harassment, and more in carrying out their jobs. Both the members of the Jane collective and doctors who currently provide abortion face considerable risk to themselves and their families. Abortion, apparently, is not rocket science. When the collective learned that their most trusted abortionist was not, in fact, a doctor, women in the collective took it upon themselves to learn how to perform safe, humane abortions. Fortunately, the collective had connections with sympathetic doctors who served as insurance if any complications arose. But complications were rare. The collective performed more than 10,000 abortions in their four years of operation, and not a single woman died as a result of a Jane abortion. We know, of course, that DIY abortions are incredibly dangerous — but abortions provided by someone trained in doing them safely are not, whether that person is an MD or not. The Janes provided women-centered healthcare the likes of which we rarely see within established medicine. Jane members engaged in emotional support and literal hand-holding before, during, and after the procedure. Women were given food and water during the brief post-procedure recovery period. They were able to talk with other women who were waiting for or recovering from an abortion. The abortionist talked them through the procedure so they knew what was happening and what to expect. When the collective dissolved in 1973, women who had subsequent legal abortions reported the medical abortions as being more traumatic than the Jane procedures. While our medical establishment may be slowly and begrudgingly moving toward more patient-centered care — a doula, privately paid for, was welcomed during both my births to provide this kind of “whole-person” care — receiving intimate medical care can still very much make you feel like just another body being shuttled through the system.

While these books provided compelling arguments and, more importantly, evidence, I know that statistics do not always stick with one the way that personal accounts do. That’s why I’ll soon turn to the treatment of the topic of abortion in fiction and the personal stories of those living in the midst of the abortion debate.

Earlier this fall, I had the honor of being one of the final pre-publication readers of my friend Marie Zhuikov’s new book, Meander North, which goes on sale today!

Although Marie is a member of my writer’s group, this was my first time reading Meander North. The book is a memoir-in-essays of life in Northern Minnesota, pulled from over a decade of posts on Marie’s blog, Marie’s Meanderings. Because our writer’s group focuses on speculative fiction, and because the time I spend online plummeted precipitously after the birth of my first child in 2017, much of the content was new to me. And reading the essays I’d previously encountered on Marie’s blog was like bumping into an old friend.

Reading the book, I was filled with longing and nostalgia for the north shore of Minnesota, where I lived for seven pivotal years — the years in which I Learned How to Be an Adult. I was impressed by how vividly Marie had captured the landscape of the Northland, both literally in her gorgeous nature descriptions, and culturally in her stories about encounters with others who call northern Minnesota home. And reading the book made me jealous in the best possible way.

I admired Marie’s ability to find the narrative beauty and humor in the moments of her life that someone without her keen writer’s eye might have tossed off as “mundane” — seeing a rabbit in the snow, chatting with a twelve-year-old stranger during a dog walk, liberating a mailbox from a frozen snowdrift. Sometimes we can get so bogged down with living that we forget to capture, or even notice, the stories that we are part of. I have struggled with this particularly since having my two sons; I rarely have those moments of quiet or reflection that allow me to make sense of the world as it happens around me. Marie’s book was a reminder of what writing about our own lives can be, and it allowed me to see the stories in my own life again, to coax some cohesion and meaning out of the daily grind of making meals, answering the endless questions of a toddler and a five-year-old, holding screaming children until they calm down. It made me want to take up a regular writing practice again, to make note of the moments of my life before they are gone.

For a long time, I kept this blog as just a blog about writing. For most of my life, my primary identity was as a writer and, later, an editor. This blog lay mostly dormant since that fateful July of 2017 both because I lacked the dedicated time for writing that I used to have and the mind space for reflection; and also because when I was doing less writing, I fell into the mistaken belief that I didn’t have much to say here, anyway.

Marie’s book reminded me that my blog is my blog, da** it, and I can tell the stories I want to tell here. I can have the reflections I want to have. Writing is what makes me a writer, not the subject matter I write about. I may be writing less these days, but I am still living my life’s stories, and Meander North reiterated the beauty that can come from noticing and capturing at least some of them. So I’m writing here more, and writing in my journal more. And I credit Meander North with giving me that nudge in the right direction.

Give it a try for yourself. You might just fall in love with Minnesota again (or for the first time). Or, if you’re as lucky as I was, you might appreciate your whole life anew.

During my recent book purge, I found certain books jumping out at me. First, This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wickland, and then, its counterpart: Redeemed by Grace: A Catholic Woman’s Journey to Planned Parenthood and Back by Ramona Trevino.

I need to read these books right now, I thought. If ever I needed to read these books, it’s right now.

Making that decision, I pulled the other books from my shelf that dealt with abortion: Rebel Girls by Elizabeth Keenan; Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice by Kathy Rudy; Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict by Irene Vilar; and Borrowed Light by Anna Fienberg.

I decided to read all of them, along with The Story of Jane by Laura Kaplan and The Turnaway Study: The Cost of Denying Women Access to Abortion by Diana Greene Foster from the library. And to round it all off, the original opinions in Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson.

I’m still not sure exactly what my aim is in this self-directed study of abortion literature and law, except perhaps to educate myself as fully as possible on an issue that has become all-too-relevant.

On June 24 of this year, I was on my way to an acupuncture appointment when I heard the confirmation that Roe v. Wade had been overturned. On the way home, the coverage continued, and I cried as I drove, trying to absorb the reality that overnight abortion had become illegal in the state in which I live.

It also did not escape my notice that, had this ruling come twenty years earlier, I would have been on the side rejoicing over it.

I’ve been reflecting on this journey a lot lately. I was raised both Catholic and feminist, two camps with differing philosophies on abortion. I don’t remember hearing the word “feminist” in my childhood, but my mom was very vocal about feminist ideals, such as prioritizing self-actualization over relationships with men; pursuing your own independence (financially, in particular); and discarding the opinions of anyone who told me women couldn’t do this or that thing — even and perhaps especially when that came from the Catholic Church.

But my mom never talked about abortion as a feminist issue, and so I absorbed the Church’s teaching, my heart aching over all the “babies” that would never have the chance to be born.

I carried this conviction with me when I began working for a feminist organization after college, although I observed that it was at odds with the work culture and kept it to myself. At the time, I saw feminism as standing for the rights of those who are oppressed, and I saw a fetus as oppressed and needing to be spoken for. I was not the only feminist to make this connection or to claim both the titles of being feminist and pro-life, but I’ve come to see that those positions are generally at odds for a reason.

There was not a single moment that I remember “turning” from one side of this issue to the other. But I do remember beginning to see the sinister side of the pro-life movement — namely, that many who wanted to make abortion illegal also wanted to control women’s decisions in other ways, such as limiting access to contraception. Wanting to limit abortion and ALSO making sex education and birth control less accessible made no sense to me, and I realized that there is a strong branch of the pro-life movement that doesn’t see a fetus as a baby that needs to be saved, but instead sees a pregnancy as an appropriate “punishment” for a woman who has had sex.

I also began learning more about the dangers women faced when they attempted to secure an illegal abortion. I saw the hypocrisy of those who called themselves “pro-life” murdering abortion providers. I saw the hypocrisy of those who called themselves “pro-life” shrugging off the deaths of women who attempted illegal abortions as a fitting “consequence.” And most of all, I saw how many in the pro-life movement were not willing to support women or mothers who made the very choice the pro-lifers wanted them to make. Unmarried pregnant teachers could be fired at Catholic schools. Those who were politically pro-life all-too-often opposed the programs that would make life easier for mothers. They made snide remarks about “welfare queens” and argued that women who couldn’t adequately provide for their children should stop having babies or, if already pregnant, give those babies up for adoption. Essentially turning underprivileged women into a breeding mill for wealthier families. Forcing a woman to undergo the physical trauma and stigma of an unwanted pregnancy so that in the end someone more “deserving” could take the baby.

This, despite the fact that our foster care system is utterly overrun with just such babies, grown into children and teenagers, in desperate need of the homes that are often just not there for them.

Where is all this “pro-life,” pro-child, fervor for the children that actually need it? The living, breathing, beautiful, difficult, impulsive, exhausting children that already exist?

So for a while, I defined myself as “morally pro-life, politically pro-choice.” Meaning I didn’t think I could terminate a pregnancy, but I didn’t think doing so should be illegal. I later dropped the qualifiers, because for one thing, I don’t really know how I would react to an unplanned pregnancy in certain circumstances. I’ve had the extreme privilege of only ever having to face that possibility within a financially and emotionally stable relationship. And for another thing, how I feel about abortion in my own life is beside the point. If I believe women should be able to make that choice for themselves, I’m pro-choice. Full stop.

When I was younger and desperately wanted this issue to be less complicated than it is, I believed that the “choice” came when a woman “decided” to have sex, reasoning that any act of sexual intercourse could result in pregnancy so a woman was accepting that risk with that choice.

What a judgmental, short-sighted, naive position to take. My defense is that I was sixteen, although even then, I was smart enough to know better. I just didn’t want to see it. The way many people of all ages still don’t want to see the reality of this issue.

Because what I realize now is that, in our current culture, abortion is unfortunately desperately needed as a fail-safe for all the choices women do NOT have.

Women cannot choose whether or not their birth control fails.

Women do not choose to be raped.

Women do not choose to have an ectopic pregnancy or to carry a fetus that has disabilities making it incompatible with life.

Women do not choose health conditions that make pregnancy dangerous.

Women, for the most part, do not choose the legacy of policies and priorities in this country that fails to support almost all choices women make but then wants to forbid them from making this one.

And most importantly of all, a woman’s life also matters. A woman is a full person, not just a potential incubator for future people. And as such, the law needs to get out of the way when she makes this personal choice not just about her body, but about the course of her life.

I am terrified to post this because I know how vitriolic talk around this issue can become. But I am posting it because, although I don’t completely understand my driving need to undertake this “abortion book study,” one thing I knew from the beginning was that it felt fairly useless if I just kept it to myself. Especially now, in my state and in many others, where women’s lives are subject to the whims of other people’s opinions.