Karen Weingarten on Abortion Stories

Professor Karen Weingarten joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about a new anthology she has edited, Abortion Stories: American Literature Before Roe v. Wade. Weingarten reflects on the complicated history of abortion, the varied use of abortifacients, abortion’s ties to eugenics and state control of bodies, and the rise of the anti-abortion movement. She discusses how access to abortion facilitates other kinds of resistance, and explains how the book came to include authors like Maria Sybilla Merian, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Lucille Clifton, and Eugene O’Neill alongside oral histories from formerly enslaved persons and groundbreaking politicians like Shirley Chisholm. She talks about the stories she hopes to see represented in post-Dobbs writing and reads from her foreword to the anthology.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel. This episode of the podcast was produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: We always have to talk about “Hills Like White Elephants” when we talk about abortion, but we don’t. It’s not in this book. You’ve chosen this much more eclectic set of readings. It has this incredible range in the ways that it portrays abortion to represent the period that we’ve just been discussing. The book starts with Merian and ends with Shirley Chisholm, who, in addition to being a politician, was an extraordinary writer, and Lucille Clifton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Eugene O’Neill, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Williams—who, of course, was a doctor—in between. So it’s this amazing range. 

I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about what themes and histories you wanted to make sure to include, because as you noted in that introduction, you don’t allow abortion to be portrayed as a simple thing. You talk about the importance of access, but it’s in a very complex way that’s portrayed across all of these readings.

Karen Weingarten: Yeah, I’m glad you asked this question, because the decision not to include Hemingway’s story was intentional, and I wanted to show the history of abortion through its representation.  I was hoping that the text that I chose showed how people changed the way in which they understood abortion, but in order to really understand the history of abortion in the United States, you need to see how it intersects with race, how it intersects with class, how it intersects with, of course, gender and sexuality. So, for example, the Langston Hughes story, which is one of my favorites—it’s a tragedy that it’s not more well known, and I knew I had to include it in this collection. Someone might pick that story up and think, “Oh, is this an anti-abortion story,” because the character who has the abortion dies in the story, but at the same time, I actually think the story doesn’t comment on whether abortion is a good or a bad thing. It’s showing how abortion can be used as a coercive tool to support racist and xenophobic ideologies that were circulating at the time. 

You started this question with your comment about looking at the anti-immigrant policies of today, and I think we need to do more in this current moment to connect the anti-immigrant policies to the anti-abortion rhetoric that we stay circulating. We don’t often see these two things in conversation with each other, and they very much are—this idea of, “sending people back” who are not wanted in this country, and controlling the reproduction of women in this country to encourage so-called “true Americans” to have more children. And of course, that also means sending women back into their correct place in the domestic sphere.

One of the things I wanted to show is how that ideology has a long history. Sometimes when we look at how abortion is represented historically, some of these connections become clearer than when we look at them in our particular moment. So that’s one of the things I was hoping to achieve: to show all the different ways that abortion is connected to other social and political issues. It was in the 19th and early 20th century, and it still is today. 

Whitney Terrell: Speaking of that, for our listeners who haven’t read the story yet, could you just go through the plot of that Langston Hughes piece? I think it tells a lot, if you just know what happens in the story.

KW: Yeah, so the story is about a black woman named Cora who works as a housekeeper in a small town. Her and her mother are the only black family in town. I won’t go into all the details, but she becomes very attached to the youngest child of this wealthy white family that she works for, in part because her own daughter, who was the same age as this child, Jessie, died. So after her child dies, she almost adopts Jesse, and essentially raises her. Jesse falls in love and has a love affair with a young Greek man in the town and becomes pregnant. But this Greek family, they’re immigrants, and the mother decides that the son is not good enough for her daughter because they are “the white elite” of this town. She forces Jesse to get an abortion, and Jesse ends up dying as a result. At Jesse’s funeral, everybody pretends that she just died of some kind of stomach ache. No one talks about the abortion—the illegal abortion that killed her, and Cora, as the story suggests, unashamedly comes to enter the funeral and tells everybody in the town what happened. She speaks that which should not be spoken, and shames the mother. But I don’t think she shames the mother because Jessie had an abortion, I think she shames the mother for not allowing her daughter to marry a man that she loved even though it was against the norms of white society in that particular town

VVG: So one of the things that’s so good about this story is that so much of the time when you see abortion in a story, there is one abortion or one choice, and so then that plot decision stands in, and it becomes representative in a way that it actually shouldn’t and doesn’t need to, and that flattens the discourse in a certain way. So here, the other thing is that Cora has had her child out of wedlock, and the title of the story, “Cora Unashamed,” is due to the fact that she’s not ashamed of it. So there is a reproductive choice that she made, and that is the foil for what happens to Jessie. And because they’re both there, it’s such a powerful story, because you’re not allowed to just choose one of the situations and morally align yourself with it, which is so interesting. 

Then also, you have written about and spoken about the ways in which the conversation about abortion is dominated by euphemism. You mentioned in the forward as well that even Biden, when he was talking about Dobbs, couldn’t bring himself to say the word. My former colleague, Charles Baxter, wrote this book called The Art of Subtext, and as I was reading these stories, I was thinking about all the ways that so much of the literature of abortion is about writers writing subtext. You have to understand the euphemism of things like, “Oh, she’s in trouble,” or even the word “choice” is a euphemism, which I never thought about. So were you looking specifically for pieces that would rupture that kind of silence.

KW: One of the striking things to me is that actually one of the first literary works to feature abortion is Eugene O’Neill’s one act play called Abortion. There’s no silence there. It announces it in the title. This play is not well known, and it was hard to find. It was hard for me even to find a copy to replicate in the collection. I wanted to find representations of all kinds of abortions. I wanted to find it in ways where it was in the subtext, like in Sarah Orne Jewett novella. I included an excerpt from The Country of the Pointed Firs, and abortion is not mentioned there at all. She mentions herbs, and she mentions women coming to her door in secret. 

I also wanted to show readers that actually, even as abortion was taboo, it was actually talked about in quite open ways sometimes in the literature, that people did mention abortion and were quite explicit about it even when it was illegal, even when admitting that they were having illegal abortions could have gotten them into political trouble, brought the police knocking on their door, essentially. So I really did want to show a range of its representation, because, in truth, that is what was happening. 

VVG: I also like the ways that the pieces force you to separate notions of ethics and legality. I had never read any portion of Peyton Place before reading this book, and there is an excerpt of Peyton Place, which, as a kid, I was like, “Oh, it’s this juicy story.” It was very controversial at the time. And it’s actually super transgressive. There is a choice that is portrayed as ethical and also illegal: for someone to provide an abortion in that story. It’s just interesting to think about the ways that the law and common morality do not intersect at all. 

KW: Yeah Peyton Place is another example that I knew I needed to include, because that novel was a bestseller. No novel had sold as many copies as it when it came out, and the fact that it had an illegal abortion really worked to change Americans minds and to get them to realize maybe outlying abortion is punishing women. In the case of Peyton Place, the story features a woman who was raped and then has an illegal abortion because there’s both a rape and incest. It showed how punishing it could be when abortion is outlawed and when people read that scene, and millions and millions of Americans read it, it really opened up a conversation about what illegal abortion was doing to people and changed the conversation. So it was an important novel at the time.

VVG: Yeah and it made me really want to read the whole thing. 

KW: Yeah, it’s fun.

WT: What I was thinking about when reading this is that it’s a complicated subject morally, ethically, and legally, and so therefore it has been part of literature, which looks for subjects like that. It is a subject, actually, that people return to again and again. I was thinking, as you were talking about Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which is set after Roe vs. Wade and is directed by a woman. It’s thought of as this funny teen movie, but also really, the main plot is about the main character having to have an abortion and being able to, actually. So I found that the literature side of this, the writing, the quality of the stories, is really strong. 

I wanted to put in a word for a story that I had not read before by Genevieve Taggard called “Engaged,” which is this stream of consciousness of a woman who’s trying to figure out whether she wants to be with this guy that she’s gotten pregnant with, and the way that she’s thinking about it. She’s writing these poems and deciding whether she likes them or not. It was a remarkable piece.

KW: Yeah, that piece, actually, was a late addition, and someone told me about it as I was putting the collection together. And I loved it because it really takes you into the mind of someone who’s struggling with the decision. And I thought it was different than anything else I had included, and so I felt like I needed to include it. In some ways, it shares some similarity to the nonfictional piece, and we haven’t really talked that much about the nonfiction. There’s an essay by someone who published under the pseudonym Mrs. X. I love that piece because she is explaining how she went about getting an illegal abortion. 

A lot of people wonder if abortion was illegal, how did people access it? How did you know how to find an abortionist? That piece goes to show how even when abortion was illegal, women were finding ways to access abortion. You just started talking to people. And that’s what I was finding over and over, that it was actually in some ways not that hard to access, as long as you were willing to talk to people. It’s estimated that by 1969, just a few years before Roe v Wade legalized abortion, a million American women were having illegal abortions a year. So that’s a lot of women having illegal abortions, and it means that chances are you knew someone who had an illegal abortion. So if you were just willing to ask, you could probably be connected to a doctor who was willing to do them, or someone in Puerto Rico or in Mexico. Often, women went to Puerto Rico and Mexico for their illegal abortions if they weren’t able to find someone in the US.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle.

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Karen Weingarten

Abortion Stories: American Literature Before Roe v. Wade • Pregnancy Test • Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940

Others

Dirty Dancing • Fast Times at Ridgemont High • The Cider House Rules • The Mothers • The Art of Subtext • Jessica Valenti • Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win • Peyton Place • Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway (which includes “Hills Like White Elephants”)