For the past few weeks, Literary Hub has been going beyond the memes for an in-depth look at the everyday issues affecting Americans as they head to the polls next week, on November 5th. We’ve featured reading lists, essays, and interviews on important topics like income inequality, health care, gun culture, and more. For a better handle on the issues affecting you and your loved ones—regardless of who ends up president on November 6th (or 7th, or 8th, or whenever)—we have you covered. You can catch up on past features here: Income Inequality, The Importance of Labor, The High Costs of a For-Profit Healthcare System, and our National Epidemic of Gun Violence.
Today we’ve gathered the best stories published at Lit Hub about a very important issue that affects all Americans: reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.
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Imagining a World Where Reproductive Justice is For Everyone
What would it take to build a world where every pregnant person in this country had the rights, resources, and respect they needed to decide what to do with their pregnancy, whether to continue it or not? That world that we want to build is what’s possible with this election and the organizing that must happen after it, no matter the outcome. That world is possible, even as some of our political options drift dangerously far from it, fully embracing reproductive coercion, violence, and oppression as core to their white nationalist and fascist ideals.
Trump’s presidency was the final blow to a crumbling infrastructure maintaining abortion’s legality. Even before he installed several Supreme Court justices with his sole stated goal of overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, the majority of people who sought abortions encountered one of the hundreds of abortion restrictions. They ran up against unaffordable costs, inability to travel to clinics, insurance coverage refusals, and legal denials at courts and clinics. Some had been turned over to police by friends, family, and hospital staff who suspected them of self-managing an abortion, which is largely not a crime, nor should it be. Others were delayed in receiving care because they or their providers feared criminalization, and some have died. While anti-abortion candidates attempt to temper the impact of their actions, nationwide criminalization is their dream.
The 10 Best Books on Reproductive Rights
Once a woman’s right to choose was a personal medical decision. Instead, over history, that right has been subject to power: political and religious, inextricable from inequalities of gender, race and class. Since the fall of Roe in 2022, abortion is illegal in over a quarter of the country and restricted in over half. It is so polarized along partisan lines that it is hard to imagine that it ever wasn’t and yet over time the debate has changed fundamentally.
The following books seek to elucidate reproductive rights from disparate angles: historical, legal, rhetorical, societal, moral. What’s exceedingly clear is that women’s health is at risk. These books show how the infringement of reproductive rights endangers women. Women have died from illegal abortion, and discriminating medical care, been coerced into surrendering babies born out of wedlock, and undergone forced sterilization. And so, the fight for reproductive rights and justice continues. But perhaps the collective knowledge in these diverse books indicates some direction for a way forward.
Racism, Patriarchy, and Power: Siri Hustvedt on the Toxic Thinking Behind the Supreme Court’s Destruction of Abortion Rights
In 1972, abortion was illegal in Minnesota. One day that year—the exact day has vanished from memory—a 21-year-old man drove his terrified 16-year-old girlfriend to a women’s clinic in Minneapolis. He left her there for a pregnancy test and drove away.
I was the girlfriend. There were no home pregnancy tests back then. The boyfriend’s cowardice still rankles me, but most of all, I remember my fear, confusion, and miserable secrecy about my possible state. My imagination roamed to back-alley abortions. I had seen the results of some of those illegal procedures in grainy black-and-white photographs—the corpses of young women lying in pools of their own blood on filthy sofas and metal gurneys. I imagined myself in a grimy room with a strange man and his gleaming tray of instruments.
I had no money of my own. Had I been pregnant—it turned out I wasn’t—my boyfriend or my parents would have had to secure the funds for an abortion. I feel certain they would have, although none of them had much to spare, and the idea of my father knowing about my pregnancy sickened me. I do not think a flight to New York and the hundreds of dollars needed to pay for the procedure would have been possible, but I never would have gone through with a pregnancy. I would have broken the law.
How Annie Ernaux Inspired Me to Tell My Own Abortion Story
I read Annie Ernaux’s Happening, her account of her clandestine abortion in France, when it was published in 2000. In 2000, I was 34 and a mother. I had given birth at the chic clinic in Paris where I had also been born; my son was already accepted to the private school where all my friends wanted to enroll their children, and where I myself had been educated; I lived surrounded by antiques carefully assembled from my husband’s family and my own, and tasteful modern design. Our walls were taupe. I would never buy bread from the local supermarket.
Still, as it has been with every book by Annie Ernaux, I read Happening stunned by the feeling that she wrote specially for me. She wrote about an upbringing in a social class that was opposite to mine. Her parents ran a village café in Normandy, and she was the first in her family to attend university. But when I read her sentences about the traces of urine on her mother’s apron and the odor of rancid butter on a skirt, I knew exactly what she was writing about, even though I would not dare apply this word consciously to my situation. Shame.
Meeting a Crying Need: How the Women of the Jane Revolutionized the Abortion Conversation
During the four years before the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion, thousands of women called Jane. Jane was the contact name for a group in Chicago officially known as The Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation. Every week desperate women of every class, race and ethnicity telephoned Jane. They were women whose husbands or boyfriends forbade them to use contraceptives; women who had conceived on every method of contraception; women who had not used contraceptives.
They were older women who thought they were no longer fertile; young girls who did not understand their reproductive physiology. They were women who could not care for a child and women who did not want a child. Some women agonized over the decision, while others had no doubts. Each one was making the best decision about motherhood that she could make at the time.
How to Tell a True Abortion Story
On August 18th, almost two months after the Dobbs decision, I published an essay in The New York Times called “My Abortion at 11 Wasn’t a Choice. It Was My Life.” It detailed the molestation I’d experienced as a kid and the subsequent abortion I had in Utah. In the piece, I wondered what my life would be today if I’d been forced to give birth before I was even a teenager. I asked the readers not to look away. The essay found a good readership—I received no hate mail, only letters expressing the reader’s sympathy and thanking me for sharing my story.
After the essay came out, I traveled to Massachusetts and Rhode Island to give talks from my recent book, Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster, but most everyone wanted to talk about the NYT piece. That was fine with me. I have said the word abortion more times in the past three months than in my whole life. Shame is a thing of the past.
WATCH: Ursula K. Le Guin on Her Illegal Abortion in 1950
As young women growing up under the protection of Roe, we never really talked with our mother about her abortion. Elisabeth learned that it had occurred when she went through several abortions of her own in the 1980s; but what we know about the story of Ursula’s necessarily different experience comes to us through her written words, as it does to you. “The Princess” was her keynote address to NARAL Pro-Choice America in 1982 when Roe was not even a decade old, and this piece, “What It Was Like,” was a talk for Oregon’s NARAL chapter in 2004. These stories are public statements, performances of Ursula’s own life material as a means to inspire and transform. The second of them, which you are about to hear, is also a rather extraordinary public love letter to her own family.
This is a hard essay to read or listen to, and it’s meant to be. Clearly, it was hard to write; watching Ursula in her 80s read her own words aloud, more than a decade after she wrote them, the emotion is palpable—and that shy little shrug at the end, that letting go. For us, it’s hard to watch. It’s a hard thing to think about your mother having an abortion, and an illegal one at that—to do so takes you to an exquisitely painful, vulnerable place, imagining what she went through: the shame, the grief, the sense of loss she must have experienced, the lingering, corrosive doubt. A hard thought exercise, but necessary to fully honor the fact that she could later choose to carry you to term, bring you into the world, into her world, to love and mother you the way she wanted to mother.
How It Took a Diverse Coalition to Truly Fight for Reproductive Freedom in America
It was 1963, and Karen Stamm was unmarried, pregnant, eighteen years old, and eager for an abortion. A bright woman from a lower-middle-class family, she was finishing her education and in no way interested in having a child. Her home state of New York had treated abortion as a crime since the early nineteenth century. Starting in 1830, state law defined a carve-out or exception to the blanket illegality; it allowed a doctor to perform an abortion if he (and they were virtually all “he”) judged it necessary to save a woman’s life.
By the 1960s, this was known as “therapeutic” abortion and, for a small number of people who sought abortions, nearly all fairly wealthy white women, doctors interpreted the word “life” to mean something like quality of life. Doctors performed abortions for women who could argue successfully that an unwanted pregnancy would damage their mental health—and with whom the doctors were sympathetic. Stamm received approval on this kind of mental health basis.
Roe, Dobbs, and Reproductive Justice Lit: A Reading List for Abortion Advocacy
The history of abortion in the United States is the story of my life—or my life’s work. I’ve run a clinic since 1971, two years before Roe and now, fifty-three years later—two years post-Roe—I’m still at it, running Choices Women’s Medical Center.
Since the roll-back in women’s human rights that was the Dobbs decision two years ago, I’ve redoubled my efforts to train the next generation of abortion providers and to ensure the history of the reproductive rights movement is not just preserved but accessible. In order to make sense of how we got here, I wrote Choices: A Post-Roe Abortion Rights Manifesto (Skyhorse, 2023)—it’s both the beginnings of a strategic path forward and the story of reproductive justice in this country.
The books I recommend here were all written with Roe in place, but with pre-Roe horrors fresh in the collective memory. They represent a range of genres—reportage, memoir, fiction, oral history, political theory—but all make the case that having control over our own bodies is the bottom line for human rights.
Inside the Decades-Long Conservative Strategy to Weaken Roe v. Wade
In 1987, a widely overlooked book, Abortion and the Constitution: Reversing Roe v. Wade Through the Courts, laid out the primary legal strategy abortion opponents would pursue for decades. These fervent anti-abortion attorneys, brought together by Americans United for Life, the leading anti-abortion legal group, recognized that the reversal of Roe would take careful planning and a long-term strategy. There were several prongs. First, hack away at Roe’s foundations by discrediting the origins of the constitutional right to privacy, and expand the recognized justifications for restrictions. In this way they would gradually develop a new theory of constitutional jurisprudence that could subsume Roe’s entire rationale. Next, target restrictions to particular types of vulnerable women—indigent women or young women, for example—and once upheld, apply the limits to a wider group.
These challenges would need to be heard by federal courts packed with conservative judges who would be willing to upend the law. Ultimately, conservative Supreme Court Justices would be key to Roe’s demise. Arguing that “nothing can be a substitute for patient deliberation, exhaustive research, and a grand design,” this group of almost entirely male lawyers committed to working for the reversal of Roe until the job was done.
