Ordinary Abortion: Reproductive Choice in Twenty-First-Century Women’s Writing
Autor Mary Thompsonen Limba Engleză Paperback – 21 iul 2026
Considers the undramatic prevalence of abortion in the United States and how it has shaped twenty-first-century women’s writing.
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decision, which erased the constitutional right to abortion, abruptly redramatized access in the United States. Yet twenty-first-century literature written before Dobbs reflects a landscape in which abortion appears as an undramatic, routine part of women’s lives. In Ordinary Abortion, Mary Thompson argues that many contemporary women writers depict abortion as a commonplace decision intertwined with health, education, career, sexuality, relationships, family-making, and motherhood.
Drawing on American poetry, fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and dystopian writing, Ordinary Abortion examines how ideas about abortion circulate through literature and how literary forms, in turn, shape readers’ understandings of reproduction and politics. Thompson traces new plots, characters, narrative strategies, and genres emerging around birth control, unplanned pregnancy, termination, and family formation. These works reveal renewed thematic attention to abortion’s relationship with motherhood and mother-loss, neoliberal pressures, stratified reproduction, masculinity, violence, care work, and disability.
Ultimately, Ordinary Abortion shows that abortion literature extends far beyond stories centered on crisis or choice. Instead, twenty-first-century women’s writing reveals a quiet, pervasive truth: Abortion has long been woven into everyday American life, normalized in ways that public discourse has often failed to acknowledge.
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decision, which erased the constitutional right to abortion, abruptly redramatized access in the United States. Yet twenty-first-century literature written before Dobbs reflects a landscape in which abortion appears as an undramatic, routine part of women’s lives. In Ordinary Abortion, Mary Thompson argues that many contemporary women writers depict abortion as a commonplace decision intertwined with health, education, career, sexuality, relationships, family-making, and motherhood.
Drawing on American poetry, fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and dystopian writing, Ordinary Abortion examines how ideas about abortion circulate through literature and how literary forms, in turn, shape readers’ understandings of reproduction and politics. Thompson traces new plots, characters, narrative strategies, and genres emerging around birth control, unplanned pregnancy, termination, and family formation. These works reveal renewed thematic attention to abortion’s relationship with motherhood and mother-loss, neoliberal pressures, stratified reproduction, masculinity, violence, care work, and disability.
Ultimately, Ordinary Abortion shows that abortion literature extends far beyond stories centered on crisis or choice. Instead, twenty-first-century women’s writing reveals a quiet, pervasive truth: Abortion has long been woven into everyday American life, normalized in ways that public discourse has often failed to acknowledge.
Preț: 291.22 lei
Precomandă
Puncte Express: 437
Carte nepublicată încă
Livrare prin curier în România Precomanda se expediază când titlul devine disponibil.
Transport gratuit de la 400.00 lei Plată online sau ramburs, în funcție de opțiunile comenzii.
Retur gratuit în 14 zile Comandă securizată și suport în română.
Doresc să fiu notificat când acest titlu va fi disponibil:
Se trimite...
Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259870
ISBN-10: 0814259871
Pagini: 190
Ilustrații: 1 b&w image
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.29 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814259871
Pagini: 190
Ilustrații: 1 b&w image
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.29 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Thompson does an excellent job placing scholarly work on abortion narratives in conversation with political and activist work. Analyzing abortion’s representation in twenty-first-century literature from poetry to thrillers, Ordinary Abortion makes an exciting and important contribution to literary scholarship on abortion.” —Karen Weingarten, author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940
“Thompson’s ‘epistemology of abortion’ extends the theoretical work of Karen Weingarten, Judith Wilt, and Heather Latimer into our contemporary neoliberal era of capitalist politics and twenty-first-century texts. Her scholarship is attentive to race, class, and disability and engages with a range of fields, from motherhood studies to reproductive justice.” —Beth Widmaier Capo, coeditor of Reproductive Rights Issues in Popular Media: International Perspectives
Notă biografică
Mary Thompson is Professor of English at James Madison University. She is coeditor (with Modhumita Roy) of The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism.
Extras
As a result of the ordinary work of abortion-providing since 1973, an ordinary or vernacular rhetoric of abortion-providing has arisen. While the pro-choice and pro-life sides of the polarized policy debates have carved out their ideological territory through carefully deployed and policed language, the rhetoric on the ground that is used in clinics and by many supporters reflects an epistemology of abortion that borrows language and ideas from both camps. By epistemology of abortion I mean the intimate knowledge that is produced through having one, supporting someone who has one, benefitting from someone else having one, working as a provider, and/or working in defense of abortion. This knowledge has changed the vernacular rhetoric for defending abortion. Abortion Under Attack: Women on the Challenges Facing Choice (2002), edited by Krista Jacob, is one of the first works to capture this shift to what Jacob calls “the new language of abortion,” which, in addition to supporting abortion rights, seeks to express and explore areas that are more difficult to convey in traditional pro-choice rhetoric. Some of these taboo feelings and topics include grief, remorse, loss of control, concern for the fetus, religion, and motherhood. As Jacob notes, the new language originates in and reflects evolutions in abortion praxis, such as when clinics provide patients with the opportunity to look at fetal tissue. Providers observe that during these moments, patients will refer to the fetus as “a baby,” pray, grieve, and identify themselves as “mothers.” Abortion defenders contend that this vernacular rhetoric reclaims the fetus, grief, spirituality, and motherhood from antiabortion rhetoric. The vernacular defense of abortion is another aspect of what is meant by ordinary abortion in this book.
It is literature’s ability to depict the elements of ordinary abortion that interests me in this project. Countless scholarly articles and books from across a range of disciplines have scrutinized the topic of abortion in the Roe v. Wade era. Since 1973, feminist scholars and writers have analyzed the origins of the abortion debate, the history of abortion access and stigma, the history of abortion, body politics and abortion, abortion law and policy, the decision-making process, the fetus and its visual rhetoric, depictions in popular culture, the antiabortion movement, and abortion care work—to name just a few topics—while more recently, many authors have written against the Dobbs decision. Twenty-first-century literature about abortion demands our attention, I argue, because these depictions supplement the more dramatic narratives that are deployed in policy debates and provide a more complete and ordinary picture of abortion’s role in the American cultural imaginary. This book responds to a need for the study of four areas in which literature contributes to the abortion picture: combatting stigma and misinformation by building a community through literature; the evolution of proabortion vernacular rhetoric; the emergence of new forms and genres; and the creation of a space for nuanced storytelling.
First, antiabortion myths, stereotypes, and stigma, as Carole Joffe and others have shown, continue to affect women’s access, while the everyday reality of abortion in women’s lives remains distorted, poorly understood, and “clandestine.” These myths include the beliefs that a majority of Americans oppose abortion; that it is a dangerous procedure posing threats to women’s reproductive and mental health; that providers are motivated by profit and are indifferent to their patients’ well-being; and that women who have abortions are careless, antifamily, child-hating, and lacking religious beliefs. These myths prevent American culture from openly acknowledging how ordinary abortion is. This book explores how the epistemology of abortion in twenty-first-century writing by women debunks stereotypes and stigma, offers compassion for patients and providers, and importantly builds a community of compassion and support for abortion.
“Books make communities” Sara Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life, in which she describes feminist praxis as one that includes being surrounded by literature. Books have the power to share experience, to inform readers, and to challenge misconceptions, and they also, Ahmed points out, combat the isolating experience of living with and resisting oppression. Such “companion texts,” Ahmed reminds readers, provide the encouragement “to travel on a path less trodden.” In terms of frequency, abortion could be described as a well-trodden path but one whose defense is complicated by myths and misinformation sustained by dominant power structures, and so defending abortion requires a community. Thus, reading and writing about abortion is community-building; it is, as Ahmed notes, “how we pick each other up.”
It is literature’s ability to depict the elements of ordinary abortion that interests me in this project. Countless scholarly articles and books from across a range of disciplines have scrutinized the topic of abortion in the Roe v. Wade era. Since 1973, feminist scholars and writers have analyzed the origins of the abortion debate, the history of abortion access and stigma, the history of abortion, body politics and abortion, abortion law and policy, the decision-making process, the fetus and its visual rhetoric, depictions in popular culture, the antiabortion movement, and abortion care work—to name just a few topics—while more recently, many authors have written against the Dobbs decision. Twenty-first-century literature about abortion demands our attention, I argue, because these depictions supplement the more dramatic narratives that are deployed in policy debates and provide a more complete and ordinary picture of abortion’s role in the American cultural imaginary. This book responds to a need for the study of four areas in which literature contributes to the abortion picture: combatting stigma and misinformation by building a community through literature; the evolution of proabortion vernacular rhetoric; the emergence of new forms and genres; and the creation of a space for nuanced storytelling.
First, antiabortion myths, stereotypes, and stigma, as Carole Joffe and others have shown, continue to affect women’s access, while the everyday reality of abortion in women’s lives remains distorted, poorly understood, and “clandestine.” These myths include the beliefs that a majority of Americans oppose abortion; that it is a dangerous procedure posing threats to women’s reproductive and mental health; that providers are motivated by profit and are indifferent to their patients’ well-being; and that women who have abortions are careless, antifamily, child-hating, and lacking religious beliefs. These myths prevent American culture from openly acknowledging how ordinary abortion is. This book explores how the epistemology of abortion in twenty-first-century writing by women debunks stereotypes and stigma, offers compassion for patients and providers, and importantly builds a community of compassion and support for abortion.
“Books make communities” Sara Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life, in which she describes feminist praxis as one that includes being surrounded by literature. Books have the power to share experience, to inform readers, and to challenge misconceptions, and they also, Ahmed points out, combat the isolating experience of living with and resisting oppression. Such “companion texts,” Ahmed reminds readers, provide the encouragement “to travel on a path less trodden.” In terms of frequency, abortion could be described as a well-trodden path but one whose defense is complicated by myths and misinformation sustained by dominant power structures, and so defending abortion requires a community. Thus, reading and writing about abortion is community-building; it is, as Ahmed notes, “how we pick each other up.”
Cuprins
Contents
Introduction The Epistemology of Abortion
Chapter 1 Flipping the Script and the Aborted Woman: Revisiting Johnson’s “Animation, Apostrophe and Abortion”
Chapter 2 Women’s Time in Feminist Bio-Autography: The Abortions Their Mothers Did Not Have
Chapter 3 “How Can You Work There?”: Violence and Care Work in Twenty-First-Century Abortion Clinic Thrillers
Chapter 4 Resisting Responsibilization: Abortion and Disability in Twenty-First-Century Mommy Memoirs and Fiction
Chapter 5 Choice Without Justice: Reproductive Dystopias, Neoliberal Feminism, and Stratified Reproduction
Conclusion Picking Each Other Up
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Introduction The Epistemology of Abortion
Chapter 1 Flipping the Script and the Aborted Woman: Revisiting Johnson’s “Animation, Apostrophe and Abortion”
Chapter 2 Women’s Time in Feminist Bio-Autography: The Abortions Their Mothers Did Not Have
Chapter 3 “How Can You Work There?”: Violence and Care Work in Twenty-First-Century Abortion Clinic Thrillers
Chapter 4 Resisting Responsibilization: Abortion and Disability in Twenty-First-Century Mommy Memoirs and Fiction
Chapter 5 Choice Without Justice: Reproductive Dystopias, Neoliberal Feminism, and Stratified Reproduction
Conclusion Picking Each Other Up
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Descriere
Analyzes abortion as an undramatic feature of everyday life in contemporary literature, contrary to public discourse.