Review of Abortion Stories: American Literature before Roe v. Wade, ed. Karen Weingarten (Penguin Classics, 2025)

Abortion Stories: 9780143138204 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

Donna J. Drucker

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022 (597 U.S. 215 [2022)] was a watershed moment in the history of reproduction and had immediate consequences for abortion-seekers, clinics, and anyone who could become pregnant. Thirteen states had “trigger laws,” which made abortion illegal immediately if the Court decided to hand its legality over to them. Clinics in the states where abortion remained legal prepared to handle the increased volume of out-of-state patients, many patients had to arrange travel to distant service providers, and some seekers turned to clandestine local networks or international mail-order providers to find mifepristone and misoprostol.^[1]

With even more fragmented access across the country following Dobbs, some turned to history to understand what the abortion experience was like before legalization in the Roe v. Wade decision (410 U.S. 113, 1973). Those interested in a linear history may have picked up Leslie J. Reagan’s 1997 now-classic When Abortion Was a Crime. Those interested in how poets, novelists, political figures, playwrights, and everyday people thought and felt about abortion can now turn to Abortion Stories.

Karen Weingarten, a professor of English and director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Queens College, City University of New York, is a leading scholar in this area, as she previously published a monograph on representations of abortion in American literature before 1940, Abortion in the American Imagination. In Abortion Stories, she gathered sources from 1699 through 1972, including many from well-known authors, Edgar Allan Poe, Eugene O’Neill, Edith Wharton, and Langston Hughes among them. Her choices are intended to illustrate two primary elements: first, the social and cultural context of abortion-related decision-making when the procedure was illegal the first time, and second, how the consequences of choosing abortion depend on that context. Publishing such a book three years after the Dobbs decision provides historical context and unsurprising echoes of how illegality does not stop abortion, but limits access to safe methods and drives seekers toward unsafe ones.

A foreword by Rebecca Traister and an afterword by Renee Bracey Sherman bookend the primary sources from journalistic and activist perspectives. Traister identifies the importance of the collection through her limited exposure to abortion literature: she only read Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story “Hills Like White Elephants” in school, which never mentions the procedure by name and makes the white male character the protagonist while his pregnant girlfriend is an afterthought. She highlights the importance of reading sources beyond a traditional canon and from a range of authors and historical periods to garner a fuller picture of human experience. In doing so, she points out that “What we learn from storytelling is that experiences of abortion are as varied as the human beings who seek them, because those who seek abortions are themselves fully human” (ix). Sherman reflects on pre-Roe abortion stories in a post-Dobbs world, stating the necessity of continuing to tell stories, especially as a form of mutual support and a spur to action: “We can construct communities where those of us who have abortions feel safe enough to step forward and share our whole truths and inspire others to blossom into theirs” (205).

However, the subtitle of Abortion Stories—American Literature Before Roe v. Wade— is somewhat misleading. The selections are not only from American literature, but also from a variety of sources: from oral histories of American slaves in the 1930s; the 1969 memoir of Ruth Barnett, an abortionist who performed thousands of procedures in Portland, Oregon; and interviews with an anonymous male abortion doctor and an anonymous patient in the 1960s. Those selections bring to light the multitude of voices and the sources to trace approaches to abortion in the US across time, to compare male and female authors’ perspectives, and to consider how varied literary forms provide the means to shape different kinds of insights. It nonetheless would have been helpful to understand Weingarten’s selection process in more depth, given the extensive primary sources that she could have chosen from.

One thread that links the fictional depictions of abortion is how the authors framed the discussion of the procedure when they did not name it. In Edgar Allen Poe’s 1848 story “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” Poe imagines the main character describing her disappearance as “certain concealments” needing to be “effected” (17). Eugene O’Neill called his 1914 one-act play “Abortion,” but his characters never use the word, instead calling it “the other affair” (58) or “this other thing” (59). Choosing stories about abortion but not using that word serves multiple purposes for readers. They could imagine themselves in a time when the procedure was available, but speaking of it directly was an impropriety or signaled illegality, and one had to know the coded language to understand what was happening or to access the procedure. It’s a way of thinking and speaking that will sadly be familiar to Americans in states where abortion and actions around it are now illegal.

Another thread through the texts is the depictions of practitioners. In “The Great ‘Trunk Mystery’ of New York City” (1871), the author draws on racist and antisemitic tropes to depict the abortionist, putting his title as “Dr” in quotation marks and representing his speech in vernacular: he “claims to be Russian, but his accent has the twang of a German Jew” and defends himself by saying “I poshitively do all operashunsh widout any danger, and as sheap as anybody” (39). Matthew Swain, the doctor in “Peyton Place” (1956), talks himself into performing an abortion on a sixteen-year-old rape victim by stating “I am protecting life, this life, the one already being lived” (153). Dr. X, a physician interviewed by the journalist Lucy Freeman in 1962, described his experience as an underground practitioner who served time in jail for performing illegal procedures. In these descriptions, the practitioner is never a neutral figure—they are heroes, villains, or sometimes both, depending on the point of view.

Abortion Stories is an excellent choice for undergraduate courses in American history and literature, along with courses in women’s and gender studies. An instructor could ask the students to identify connections and disconnections among the stories across time or use them as a basis for projects on placing those authors’ works into their literary and historical contexts. Students could consider the roles of race and racism in these texts–connecting the memories of formerly enslaved Americans using cotton root to defy owners’ demands for reproduction to Shirley Chisolm’s “The Abortion Question” (1969), which highlighted racial and class differences in access decades later. It is best read with some knowledge of American history, particularly twentieth-century American history, to provide a background for authors approaching the topic the way that they did. The book reminds readers that abortions are part of a long history of decision-making about the future, whether or not they are illegal. And whether the stories have happy endings or not, or leave more silences than answers, they are all part of understanding the experience of human reproduction.

Featured image courtesy Markus Winkler.

Donna J. Drucker

Donna J. Drucker, MLS, PhD, is Associate Director of the Office of Scholarship and Research Development at the Columbia University School of Nursing. Her books include Contraception: A Concise History (MIT Press, 2020) and Fertility Technology (MIT Press, 2023). Her current project is a global history of abortion from the 1860s to the present.

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