Unlike the statistics above, our stories help humanize the theme of abortion, and this week we are sharing five of them, in poetry and prose, by Mileva Anastasiadou, Andrea England, Vicki Cohen, Heather Mydosh, and Penny Perry. Like every piece in the issue, each abortion decision is unique and intimate, and it is owned by only one […]
By Mileva Anastasiadou She’s not that young, already in her mid-twenties, when the double lines appear on the test. She is careful enough most of the time, yet that’s how it goes; life happens and spoils all plans. At first, she’ll panic. That doesn’t mean much, her boyfriend will say; everybody panics at the […]
By Andrea England The baby born into a subway toilet between Harvard and Porter Baby with the too-big head and ears that flap in the wind from a smack Baby addicted to crack turned blue as a bruise in his birthday suit Baby unwanted and doesn’t know why His father raped his mother Baby […]
By Vicki Cohen I am a nurse-midwife. For over thirty years, I provided prenatal care for pregnant women and welcomed new life. It was mostly happy work, but sometimes I’d find myself worrying about the women who lived in poverty or suffered from substance abuse, the thirteen-year-old who didn’t know she was pregnant until […]
By Heather Mydosh For Indiana HEA 1337 Eve is a common punch line in the joke against women with her penchant for the forked tongue and listening to more than one authority figure, but if we peel it back a little further to rectilinear Pandora, bless her, created first among women by temperamental adolescent […]
By Penny Perry Mother couldn’t have known what to do. She was only twenty-five, drove her big sister, Leona, six weeks pregnant to the doctor’s in L.A. Leona squinted at California bungalows, backyards with orange trees. She thought about her husband home worrying, her baby waiting for her. She told my mother about her […]
