A long-dormant topic has now been given a moving, powerful and timely literary anthology, beautifully edited by Annie Finch
The first abortion I encountered in literature isn’t named. In Ernest Hemingway’s short story Hills Like White Elephants, which I studied at school, a man and a woman wait at a sleepy Spanish train station for the express to Madrid and conduct a veiled conversation as they drink:
“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
Whereas I stand almost intact,
giddy with freedom, not with pain.
I lift my light basket, observing
how little I needed, in fact;
and move to the checkout, to the rain,
to the lights and the long street curving.