Abortion Stories: American Literature before Roe v. Wade

Abortion Stories: American Literature before Roe v. Wade is a meticulously curated and timely anthology that intervenes in the histories of reproductive politics and American literary culture. Bringing together texts from the early eighteenth century through the early 1970s to coincide with the 1973 landmark US Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which ruled that the Constitution of the United States protected the right to abortion, the collection makes visible an archive that has long been scattered, undertheorized, or actively diminished. As Karen Weingarten argues in her introduction, “abortion is as old as the human need to control reproduction” (xiii), and its literary representations reveal, across centuries, how intimately reproductive autonomy has been shaped by citizenship and state power.The anthology’s chronological sweep is one of its major strengths. Opening with Maria Sibylla Merian’s 1705 description of enslaved and Indigenous women in Suriname using abortifacients to resist the reproductive violence of slavery, the volume grounds abortion not as a modern political invention but as a long-standing practice bound up with survival and agency. Subsequent nineteenth-century selections range from WPA oral histories to newspaper reportage and the sensationalist “Trunk Mystery,” the 1871 murder of Alice A. Bowlsby in New York City, whose body was found dismembered in a trunk at a train depot, leading to the conviction of abortionist Dr. Jacob Rosenzweig for manslaughter. These selections highlight the period’s shifting anxieties about sexuality and social order. The expert headnotes provided by editor Weingarten, who is professor of English at Queen’s College, CUNY, provide crucial context for each text, enabling readers to see how literary works both reflected and contested emergent eugenic ideologies, professional medicalization, and the criminalization of midwifery.The early twentieth-century selections form a particularly rich resource for use in classrooms. Eugene O’Neill’s Abortion (1914), Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917), and works by Dorothy Parker, Tess Slesinger, and Langston Hughes mark abortion as a key formal and thematic concern in American modernism, countering critical traditions that have treated reproductive politics as peripheral to the literary canon. The inclusion of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the mother” (1945) and Lucille Clifton’s “the lost baby poem” (1972) further underscores how Black women writers approached abortion with a complex grammar of survival and self-definition that is still too rarely foregrounded in academic narratives.The collection gains additional political urgency through its framing materials. The forward, written by journalist and writer-at-large for New York magazine, Rebecca Traister, situates the anthology within the post-Dobbs landscape, underscoring how the rhetoric of “choice” has historically obscured the material conditions necessary for reproductive freedom. Reproductive justice activist, abortion storyteller, and coauthor of Liberating Abortion, Renee Bracey Sherman, provides an afterword that brings the conversation into the present, bridging historical narratives with contemporary activist movements for reproductive justice and reminding readers that storytelling itself remains a crucial site of resistance.If the anthology has a limitation, it is one Weingarten openly acknowledges: the relative absence of Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous writers due to the barriers these groups faced in publishing during the period the collection covers. Yet her commitment to recovering understudied voices, particularly those of formerly enslaved people, workers, and writers marginalized within canonical modernism, ensures that the volume significantly broadens existing literary genealogies of abortion. Its selections and editorial apparatus together invite future scholarship to continue expanding this archive. For Edith Wharton scholars in particular, the contextual placement reconsiders Summer not just as a story about desire and consequence but as part of a centuries-long narrative about how women navigated restricted reproductive futures.