A TERMINATION

A distinguished poet and nonfiction writer reflects on the lasting emotional imprint of an abortion.

Moore, author of The Bishop’s Daughter and Our Revolution, was a 23-year-old student at Yale’s drama school when she terminated an unplanned pregnancy. The year was 1969, a time that also saw the emergence of the Jane Collective, a group that established an underground network dedicated to providing safe abortions to all women. Because the author was an “inheritor of minor WASP money,” she was able to get a legal abortion by convincing a psychiatrist that a child would destroy her mental health and paying for the procedure with her own funds. “There were two men who might have made me pregnant,” writes Moore: one a photographer who forced himself on her and the other, a professor who would have married her had she told him about the pregnancy. Early on, Moore unapologetically describes herself as Magdalene. “A taint of accusation hovers when I write about sexuality: She’s had bad relationships, they say. Fallen woman, the woman who sins, adulteress, slut, a stitch dropped from the fabric of society,” she writes. Even though she never wanted to have children, Moore returns to thoughts of the baby to which she never gave birth, imagining that child as a boy. “I was always looking for a great love—the kind that starts at a high temperature and calms over time, embers steady,” she writes. “What would I have looked for in a lover if I’d had a child?” The author’s candid, prose poem–like explorations of the ghosts of relationships past and the complexities surrounding love and sex for women make for compelling reading. But what makes her work especially affecting is the quiet way it suggests the possible shape of things to come in a post–Roe v. Wade era.

Haunting and lyrical.