Ordinary Abortion

“Thompson does an excellent job placing scholarly work on abortion narratives in conversation with political and activist work. Analyzing abortion’s representation in twenty-first-century literature from poetry to thrillers, Ordinary Abortion makes an exciting and important contribution to literary scholarship on abortion.” —Karen Weingarten, author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940

“Thompson’s ‘epistemology of abortion’ extends the theoretical work of Karen Weingarten, Judith Wilt, and Heather Latimer into our contemporary neoliberal era of capitalist politics and twenty-first-century texts. Her scholarship is attentive to race, class, and disability and engages with a range of fields, from motherhood studies to reproductive justice.” —Beth Widmaier Capo, coeditor of Reproductive Rights Issues in Popular Media: International Perspectives

Considers the undramatic prevalence of abortion in the United States and how it has shaped twenty-first-century women’s writing.

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decision, which erased the constitutional right to abortion, abruptly redramatized access in the United States. Yet twenty-first-century literature written before Dobbs reflects a landscape in which abortion appears as an undramatic, routine part of women’s lives. In Ordinary Abortion, Mary Thompson argues that many contemporary women writers depict abortion as a commonplace decision intertwined with health, education, career, sexuality, relationships, family-making, and motherhood.

Drawing on American poetry, fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and dystopian writing, Ordinary Abortion examines how ideas about abortion circulate through literature and how literary forms, in turn, shape readers’ understandings of reproduction and politics. Thompson traces new plots, characters, narrative strategies, and genres emerging around birth control, unplanned pregnancy, termination, and family formation. These works reveal renewed thematic attention to abortion’s relationship with motherhood and mother-loss, neoliberal pressures, stratified reproduction, masculinity, violence, care work, and disability.

Ultimately, Ordinary Abortion shows that abortion literature extends far beyond stories centered on crisis or choice. Instead, twenty-first-century women’s writing reveals a quiet, pervasive truth: Abortion has long been woven into everyday American life, normalized in ways that public discourse has often failed to acknowledge.

Mary Thompson is Professor of English at James Madison University. She is coeditor (with Modhumita Roy) of The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism.

Contents

Contents
Introduction The Epistemology of Abortion
Chapter 1 Flipping the Script and the Aborted Woman: Revisiting Johnson’s “Animation, Apostrophe and Abortion”
Chapter 2 Women’s Time in Feminist Bio-Autography: The Abortions Their Mothers Did Not Have
Chapter 3 “How Can You Work There?”: Violence and Care Work in Twenty-First-Century Abortion Clinic Thrillers
Chapter 4 Resisting Responsibilization: Abortion and Disability in Twenty-First-Century Mommy Memoirs and Fiction
Chapter 5 Choice Without Justice: Reproductive Dystopias, Neoliberal Feminism, and Stratified Reproduction
Conclusion Picking Each Other Up

Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index