ABORTION (OR WOMAN AS THREEFOLD MURDERESS)

A tapestry of essays, stories, poems, and anonymous testimonies about abortion.

Juanita’s book opens with “Deciding on Womanhood,” a personal essay that ranges from the author’s aunt’s successful home abortion through Juanita’s own abortion in 1968. The most interesting and affecting part of the book, “Deciding on Womanhood” gives unique insight into Juanita’s experiences in the Black Student Union and Black Panther Party in 1960s San Francisco, evoking the difficulties of the time while also covering the movement’s lesser known but integral components: “women’s sexuality, childbirths and abortions, and sexual politics.” Five short stories follow, each relating to abortion, with most directly relating to parts of Juanita’s life. In “Hometown,” a woman tells the story of her rape and childbirth at 15, and her decision not to attempt an at-home abortion after witnessing her sister’s. In “When Dottie Meets Ouida,” a dinner party escalates from polite conversation to a heated abortion debate. Three short poems round out the main portion of the book. The book’s first appendix, “An Abortion Compendium,” uses both images and text to show how abortions were provided throughout human history. The first image, from around 1150, is a bas relief of a demon performing an abortion in the underworld. The section also includes lists like “Ways to Abort in Antiquity-Medieval Times” and a similar list from the 19th century onward. The second appendix is made up of anonymous testimonies from the Shout Your Abortion website, a site that “envisions a world where abortion is free, destigmatized, and accessible.”

The book’s title comes from St. Jerome, the fourth-century priest and theologian, describing women who died while attempting abortions, calling them “threefold murderess: as suicides, as adulteress to their heavenly bridegroom Christ and as murderess of their still unborn child.” Despite this dramatic title, Juanita’s book does not delve much into the ethics of abortions, nor does it directly stake a claim in the current political discourse on the subject. Instead, Juanita offers a mosaic of writing and images that revolve around abortion, giving emotional and historical context for a subject usually mired in debate. At its best, Juanita’s prose has a poetic flourish (“They sat thisclose like lovers”), and she is adept at writing piercing images that will stick with readers, such as in the poem “the powerful nurse, the powerful baby”: “da baby wanted wholeness / he wouldn’t have minded being / ugly as gawdzilla / to be alive / to eat mush and grow teeth / to gather fuzz between his toes / instead of guts swirling around him.” Unfortunately, the patchwork structure means that this quality of writing isn’t matched throughout—the stories in particular seem half-baked, more sketches than full stories. In “Making Room,” a mother sees the ghost of the “little brown boy” she aborted. She contemplates the baby (“I’m sorry you didn’t get to be loved and live a life like Khiron”), and then the story abruptly ends. Though the appendices are interesting, readers may wonder what purpose their inclusion serves. Unfortunately, none of the later sections stand up to the book’s first essay—the book is worth reading for that essay alone.

At times riveting, at times unfocused.