Choice Words: Writers on Abortion
Reclaiming the story of abortion
Description
Annie Finch, a poet best known for her work on meter and form, spent close to twenty years assembling a book she couldn't find anywhere else. She wanted an anthology of writing about abortion — not the pamphlet kind, not the argument kind, but the literary kind: poems, stories, monologues, essays that treated the experience as material worthy of art. She kept looking for it on shelves and in libraries. It wasn't there. So she started building it herself, one text at a time, tracking down permissions, translating, digging through centuries.
The result, published in 2020 by Haymarket Books, is called Choice Words: Writers on Abortion. It gathers more than a hundred and thirty contributors across continents and centuries — Ntozake Shange, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, alongside anonymous voices and ancient sources. It is not organized as a debate with two sides. It is organized as a chorus. And the striking thing about a chorus this large is what it reveals by its very size: that this experience has always been written about, just rarely collected, rarely centered, rarely allowed to stand as literature rather than as evidence in someone else's case.
Which raises a question the book keeps circling without ever quite stating as a thesis. When an experience is surrounded by silence and shame, what does it change to write it down — and then to place it beside a hundred other people who wrote it down too? Finch's wager is that the gathering itself does something the individual texts can't do alone.
The question we’re asking : What happens when an experience wrapped in shame is turned into literature — and then collected into a single volume?What we’ll see : How one poet spent two decades building the book she couldn't find, and what a chorus of voices does that no single voice can.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — Twenty years, one gap on the shelf
The origin story Finch tells is almost mundane, which is part of its force. She had her own abortion, years before the book existed, and afterward went looking for writing that met the experience where she was — something with the weight of poetry rather than the flatness of a leaflet. She found scattered pieces, a poem here, an essay there, but no place where they lived together. The absence itself started to look like a statement. Plenty of experiences that shape a life get their anthologies: love, war, grief, motherhood. This one didn't.
So she began collecting, and the collecting turned into a project that outlasted most books' entire lifespans. Roughly two decades passed between the first gathered texts and the finished volume. Part of that was the ordinary slowness of permissions and translation. Part of it was that the field she was assembling barely recognized itself as a field. There was no established canon to draw from, no prior anthology to argue with or improve upon. Finch was, in a real sense, proposing that a body of writing existed before anyone had treated it as one.
02Chapter 2 — The anthology as an act of gathering
The book's architecture matters as much as its contents. Finch could have arranged the texts as a debate, pro and con, the familiar two-column format the subject usually gets in public life. She refused that. Choice Words is not structured to persuade anyone of a position; it's structured to hold experience. The organizing principle is closer to a ritual than an argument — the sections move through phases of the experience itself rather than through political stances.
The range of contributors is deliberately vast. Alongside canonical names — Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin — there are writers working in languages other than English, voices from earlier centuries, and accounts by people who are not professional writers at all. Finch spans continents and centuries on purpose. The point of the breadth is to dislodge the assumption that this is a modern Western argument. It's a human experience with a long, cross-cultural literary record, and the book insists on showing that record's full width.
03Chapter 3 — What defying shame sounds like on the page
The emotional engine of the collection is shame, or rather the refusal of it. Much of the writing here begins from a place where silence has been the expected response, where the experience is something to be carried privately and never named. To write it down at all is to break that expectation. The texts vary enormously in tone — some are furious, some tender, some flatly matter-of-fact, some grieving — but nearly all of them share the underlying gesture of speaking a thing that was supposed to stay unspoken.
That gesture is what Finch frames as the book's real politics. Not a policy position, but the act of claiming authorship over one's own story. The people in these pages are reclaiming the sole authorship of their abortion experiences — insisting that the person who lived it, not the doctor or the state or the culture, gets to say what it meant. Some of the most striking pieces do this by simply describing, without apology and without the framing of confession. The refusal to apologize is itself the statement.
04Chapter 4 — The literature of a subject that resists literature
Step back from the individual texts and the deeper move of Choice Words comes into view: it treats abortion as a literary subject, and in doing so quietly changes its status. Some experiences are granted a literature — they accumulate poems and stories and essays until the culture accepts them as part of what art is allowed to be about. Others are kept in the register of the pamphlet, the medical form, the courtroom, the debate. Which experiences get a literature and which don't is never a neutral matter. It reflects what a culture is willing to look at directly.
Finch's anthology performs a kind of cultural admission. By collecting these writings and presenting them as literature rather than testimony, it asserts that this experience belongs in the same room as love and death and war — the perennial subjects poets have always been trusted to handle. That assertion doesn't depend on any reader's political views. It's a claim about the scope of art, and it's made not by argument but by demonstration: here are the poems, they are good, they exist, they always did.
05Conclusion
The book Annie Finch spent close to two decades assembling began as a gap on a shelf — a poet looking for writing that met her own experience and finding it scattered, uncollected, unrecognized as a body of work. What she built to fill that gap is less a manifesto than a room: a place where more than a hundred and thirty voices, across continents and centuries, sit together and speak a thing that was long expected to stay silent. The arrangement is the argument, and the argument is that no single story owns the experience.