Choice
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A moving collection of personal essays about the real, human experiences behind the highly politicized issue of reproductive choice. At a time when a woman’s most complex decisions have been reduced to political rhetoric and impersonal theory, and political debate has been hijacked by pundits and name-callers, Choice joins the discourse with an assortment of candid voices in an effort to humanize the debate about reproductive rights. In addressing a wide range of women’s choices — from using birth control to taking the morning-after pill, from adopting a child to putting a child up for adoption, from having an abortion to bringing a pregnancy to full term — 'Choice' explores the complexities inherent in every reproductive decision. Including twenty-four honest, heartrending essays from established writers such as Francine Prose, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Pam Houston, Ann Hood, and Sarah Messer and emerging talents such as Kimi Faxon Hemingway, Stephanie Anderson, and Ashley Talley, 'Choice' will allow you to truly understand the meaning of the word “choice” — regardless of what side of the debate you stand on.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This collection, compiled by two savvy fiction writers fed up with the bumper-sticker mentality of most pro-life and pro-choice arguments, illuminates the volume of options, obstacles and ambivalence that reproduction brings through personal, often painful stories of real women. Examining almost every angle of the pregnancy experience are two dozen writers, editors and educators, including novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard (The Deep End of the Ocean), writer's writer Francine Prose (Reading like a Writer) and editor Elizabeth Larsen (one of the creators of Sassy magazine). Collectively celebrating the courage of the choice-whatever that choice may be-Bender and de Gramont offer these stories as a bulwark against the criminalization of women's reproductive options (the book was conceived amidst South Dakota's proposed abortion ban); among these tales of women choosing to terminate pregnancies, to have children with men unfit to raise them, to fight against their own bodies to become pregnant, to keep an at risk-pregnancy both doctors and ministers advise against, that purpose is powerfully realized. Each tale is unique, and politically charged buzz terms (RU-486, Roe V. Wade, etc.) gain new impact nestling alongside these writers' honest quests for basic human needs: love, nurturing, and above all, possibility.
