Ordinary Abortion

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.