Twenty years in the making, this anthology gathers voices across continents and centuries to explore reproductive rights and experiences. Contributors include Ai, Amy Tan, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, and many more.
The range of stories detailed here is extraordinary. Finch has clearly made concerted efforts to seek out contributions from across ethnicities, cultures, genders, and sexualities, as well as texts by writers whose abortion experiences are rarely spoken about, such as those by disabled women ... from household names like Amy Tan, Audre Lorde, Gloria Steinem, Joyce Carol Oates, Kathy Acker, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ursula K. Le Guin, the volume’s most valuable, revealing, and often powerful contributions are those from beyond the shores of the United States. They remind us that in some parts of the world reproductive rights are as much to do with the freedom not to have an abortion as the freedom to have one ... In these disturbing times, an open conversation about abortion in all its forms is of the utmost importance. Choice Words brings that conversation into the cultural sphere, reaching, as Finch puts it, 'beyond argument, into the realm of experience.'
... a hefty collection of generally high quality ... The anthology's contents are confessional, funny, graphic, stolid, absurdist, cagey, heartbreaking, vitriolic and on it goes, the approaches to the subject at hand as varied as human experience.
... [a] moving collection ... the pieces in Choice Words eloquently explore the emotions, circumstances, and desires involved in abortions ... the book neither celebrates nor condemns abortion, choosing instead to represent the complex tapestry of legal, social, and personal pressures that influence the decision to bear, or not bear, a child. While the collection skews—perhaps inevitably—to modern, Western experiences of abortion, Finch has clearly worked to incorporate a multiplicity of voices spanning the boundaries of era and nationality. Choice Words is a landmark anthology of writing about abortion that gives weight and dignity to all sides and experiences of this controversial issue.
