What a radical thing this novel is, even with its old-fashioned cover with an image of a woman from behind, with its sepia tones suggesting this would be a safe bet for your great-aunt’s book club. It all comes down to having the right to make the choice. Where they don’t need to hang themselves or try to slit their wrists in a bathtub just to know what it feels like to have control. To leave these women a world where no one can tell them that they don’t own their own bodies. To make sure a horrible cycle was broken, and the next generation would be better off than their own. This fight and this victory was for their daughters, and their daughters’ daughters. What people who haven’t thought much don’t tend to know is that abortion is not the opposite of adoption, or infertility, or miscarriage, or motherhood, or even choosing not to have children at all, and also there are plenty of people who’ve experienced two or more of these things, and that these things don’t even exist on some kind of moral spectrum, but instead, they’re a vivid constellation of lived experiences, and what I love about Heather Marshall’s extraordinary Looking for Jane is the way the story connects them all, making plain what so many women already know but still might not have the courage to put into words even almost 35 years after abortion was made legal in Canada.īecause the abortion rights activists didn’t win this fight just for themselves.
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