Abortion Stories: American Literature Before Roe v. Wade

A one-of-a-kind, intersectional volume of abortion representation in American literature before Roe v. Wade that compellingly proclaims: when abortion is illegal, women’s lives are always more precarious and limited

A Penguin Classic

One of Ms. Magazine’s Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2025

One of Library Journal's Best Books of the Year

Cover Art by Laura Peretti is an AI-AP American Illustration 45 Chosen Winner. Art Direction: Elizabeth Yaffe

Abortion Stories is the first volume of its kind to bring together a diverse collection of writings on abortion published before 1973, when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in every American state. These stories, poems, essays, and memoirs reflect a range of representations and responses to abortion during this era, but when read together, they demonstrate how when abortion is illegal, women’s lives are always more precarious and limited. In this volume, you will read stories that will elucidate and enrich a view of abortion as one element of human experience—woven into stories of love and death and medicine and motherhood and enslavement and emancipation. Featuring luminaries like Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edgar Allan Poe, Lucile Clifton, Eugene O' Neill, and Shirley Chisholm, as well as rare firsthand accounts of abortion providers and seekers, this reproductive justice-minded collection brings together diverse representations of abortion to show how access to abortion is often race and class dependent, and demonstrates how the repercussions of an illegal abortion also vary depending on such factors. The need and desire to have an abortion goes back centuries, and these literary representations of abortion before Roe compellingly argue for the necessity of legal and accessible abortion. Edited and introduced by Karen Weingarten, Abortion Stories features a foreword by Rebecca Traister and an afterword by Renee Bracey Sherman.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Karen Weingarten (Editor) is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Her previous books are Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice and Pregnancy Test. Rebecca Traister (Foreword) is writer at large for New York magazine. She is the author of Good and Mad, All the Single Ladies, and the award-winning Big Girls Don’t Cry. Renee Bracey Sherman (Afterword) is an abortion activist, writer, and founder and co-executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions.