A Personal Telling, And a Battle Cry
Urban Matters: Why did you decide to write A Termination now, so many years after your abortion? And why did you want to tell the story in the way you did?
Honor Moore: I decided to write it when I realized that many of us who’d had abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade [the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision generally protecting abortion rights] had simply not talked about them. As a friend of mine said, when we were talking about what I was writing, ‘You know, I think if we talked about our abortions, about the impact they had on our lives, perhaps Roe would not have gone down.’
And I discovered younger women who’d grown up with legal abortions didn’t understand what it was like, not just the struggle to find a provider but our generation’s attitudes toward abortion. Years ago, someone reviewing a book of mine said in the middle of the review – this book was about something else – 'She glosses over her abortion, which is troubling.' My initial reaction was: ‘That’s none of her business!!!!.’
And then I thought, oh, I really have to explain how it was different then, not only that abortions were illegal before Roe, but that we felt differently about abortion because we hadn’t been loaded up with all the pro-life propaganda. I mean, the phrase ‘pro-life’ wasn’t even in the language then.
UM: Did the Dobbs decision cause you to change the content or trajectory of your book at all?
Moore: I started the book about 18 months before the Dobbs decision, even before the leak [to reporters in 2022 revealing the Supreme Court’s intention to overturn Roe], and I actually finished the first draft the week of the Dobbs decision.
I didn’t revise, because I had my story. It had become clear to me that the book had more than one subject: my abortion, what it was like to be freed by the sexual revolution, how making such a decision was a first step in becoming a self – before I even knew I had a self. It became clearer than ever that the anti-abortion forces were depriving women not only of necessary medical care, but of our larger autonomy.
Who am I? Do I want to be a mother? Do I want to be a mother and a pianist? Or do I just want to be a pianist? Do I want to have three children or one child or no children? After all, it’s women who actually take care of the children. That’s changed a lot in the last 50 years; there are many more involved fathers. Really, it’s because of the women’s movement that the gender-neutral word ‘parenting’ has come into use. In the end though, the buck stops at the mother.
UM: Your experience as a playwright and poet is really evident in the book as you imagine different scenarios: If you had carried the pregnancy to term, if you had a son or a daughter, if you had known who the child’s father was. What did spinning out those various scenarios mean for you during the writing process?
Moore: It was fun, kind of exhilarating. For instance, I’d always had the sense that the pregnancy would have given me a son, but I had never spun it out like that. Once I did that, my method opened. I had a kind of macabre fun when I imagined giving a reading in Texas and seeing people I thought lined up to see me and have their books signed, when someone rushed forward, poured accelerant on my pile of books, and lit a match. And next, driving a young woman into Mexico for an abortion, pursued by police cars.
UM: How did you come up with the title?
Moore: My working title was My Abortion, which reflected my desire to write the book without compromise. There is a sentence in the book when I say, ‘terminating one thing and beginning another.’ The word termination has in it the notion, present in my story, that ending a pregnancy might be the beginning of something new. The word abortion does not have that kind of metaphorical valence. It’s clearly about interruption, about ending.
UM: Is there anything else we haven’t discussed that you’d like to touch on?
Moore: I am thrilled that we have a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, who has really put her foot on the pedal of reproductive freedom since the Dobbs decision – that the issue is now part of a national, public, open discussion. So different from the loneliness and secrecy I experienced as a 23-year-old.
I hope that my book can inspire the kinds of things women may be willing to tell and be open about, things that have really affected our lives that we’re not allowed to talk about: To be open about our sexuality, open about what we have experienced not only in terminating our pregnancies without guilt, but in surviving the lack of care that the Dobbs decision has made all too common. How extraordinary that four women were able to tell stories of incest, rape, and botched miscarriages to millions at a political convention on national television.
At the end of the book I write, ‘I did not tell my mother or my father. I’m telling you.’ I love that The New York Times reviewer wrote that A Termination reveals abortion ‘as a problem of love, born of sex,’ and that Publishers Weekly called it ‘a battle cry.’
Honor Moore is on the graduate writing program faculty of The New School. She is the author of seven books, among them The Bishop’s Daughter, a 2008 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She co-edited Women’s Liberation: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can! A Termination was published in August by Public Space. Moore was interviewed for Urban Matters by Lauren Leiker, a graduate research assistant at the Center for New York City Affairs.
Photo by: Elvert Barnes