Professor Karen Weingarten joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about a new anthology she has edited, Abortion Stories: American Literature Before Roe v. Wade. Weingarten reflects on the complicated history of abortion, the varied use of abortifacients, abortion’s ties to eugenics and state control of bodies, and the rise of the anti-abortion movement. She discusses how access to abortion facilitates other kinds of resistance, and explains how the book came to include authors like Maria Sybilla Merian, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Lucille Clifton, and Eugene O’Neill alongside oral histories from formerly enslaved persons and groundbreaking politicians like Shirley Chisholm. She talks about the stories she hopes to see represented in post-Dobbs writing and reads from her foreword to the anthology.

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This podcast is produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.

Selected Readings:

Karen Weingarten

Others

Dirty Dancing
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
The Cider House Rules
The Mothers
The Art of Subtext
Jessica Valenti
Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win
Peyton Place
Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway (which includes “Hills Like White Elephants”

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S8 Ep. 23: Karen Weingarten/Abortion Stories Before Roe v. Wade