{"id":3192,"date":"2007-01-29T11:23:45","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T11:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/pro-life-fiction.html"},"modified":"2007-01-29T11:23:45","modified_gmt":"2007-01-29T11:23:45","slug":"pro-life-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/pro-life-fiction.html","title":{"rendered":"Pro-Life Fiction?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jody Bottum is looking:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

The young Robert Lowell was often accused of becoming a Catholic because it gave him so many deep things to write about and a received set of images to play with. Why aren\u2019t poets flocking to the pro-life banner for much the same reason? The answer, of course, is that they can\u2019t\u2013not while holding the flawed connection of art to politics.<\/p>\n

Genre fiction is another obvious casualty. The horror story seems a natural for anti-abortion themes, but, generally, it has shied away in horror. High adult fiction, too, has consistently refused the topic, for precisely the same reason.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He has a few ideas – mentioning Eve Tushnet in the process, and I am fairly certain Eve at one time compiled a list of short fiction with abortion-related themes, but  I can’t find it at the moment.<\/p>\n

I’d add, off the top of my head, "The Comedian," by John L’Heureux<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I read a story in The New Yorker <\/em>by Michael Chabon that touched on abortion of a disabled child. The setting was a father with his son in a pumpkin patch, selecting a pumpkin for Halloween, and it was all very allusive. The subtext is, of course, that Chabon and his wife Ayelet Waldman, had decided to abort a disabled child in the second trimester of pregnancy.<\/a> I cannot remember the name of the story, though.<\/p>\n

Emily of After Abortion<\/a> once compiled an Amazon list of novel-length fiction in which abortion plays a role.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jody Bottum is looking: The young Robert Lowell was often accused of becoming a Catholic because it gave him so many deep things to write about and a received set of images to play with. Why aren\u2019t poets flocking to the pro-life banner for much the same reason? 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}