As it’s seen and felt

As an abortion provider for more than forty years, and an advocate for abortion law reform and improved abortion services for more than fifty, I approached this book with alacrity. Around one hundred thousand abortions are performed in Australia every year, yet abortion is still not easily talked or written about. I felt that a non-fiction work of nearly three hundred pages on the topic, by a person who had experienced abortion, would be a welcome addition to existing literature, something that other people, contemplating or experiencing abortion, might absorb themselves in.

The author’s own abortion, in the early weeks of her pregnancy, using the medications mifepristone and misoprostol – this was during a Melbourne lockdown in 2021 – is front and centre of every chapter in the book, finishing on page 286, seventy-six weeks after the procedure. It took all that time for her to come to terms with her emotions before, during, and especially after the physical act of abortion. As she travels, she bestows her thoughts on a great many other topics – her childhood, her family, her education, anorexia, gender identity, love, the meaning of pleasure, masturbation, painful sex, joyful sex, many sexual relationships, climate change, overpopulation, her career as a tattooist, the internet, privacy, the Covid pandemic, and more – and relates these as best she can to her central topic of abortion.