Biology Lessons

By Melissa Kantor

The overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 upended the discussion around women’s reproductive rights for anybody concerned with abortion access, regardless of political affiliation. In this month’s Big Picture, author Kantor offers a moving story in response to the Dobbs decision, focusing on a pregnant teen who knows what she wants but accepts that there isn’t one right answer to an unwanted pregnancy. While Kantor’s stance on the life-saving importance of abortion access is clear, she’s written a nuanced take on teen pregnancy, one that could be rightly read as an update to the familiar YA problem novel. The book manages to highlight the personal without excluding the political and favors truthful pain over tragic histrionics, ultimately allowing a big, bright, and complicated future for its main character.

Grace is supposed to be finishing her senior year and making lifelong memories with her best friend Addie before leaving to go to college at Barnard. But now she’s pregnant, a result of her first sexual situationship, and even as a middle-class white girl she doesn’t have many options in Texas. She and Addie go to a crisis-pregnancy center, which turns out to be a fake clinic run by the religious right. She can’t tell her Christian parents, who wouldn’t necessarily make her marry the guy who got her pregnant but would definitely make her keep and raise the baby. Through a scribbled note in a bathroom stall, Grace finds the Jennifers, an organization inspired by the Jane Collective of the pre-Roe era, to help folks with unwanted pregnancies get out of Texas to places where abortions are legal. Even with their assistance and Addie’s constant support, however, the road is traumatic and lonely. Grace knows what she wants—a future on her own terms—but it’s starting to feel like “all roads led to having a baby or dying.”

Grace’s journey is harrowing, but the book never veers into sensationalism, instead realistically chronicling the hoops one must jump through to get an abortion in many US states, along with the emotional and legal ramifications of doing so. The inherent dichotomy, and great strength, of this story is that it views an abortion as something both enormous and, in the end, very small. The lead-up to the procedure is deeply unsettling: Grace is forced to hear a fake heartbeat recording at the crisis-pregnancy center and called a “baby killer” when walking into the abortion clinic, and she considers throwing herself down the stairs at school in hopes of having a miscarriage. In contrast, the procedure itself is far less dramatic, and while it is explicitly written, with the doctor gently explaining each step, the actual abortion takes up just two pages, ending with Grace’s surprised comment that, after all she’d been through, “all of that, and it was so nothing.”

The real growing up in Grace’s journey isn’t the abortion itself, but how her experience forces her to reconsider the people she knows and meets. As a pregnant person who doesn’t want to be pregnant, Grace knows she isn’t safe in many ways and yet finds help in friends and strangers alike. She wonders more and sees more layers in others’ lived experiences, from her sister-in-law, who is both joyful and terrified about being pregnant so soon after her first child, to a male volunteer who escorts Grace safely into the abortion clinic (who must, she believes, have his own strong reasons for doing this specific volunteering).

The tone of the overall book is one of compassion and protectiveness, crystalized in a particularly gorgeous conversation with the Jennifer who Grace and Addie stay with, who tells Grace that “it’s madness that the women in your life can’t tell you about their abortions as freely as they’d tell you about their weddings or their first jobs or their babies.” It’s a perspective echoed in the backmatter, which includes an author’s note and interviews with a sex educator and a reproductive justice scholar. This is a book that Judy Blume would approve of, where a girl is allowed to imagine a future where her abortion isn’t the most important moment of her life.

—Cassidy Russell, Reviewer