The author Kate Daloz offers deft, penetrating accounts of fraught circumstances and events. A writing instructor at Columbia University, Daloz has contributed to The American Scholar, and in 2016 published "We Are as Gods," an intriguing look at the rise and fall of a free-love commune in Vermont during the seventies. In 2017, Daloz wrote "My Grandmother's Desperate Choice," a Personal History about her grandmother's self-induced abortion, in 1944, and its tragic aftermath. Daloz's mother had always referred to her grandmother's death as an "accident," and it wasn't until Daloz was twelve years old that she discovered the truth. Her essay is a deeply personal meditation on the strands of desperation that can lead women to take matters of reproductive health into their own hands. At an especially poignant moment, her mother describes seeing her grandmother's death certificate for the first time. "Under 'cause of death,' the coroner had written in a sloped hand: 'Attempt at criminal abortion, self-inflicted. The word 'criminal' refused to sink in," Daloz writes. " 'That night, for the first time in many years, I vomited several times,' she told me. 'Somehow I knew I wasn't sick, but was having a life purge.' " With clarity and precision, Daloz upends the mythologies surrounding the politics of "pro-choice" and "pro-life." Part mystery, part touching memoir, her essay unspools the exigencies behind her grandmother's fatal decision and allows us to feel its enduring reverberations. In so doing, she makes us question our perspectives on the very nature of absence. We focus so much on the absence of a fetus or a child, she seems to be saying, yet what about the wrenching heartache that stems from the absence of a mother, a wife, a sister? Whose lives, we wonder, are forever altered by a preventable void in our families and in our hearts? Toward the end of the piece, Daloz movingly seeks to comfort her young daughter with a subdued version of the truth. Don't worry, she reassures her, "It's not a thing that would happen to us now."
—Erin Overbey, archive editor
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