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’t poets flocking to the pro-life banner for much the same reason? The answer, of course, is that they can’t–not while holding the flawed connection of art to politics.
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.
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.
I’d add, off the top of my head, "The Comedian," by John L’Heureux.
A few years ago, I read a story in The New Yorker 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. I cannot remember the name of the story, though.
Emily of After Abortion once compiled an Amazon list of novel-length fiction in which abortion plays a role.
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