Issue 18 / Summer 2019 / Abortion Ban Protest Special Issue I have given birth to three sons—two living and one dead. The one who died was my first, when I was 22; he lived for an hour. He was a breech birth, so I needed a Caesarean—I never held him or saw him....
Issue 18 / Summer 2019 / Abortion Ban Protest Special Issue In 1765, the first Magdalene Asylum in Ireland opened. Named after Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who sought redemption in the Bible, this was a Christian church-run institution for “fallen women.”...
Issue 18 / Summer 2019 / Abortion Ban Protest Special Issue I find out I probably can’t get pregnant during the worst month of my life. Those are two half-lies, only because the actual words my doctor used were “your uterus is a tricky environment,” and the...
Issue 18 / Summer 2019 / Abortion Ban Protest Special Issue A group of men followed us down Broadway, the bustling honky tonk district in Nashville, Music City, U.S.A. They shouted to us: “Ladies, ladies, LAAADDDIIIIEES.” We stopped on the street corner and...
Issue 18 / Summer 2019 / Abortion Ban Protest Special Issue My story may be more typical than I know. I was a teenager in the middle of a bitter divorce. I lived with one parent but terribly missed the other. I couldn’t have been unhappier. I rebelled, leaving...
Issue 17 / Spring 2019 This piece is a continuation of Jon Epstein’s “Ace in the Hole,” published in the Quarterly’s Issue 16, Winter 2019. A vague whisper in my gut said, “Your soul is being eclipsed by a locust cloud of misdeeds,” but I was...
