“THE ABORTIONIST’S HORSE“: That’s the title of a short story by Tanith Lee that I read recently. Like much of her fiction, it’s dark and slightly overwritten–but also effective. I was choking back tears well before the end. The story startled me, since it appeared in the fourteenth edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. As far as I know, Datlow and Windling are standard-issue feminists–I’ve read several collections they’ve edited, including a few collections of “modern fairy tales” that mix approximately one sharp story for every five victim-chic or soft-porn tales. Yet Lee’s story is–well, it’s too dark to be called pro-life, since it’s not really pro- anything–but it’s firmly and viscerally anti-abortion.

The story centers on a woman who faces a crisis pregnancy. She’s pro-choice, but she realizes, when she becomes pregnant herself, that she doesn’t want an abortion. So she goes to a house in the country and pretends that she has a husband who will join her shortly. But her lovely country house sits along the path that the local abortionist would take, before abortion was legalized. The abortionist–an ugly lesbian, which seems way too obvious, in the story’s only really unnecessary touch–would ride at midnight down the lane. Even though she’s gone now, the sound of her horse’s hooves drawing nearer in the darkness haunts the pregnant narrator. I kept waiting for the author to imply that abortion was only bad back when it was illegal, that today it’s OK and not sordid and wrong. That didn’t happen. It’s a chilling story, and one in which the vivid physical horror of abortion is made evident.

And it’s at least the second such story I’ve read in TYBF&H;.

An earlier edition (not sure which) included Poppy Z. Brite’s “The Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire.” Brite’s story is more Goth-y and less well-written than Lee’s, but the characters are sharply drawn. The view of abortion is more muddled, but a few things are made clear: Abortion is grim and painful–it’s presented as an assault upon the pregnant woman. Back-alley abortions are awful, but front-office abortions aren’t much better. And abortion, in its assault upon the unwanted, is a rejection of the unwanted woman as well as her unwanted baby.

I wonder if short fiction is particularly well-suited to describe abortion. I can imagine a short “pro-choice” poem: It’s easy to go all abstract, ambiguous, and feelings-focused in a poem; it’s easy to isolate the narrator. It’s easy to create baroque metaphors that distance the reader from the reality of what’s being described, dazzling the reader with pyrotechnics but obscuring what’s actually happening. (Not all poems do this, obviously; the best don’t.) But prose tends to focus on physicality (in its rendering of detail) and relationships between characters. In other words, prose’s strengths lie in areas abortion disrupts.