\u201cTHE ABORTIONIST\u2019S HORSE<\/b>\u201c: That\u2019s the title of a short story by Tanith Lee that I read recently. Like much of her fiction, it\u2019s dark and slightly overwritten\u2013but 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\u2019s Best Fantasy and Horror<\/i>, ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. As far as I know, Datlow and Windling are standard-issue feminists\u2013I\u2019ve read several collections they\u2019ve edited, including a few collections of \u201cmodern fairy tales\u201d that mix approximately one sharp story for every five victim-chic or soft-porn tales. Yet Lee\u2019s story is\u2013well, it\u2019s too dark to be called pro-life, since it\u2019s not really pro- anything\u2013but it\u2019s firmly and viscerally anti-abortion.<\/p>\n
The story centers on a woman who faces a crisis pregnancy. She\u2019s pro-choice, but she realizes, when she becomes pregnant herself, that she doesn\u2019t 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\u2013an ugly lesbian, which seems way too obvious, in the story\u2019s only really unnecessary touch\u2013would ride at midnight down the lane. Even though she\u2019s gone now, the sound of her horse\u2019s 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\u2019s OK and not sordid and wrong. That didn\u2019t happen. It\u2019s a chilling story, and one in which the vivid physical horror of abortion is made evident.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s at least the second such story I\u2019ve read in TYBF&H;<\/i>.<\/p>\n
An earlier edition (not sure which) included Poppy Z. Brite\u2019s \u201cThe Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire.\u201d Brite\u2019s story is more Goth-y and less well-written than Lee\u2019s, 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\u2013it\u2019s presented as an assault upon the pregnant woman. Back-alley abortions are awful, but front-office abortions aren\u2019t much better. And abortion, in its assault upon the unwanted, is a rejection of the unwanted woman as well as her unwanted baby.<\/p>\n
I wonder if short fiction is particularly well-suited to describe abortion. I can imagine a short \u201cpro-choice\u201d poem: It\u2019s easy to go all abstract, ambiguous, and feelings-focused in a poem; it\u2019s easy to isolate the narrator. It\u2019s easy to create baroque metaphors that distance the reader from the reality of what\u2019s being described, dazzling the reader with pyrotechnics but obscuring what\u2019s actually happening. (Not all poems do this, obviously; the best don\u2019t.) But prose tends to focus on physicality (in its rendering of detail) and relationships between characters. In other words, prose\u2019s strengths lie in areas abortion disrupts.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cTHE ABORTIONIST\u2019S HORSE\u201c: That\u2019s the title of a short story by Tanith Lee that I read recently. Like much of her fiction, it\u2019s dark and slightly overwritten\u2013but 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\u2019s Best Fantasy and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n