Reaction paper analysis and critical response

¶ … Abortion," Anne Sexton repeats the line, "Somebody who should have been born / is gone." The narrator treats abortion as "loss without death," indicating that an abortion falls into a moral grey area. In fact, the color gray is an important symbol in "The Abortion," such as in the "gray washboard" of the "sunken" roads. Later the road is also described as a "sheet of tin." The narrator's mood is also gray, tainted with loss and death. As Robert Frost pointed out, poetry is "a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget." The narrator of "The Abortion" remembers the emotional anguish of her act, and thus gives life to that which was never born. In the poem, Sexton seems to suggest that an abortion might seem like a trivial act as easy as changing one's shoes; but in reality women must face the fact that the abortion is a type of death.

The narrator is obviously bitter about her experience with the abortion, and is emotionally conflicted. The poem is filled with an angry tone as well as sorrow. She calls herself, or her partner, or women in general "cowards," without actually spelling out who she means. The coward could refer to a man who did not want to take responsibility for the baby, or it could refer to the speaker's own inability to be responsible for the baby. It is entirely likely that the narrator advises her fellow females to think critically about abortions. The "logic" of simply doing away with a pregnancy might seem like "loss without death." That "loss without death" might be a cowardly way of rationalizing an immoral act.

Interestingly, the narrator does not seem to want to take full responsibility for the act. In the seventh stanza of the poem, the narrator mentions the man who impregnated her in a passive way. She simply states, "up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man, / not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all... / he took the fullness that love began." Using the term Rumplestiltskin invokes the fairy tale, which further allows the narrator to distance herself from the abortion. A fairy tale suggests being out of touch with reality. This corresponds with the sense of abortions being the type of "logic" that "will lead / to loss without death." The narrator also trivializes her role by saying, "I changed my shoes, and then drove south." She therefore seems to trivialize the act of an abortion as being akin to changing her shoes.

Finally, the last line of the poem spells out more clearly what an abortion is. The narrator refers to "this baby that I bleed." Female readers who have had abortions can relate to the psychological crisis referred to in the poem. Conflicting emotions, symbolized by the grayness and also by the detachment and lack of responsibility, are inevitable when a woman makes the choice to abort a pregnancy. Some women may feel like "cowards," and others may blame the father of the child as the "coward." I actually feel both emotions. In any case, it is crucial to remember that having an abortion does mean some kind of a "loss." Whether or not a woman believes that the pregnancy at that stage is a viable living being, the abortion does entail "Somebody who should have been born / is gone." An abortion is a life-altering experience.