Stories about abortion provide a rich ground for looking at the relationship between narrative, experience, and meaning because in many ways abortion has come to be a defining issue for American culture—one that touches on the value we attribute to human life, liberty, and freedom. Using personal stories and interviews, MariAnna seeks to show the contours of a vital and diverse collective story—a narrative that emphasizes the discursive dynamics at work in any account of the significance of abortion.

MariAnna seeks to show the contours of a vital and diverse collective story—a narrative that emphasizes the discursive dynamics at work in any account of the significance of abortion.

By attempting to find a range of narrative and experiential extremes, she provides diverse and detailed accounts that form a collective story. The accounts she provides are about actual experience, but because the meaning of that experience is created and conveyed in narrative form, there is no neat distinction between a story and the event to which it refers. Meaning is embedded in larger cultural narrative: the individual stories told about abortion and the intersection between them. These stories illustrate how experience itself is mediated by, to some extent even a function of, narrative modes and currents. They illustrate the way autobiographical history is so enmeshed in cultural narrative forms that the private accounts we give of our own lives function as often unacknowledged social commentary. Stories about abortion provide a rich ground for looking at the relationship between narrative, experience, and meaning because in many ways abortion has come to be a defining issue for American culture—one that touches on the value we attribute to human life, liberty, and freedom. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, students, and researchers involved with Women's Studies and Women's Health issues and to general readers concerned with contemporary American social problems.