The Abortion Story

Eleanor Bourg Donlon
“I can’t wait to tell my daughter about your periodical. She is remarkably talented — all of her teachers think so — and she has written a story about abortion that is so good.”

And so my mind wanders away, and I brood over the purpose and prevalence of that developing genre — The Abortion Story — until the proud mother draws me back to the conversation with a comment that obviously requires a response.

It is easy to capture such a scene anonymously, as it happens all of the time, especially when one happens to be peddling a Catholic journal for fiction, poetry, essays and art.

The Abortion Story is a rite of passage for young Christian writers. I wrote one myself in earlier days, as have nearly all of my friends and colleagues who aspire with me to a literary vocation.

There is a positive glut of differing versions of The Abortion Story sitting around waiting to be picked up by an interested market. A very few of them are really well done; some of them are schmaltzy; most of them are highly sentimentalized; nearly all are predictable, and a considerable number of them are utterly unremarkable.
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