Carly Manes, a queer, full-spectrum doula, offers children of picture-book age a simple, thoughtful, and gender-inclusive look at what it means to have an abortion. When someone gets pregnant, it tells us, different things can happen. They could have a baby; they could have a miscarriage (“when a pregnancy isn’t healthy enough to keep growing”); or they could have an abortion (“when someone decides to stop growing their pregnancy”).
Abortions can be done in different ways, too: via a doctor who does a “special procedure” (not further explained) or via medicine the pregnant person takes. Abortion is “very safe” and millions of people around the world have them every year.
Manes then explains that people may have abortions for different reasons: they like their family as is, they can’t take care of a baby right now, or a pregnancy could risk their own health. Notably, the book also discusses that people may have many different emotions—happy, sad, calm, lonely, or a combination—before, during, and after an abortion. Some will want to talk about it; others won’t. Regardless, they all deserve “love and respect.” The book repeatedly stresses that having an abortion is a decision each person should make for themselves, and concludes, “We can never really know what it is like to be someone else.”
The text does not touch on any of the political debates around abortion or the fact that although abortion is safe when done properly, it can be very unsafe when a person is forced to have one from a disreputable provider because it has been made illegal. That feels like an appropriate approach for the age group; adults who feel their child has a need to know these other aspects can go into them as desired, using this book as a launching point. It also does not go into how pregnancy happens in the first place, and recommends Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth’s What Makes a Baby? for that. (I do, too!)
This book fills a gap in books about gender/bodies/sex-ed for younger children, though, and is a recommended addition to any collection of such titles.
Images throughout are of people diverse in racial/ethnic and gender identities. They were inspired by real people who have shared their stories through We Testify, a group dedicated to elevating the voices of people (particularly people of color) who have had abortions.
