What if your mother (review)

In the preface of What if your mother, poet Judith Arcana writes about her experiences from 1970 to 1972 as a "Jane," a member of the Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union. In the histories of the U.S. women's health movement, the Abortion Counseling Service, now called "Jane," worked with more than eleven thousand women and girls (the youngest under twelve, the oldest over fifty), all of whom came to the underground group for abortions prior to the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v Wade. Some of the poems in the collection were inspired by this pre-Roe abortion work as well as through stories Arcana discovered in newspapers about elections, legislation, and incidents of terrorism and assassination perpetrated by the anti-abortion movement in the United States. But most of the poems are drawn from the personal experiences of the girls and women Arcana knew through her work with clinics, Planned Parenthood, and other organizations.

In this book, Arcana deftly writes about a complex subject, managing to present powerful political poems that are at once grounded in women's lives and bodies. The poems are clear-voiced, compassionate, and passionate. The poet manages to express the ineffable in work that is accessible, fierce, funny, and full of lyric intensity.

The book works very well as a collection, moving from the first section on birth and conception to a second section of poems on birth control, medical and social myths, and onto a section about the mystification of women's conceptual health entitled "Information rarely offered." The next section, entitled "Don't tell me you didn't know this," contains some of the strongest poems in the book. Complex arguments are raised in poems beginning with "Jocasta interviewed in Hell" and moving to the wry and darkly humorous "For all the Mary Catholics" and "Opposing Arguments."

The final section, entitled "Here, in the heart of the country," focuses primarily on narrating the lives of girls and women who came to the Janes for assistance; because of the personal accounts, this section is extremely moving. The poem, "In the Service we said," demonstrates Arcana's ability to use simple vernacular to achieve a statement of "truth":

Lying there, some would ask, so we said No, we're not doctors; we're women just like you. We needed to know, so we learned it— you know, just like you learn anything.

(71)

One of the most powerful poems is "Felony Booking, Women's Lockup, 11th and State: A Short Literary Epic" in which Arcana describes the experience of being arrested:

Compounded by conspiracy: collaborators like in the black & white movies about Nazis where they shave the heads of women who fuck the enemy. But citizens, here's the thing you need to know: when it's illegal, abortion's homicide.

(79)

Toward the end of this poem, Arcana's description of her own breast-feeding body evokes an ironic eroticism juxtaposed against the stark reality of prison and the justice system:

Locked up, I freed my breasts from their container: a nursing bra built like the Golden Gate Bridge. I squeezed them soft like a lover, milked them hard like a farmer, sprayed my baby's own sweet nectar down that dirty little sink. Then the lawyer boys took me out to night court in the basement, away from the women, saying strategy: I was a wooden horse, a night mare.

(81)

The arguments within What if your mother are never simplistic, as we see in Arcana's poem, "Yes and No" and in the eloquent closing poem of the book, "She Said," in which we encounter the voices of many different girls and women—the many things "she" said, ending with the final voice:

She gulped some water in the kitchen and said, . . . My mother always said that everything comes down to give and take. So I think the baby, today, that was the taking—and me, me in my own life...