By: Mike Spielman |  abort73.com

The following is excerpted from chapter three of my new ebook, Love the Least. To read Love the Least in its entirety download it for free and add it to your favorite ereader.

Towards the end of my collegiate career, I read Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. The central character in the story is a runaway slave mother who, on the verge of recapture, slits the throat of her daughter to prevent her from reentering a life of slavery. I don’t know that I saw the connection to abortion at the time, but I have since reread the text in pursuit of the details I’d forgotten. Though I don’t know Morrison’s position on abortion, I found her account of this mercy killing far less sympathetic than I anticipated. After killing her daughter, Sethe is shunned by her own people—the very ones with first-hand knowledge of what she was trying to protect her child from. Her sons run away forever, terrified by what their mother had done. Baby Suggs, the town matriarch and Sethe’s mother-in-law, loses all hope, shuts herself up in her room, and dies. Beloved, the young daughter who was killed, haunts the family in a perennial fury until she finally shows up in bodily form to torment and almost kill her mother. Near the end of the book, we find this account of Sethe’s efforts to justify her actions to Beloved:

Sethe began to talk, explain, describe how much she had suffered, been through, for her children… None of which made the impression it was supposed to. Beloved accused her of leaving her behind… And Sethe cried, saying she never did, or meant to—that she had to get them out, away… That her plan was always that they would all be together on the other side, forever. Beloved wasn’t interested. She said when she cried there was no one… Sethe pleaded for forgiveness, counting, listing again her reasons: that Beloved was more important, meant more to her than her own life. That she would trade places any day. Give up her life, every minute and hour of it, to take back one of Beloved’s tears.⁸

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