LOVED AND WANTED

In an intimate, affecting follow-up to her well-received debut memoir, Her (2013), Parravani recounts the complicated circumstances surrounding the birth of her third child. At the age of 40, a year after her second daughter was born, the author discovered she was pregnant. The news was dismaying: Her marriage was foundering, her family was financially unstable, and with a full-time job as a creative writing teacher, she felt she could not manage another child. Soon, however, she found that access to an abortion was severely circumscribed. In Morgantown, West Virginia, where she had moved for her teaching job, she could not find a provider; by the time she found one, located hours away in Pittsburgh, her pregnancy was too far along. Parravani cites the Turnaway Study, which examined women’s motivations for seeking an abortion, and she echoes those findings: “Nobody goes to a clinic or a doctor and joyfully ends a pregnancy,” she writes. “Nobody wants an abortion. They do it because they’re broke, or alone, or need to care for the children they already have, or because they can’t or don’t want to raise a baby.” In West Virginia, lack of access to abortion was consistent with poor health care overall. The state has one of the nation’s highest infant and child mortality rates as well as the nation’s highest levels of drinking water contaminants and number of opioid deaths. When her youngest daughter needed to see a pediatric urologist, she found only one practitioner in a state with the highest risk of kidney and renal failure in the country. When her son was born jaundiced, with a broken clavicle and needing tongue-tie surgery, his needs were not addressed. But more than West Virginia’s medical shortcomings, Parravani focuses on women’s reproductive rights. “Choice,” she asserts, “bolsters the miraculous attachment we have to our babies.”

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