Longreads Pick
That new Brazilian fertility rate is below the level at which a population replaces itself. It is lower than the two-children-per-woman fertility rate in the United States. In the largest nation in Latin America—a 191-million-person country where the Roman Catholic Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official government policy has ever promoted birth control—family size has dropped so sharply and so insistently over the past five decades that the fertility rate graph looks like a playground slide. And it’s not simply wealthy and professional women who have stopped bearing multiple children in Brazil. There’s a common perception that the countryside and favelas, as Brazilians call urban slums, are still crowded with women having one baby after another—but it isn’t true.
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Published: Aug 18, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,269 words)
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Longreads Pick
As Jenny lay on the obstetrician’s examination table, she was grateful that the ultrasound tech had turned off the overhead screen. She didn’t want to see the two shadows floating inside her. Since making her decision, she had tried hard not to think about them, though she could often think of little else. She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment — and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion. As the doctor inserted the needle into Jenny’s abdomen, aiming at one of the fetuses, Jenny tried not to flinch, caught between intense relief and intense guilt.
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Published: Aug 10, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,153 words)
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Longreads Pick
How did more than 160 million women go missing from Asia? The simple answer is sex selection — typically, an ultrasound scan followed by an abortion if the fetus turns out to be female — but beyond that, the reasons for a gap half the size of the U.S. population are not widely understood. And when I started researching a book on the topic, I didn’t understand them myself.
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Published: Jun 27, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,651 words)
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Ellen Ripley Saved My Life
On female sci-fi heroines. “So it’s a mercy we have Ripley. David Foster Wallace may not have agreed with his date that The Terminator was one long story about the evils of abortioning—but I do! Girl, call me!—but I find it not at all unreasonable to suggest that the entire Alien franchise is about people who are dealing with unplanned pregnancies, and would very much like the possibility of a safe and legal abortion, if only to keep their rib cages from exploding.”
By Sady Doyle, The Awl
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Longreads Pick
On female sci-fi heroines. “So it’s a mercy we have Ripley. David Foster Wallace may not have agreed with his date that The Terminator was one long story about the evils of abortioning—but I do! Girl, call me!—but I find it not at all unreasonable to suggest that the entire Alien franchise is about people who are dealing with unplanned pregnancies, and would very much like the possibility of a safe and legal abortion, if only to keep their rib cages from exploding.”
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Published: Dec 7, 2010
Length: 15 minutes (3,834 words)
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