the mother

the mother

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine?--

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All.

lots of people argue that perhaps this was Brooks' anti-abortion poem and some argue that it was her pro-choice version. she never really came out either way.

i've heard the sad excuse for an argument about this poem that the speaker should have stopped having sex or used birth control if she wanted to prevent the abortions....

but taken in the context of when Brook's was writing the availability of birth control was all but prohibited:

"During the first half of the 20th century, contraceptives were not widely available to women

–The Comstock Law of 1873, officially the Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, outlawed the distribution of information about birth control.
–
–The Comstock Law was particularly hard on poor women who had no means of obtaining medical advice, devices, or treatment from private physicians."

(From the History of Birth Control by Julie Oyler, MD. University of Chicago Hospitals, 2003)

In 1936 Margaret Sanger and the National Committee for Federal Legislation on Birth Control was able to win a judicial decision that exempted physcians from the Comstock Law, but it wasn't until 1965 that it was LEGAL to distribute birth control to married couples...It wasn't until the 1960's that the pill was introduced.

In terms of abortion and women's right to choose in the United States:

"The prohibition of legal abortion from the 1880s until 1973 came under the same anti-obscenity or Comstock laws that prohibited the dissemination of birth control information and services.

Many women died or suffered serious medical problems after attempting to self-induce their abortions or going to untrained practitioners who performed abortions with primitive methods or in unsanitary conditions. During this time, hospital emergency room staff treated thousands of women who either died or were suffering terrible effects of abortions provided without adequate skill and care.
Some women were able to obtain relatively safer, although still illegal, abortions from private doctors. This practice remained prevalent for the first half of the twentieth century. The rate of reported abortions then began to decline, partly because doctors faced increased scrutiny from their peers and hospital administrators concerned about the legality of their operations."

(From the National Abortion Federation http://www.prochoice.org/)

Taking all of this in to context when reading the Brooks' poem listed above, one has a very different opinion about the options available to a woman who found herself pregnant in the time when this poem was written. (1945) And before condemning the speaker to hell for having multiple abortions (the final lines read..."i loved you all") take into consideration that perhaps this poem is about not just one women, but to all the women who had to sacrafice through abortion for survival in the early part of the 20th century. much in the same way Sethe had to kill her daughter in Beloved to save her from the fate of enslavement, perhaps, these women that Brooks' refers to sacraficed their children in much the same way because they realized that the life they could offer a child was no life at all....

perhaps "the mother" is asomething greater, an all encompassing mother, for all the children that had to die because of the corrupt and brutal racism, poverty and sexism that still lives and breathes today in the United States. perhaps, Brooks' was being far more subversive and political then many have attributed her. perhaps she is directly confronting institutions that oppress women in this country...perhaps this poem is about something so much more than abortion....perhaps...