Almost one in four American women will have an abortion during their lifetimes. Unless she’s a woman in a literary novel, in which case she’s highly unlikely to.

Almost 50 years after Roe v. Wade affirmed a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, fiction writers seem reluctant to mention the procedure. Even now, as theocrats celebrate the imminent return to the era of back-alley butchers, our nation’s literature is eerily quiet on the subject.

The exceptions only prove the rule: We’re still invoking “The Handmaid’s Tale” from 1985 to show what happens when women lose the right to choose. Margaret Atwood’s dystopia continues to set the literary tone, inspiring such brilliant apocalyptic novels as Leni Zumas’ “Red Clocks” and Naomi Alderman’s “The Power.”

And even when abortion figures in works of realistic fiction, it tends to be the focus of the story rather than a natural element of the characters’ world. That’s an admittedly imprecise but telling marker of our awkward regard for the subject. For instance, abortion is a “hot-button issue” in Jodi Picoult’s “A Spark of Light”; abortion inspires the shocking violence in Joyce Carol Oates’ “A Book of American Martyrs.”

Imagine if, instead, we had read decades of novels in which abortion figured as naturally and frequently as other once controversial elements of real life, like extramarital sex, divorce and interracial marriage. The paucity of such storytelling has contributed to a half century of America’s squeamishness about reproductive health, and that, in turn, has allowed a band of religious zealots to insist that bodily autonomy remains a subject for legitimate debate in a country which claims to treasure personal liberty.

Jennifer Haigh’s surprisingly restrained new novel, “Mercy Street,” explores the precarious status of safe, legal abortion in a country where disapproval comes in a thick mixture of class snobbery, theological absolutism and misogynist fanaticism. Coincidentally, “Mercy Street” is likely to be the last abortion-focused novel that appears before our newly reconstituted Supreme Court reasserts the state’s control of women’s bodies. And yet it’s not so much a clarion call as a melancholy appraisal of the stalemate that has long held sway in the United States.

Starting with her debut novel, “Mrs. Kimble,” Haigh has been a brilliant witness to the struggles of ordinary people. In “Mercy Street,” she returns to Boston, the setting of “Faith,” her sensitive novel about a Catholic priest and his family caught in the sexual abuse scandal. The church appears again in this new story but only to hover along the periphery. This time, Haigh is more interested in the plight of severely isolated people.

At the center of “Mercy Street” is Claudia, an experienced counselor at a reproductive health clinic in downtown Boston. The protocols of working in a building surrounded by potentially violent activists have grown routine for Claudia. “The protestors were a fact of life,” Haigh writes, “a daily nuisance like traffic or bad weather.” Same for the bomb threats, suspicious callers and active shooter drills. Of course, it’s all impossibly stressful, but Claudia’s only concern is giving women the care they need. She’s long beyond arguing about the essential services that she and her colleagues provide.

Haigh seems well aware of the heavy curtain that’s been drawn across these services. Much of her novel is devoted to demystifying this quotidian work. She lets us listen in as Claudia answers the hotline, responding patiently to the same questions over and over again, starting with “How much does it cost?” We also see a range of people brave the phalanx of protesters and come to the clinic. For some young women, an abortion is simply a brief pause in a life pointed toward success. For some older women who have learned their fetuses are not viable, the procedure is the horrifying conclusion to their struggle for a family. And for others, it’s simply another disruption in a chaotic life. Some clients are shockingly uninformed about their bodies; others are afraid or sick or homeless – or all three. “The problem, always, was knowing which variable to solve for,” Claudia thinks. “Which fire did you put out first?”

Haigh bears down on the hypocrisy of so-called “pro-life” conservatives. Nothing irritates Claudia more than the extraordinary concern that daily protesters shower on poor women until the very moment they give birth – at which time the wholly unprepared new mother is simply an irritating freeloader for American capitalists to condemn or ignore. “The bleak struggle of her life – the stark daily realities that made motherhood impossible – didn’t trouble them at all,” Claudia thinks.

“Mercy Street” carefully sketches out the geography of poverty, that invisible realm that lies just beyond the horizon of middle-class life. Without condescension or sentimentality, Haigh describes people who aspire to live in a double-wide trailer, who must decide between paying the water bill and the cable bill, who feel the humiliation of using food stamps. Indeed, that life was Claudia’s adolescence, a background that makes her particularly attuned to the logic of the clinic’s poorer clients.

What’s more, Claudia’s mother, who had no particular interest in parenting, took in foster kids expressly to get extra cash from the state. Haigh never pushes on this theme, but she doesn’t need to: It’s clear that Claudia’s early exposure to the multitude of children unwanted by anyone and carelessly warehoused by the government has made her determined to present women with real reproductive choices.

But, of course, there are forces determined to snuff out that freedom, and “Mercy Street” eventually pivots to present a couple of pro-life warriors – or at least one warrior and his needy lieutenant. It’s a testament to Haigh’s empathy that these men are flayed alive by her with such gentleness. She traces the tangle of bad luck, bad decisions and bad prospects that keeps them trapped. She understands how – denied any other opportunities for success – fantasies of saving the “unborn” endow these marginalized figures with a synthetic sense of meaning, even importance.

While rotating from Claudia at the clinic to the pro-life activists conspiring on the internet, Haigh gradually choreographs the sort of confrontation we’ve come to expect and fear at the far end of the abortion controversy. In the end, though, “Mercy Street” avoids any such climactic melodrama and stays true to its fundamental decency.

Is it too much to wish this novel is not just hopeful but prophetic?

Copy the Story Link