Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children and Womanhood

Parravani (Her) exposes motherhood’s serrated edges in this searing exploration of love, autonomy, and abortion. Forty-year-old Parravani was deeply in debt and unexpectedly pregnant with her third child in 2017, and her tenure-track position at a West Virginia college provided the family’s only stable income, but still fell short of covering the bills. Certain this pregnancy spelled the end of her career, Parravani wanted an abortion, to which her husband responded, “It’s your body.” But one local gynecologist refused her request, and another would only prescribe her RU 486 if she promised not to tell anyone else at the practice. “Reduced to a vessel, I was rage-filled,” she writes. Options elsewhere were too far away and expensive to be practical. “Every path seemed strung with a trip wire.” Throughout, Parravani elucidates the nation’s patchwork of abortion laws and data about women who seek to end their pregnancies, finding that states that restrict reproductive freedoms also have the poorest health outcomes for infants and children. From the point at which Parravani decides to carry her son to term, the book turns to building a devastating indictment of how environmental contamination and inadequate healthcare harmed the two of her children born in West Virginia. This is a powerful account of what many women face in the U.S. today. (Oct.)