Leah Hayes

Somehow despite the subtitle and the depiction of a row of serious and anxious women on the cover, I got it in my head that this is was a humor collection of single-page cartoons. You could hear the gears grinding in my head as I shifted directly from second to reverse to accept that it was instead an educational tract about what women should expect if they choose to undergo a medical or surgical abortion due to an unintended pregnancy.

I'm not usually a fan of text heavy graphic novels with uneven hand lettering, but somehow it worked here, drawing me into the emotion and urgency of undergoing a mentally and physically difficult process. Hayes leavens the scary and depressing bits with compassion, simple advice, and a lack of judgement.

It wasn't what I expected, but I was impressed with what I got instead.… (meer)

This book is a really good start for talking about abortion in an honest and basic way. It goes through the basics of what a medical and surgical abortion entails, what to expect, what you may be feeling, etc. It skips over all the reasons that one might have to have an abortion, saying that no matter what they are, they are valid.

They did touch on the fact that not everyone has a supportive family, but I felt they should have gone into that a little bit further. The one character in the book who didn't want to tell her family had a very supportive friend, but not everyone has that either. Also, both of the women followed in the book had jobs that they could take days off with no repercussions - it wasn't mentioned at all, but they both were able to stay home and recuperate with no apparent worries about work or other responsibilities. They were both also able to easily find a clinic near them that would provide abortions, and they weren't fake clinics that would try to guilt them into not having abortions, and there weren't any picketers outside with pictures of fetuses on their signs yelling mean things. I know this book was meant to be a specific look at how abortions are carried out and the issues surrounding that, but I still felt that some things shouldn't have been left out. This book could be a great comfort for people who have decided to have an abortion, but for those who can't afford to take time off work there's no mention of how it might look to cope with the bleeding/cramping etc. at work - just one example of a situation that I feel should have been within the scope of this book. I also think it's worth mentioning that sometimes men and genderqueer people choose to have abortions as well.

Hopefully this will just be one book of many that take a compassionate look at the realities of abortion after someone has made the decision to do it, because I think this book would be very helpful to me if I ever made that choice.… (meer)