I found the poems that we read this week were intense and communicated the harsh reality for women considering having children or having an abortion. My attention was captivated by Brooks’ “the mother,” which deals with many heavy feelings, such as guilt (feeling like one has committed a crime, deliberation vs intentions), imagined potential (imagining the life their unborn child could have lived/loved/laughed, feeling as though one has poisoned the child’s life before it began), and yearning for the mother role (imagined motherly scenarios, gobbling mother-eye). Another part of the poem I found compelling was the choice to use physical descriptions of fetuses (damp small pulps with little or no hair) and word choices which invoke the imagery of post-partum activities or pregnancy/labor (contract, ease, breastfeeding, “you were born”). Brooks was so ahead of her time by depicting an unwanted/failed pregnancy and the emotions that a woman goes through- it is not simple, easy, happy, or convenient to go through something like this. In our contemporary I wish that these voices/perspectives were more widely understood or considered, but instead we have the opposite. In Tennessee, for example, abortion is already illegal, but recently there has been a law proposed which would make it so that women who have abortions can be charged with “fetal homicide” which is punishable by life in prison, life in prison without parole, or the death penalty. Jody Barrett, one of the lawmakers backing this bill, has a podcast where he has openly expressed his feelings on the issue, calling for a need for rule of law, rights for unborn children (“prebirth”), calls himself a “pro-life” advocate, and says that unborn children should have personhood from fertilization. His views conveniently ignore the emotional despair of women requiring abortions, the irony of being “pro-life” and calling for the death penalty, and the irony of worsening punishments for women without changing punishments for men who rape, engage in incest, “baby-trap,” or just straight up murder and abuse women. The actual crime of murder/manslaughter in Tennessee is only punishable by death or life in prison if there are aggravating circumstances or an abundance of proof, so certain lawmakers essentially want to make it so that abortion of an unborn fetus is a worse crime than murdering a fully grown and developed person with a life, family, kids of their own etc., while also carefully neglecting the fact that women who get abortions are not murderous criminals or blood thirsty people and rather just regular people getting a medical operation which comes with great deliberation and trauma, as depicted by Brooks. https://www.newschannel5.com/news/tenn-bill-overhaul-could-expand-homicide-laws-to-unborn-children
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