Abortion By Gwendolyn Brooks Analysis

Abortion is the ending of a pregnancy before the fetus has the ability to survive outside of the womb. There are two sides to abortion: Pro-life and Pro-choice. The poem “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks is about a mother who has had more than one abortion and is thinking about the lives she took away from them.

There are many reasons why people choose to get an abortion. Most of the time parenthood is not planned and the proper precautions to not having a child are not taken. The parents feel that they are not emotionally or financially stable to bring a baby into this world. Another reasons could be that they have been raped or that the father chose to not want to be in her life anymore and the mother cannot take of a baby by herself. Bringing a child into this world unprepared is not really the best idea so many people resort to abortion. Some chose to get abortions because they find out that there is a medical problem wrong with the baby causing it to not have a regular life.

Pregnancies on average last about 40 weeks. Nearly 90% of abortions are done in the first trimester of a pregnancy, which is about the first 13 weeks. In the Supreme Court case Roe vs. Wade they ruled that a woman could be allowed to have an abortion within her first two trimesters of a pregnancy. (Update: Abortion)

In the poem the speaker imagines the lives that her unborn children could have possibly had. Not only does she think about their lives being taken away from them she thinks about what she took away from herself, motherhood. She mentions in the poem that they will “never wind up the sucking thumb”(Brooks 10). She also says that she would never get to breastfeed.

People who are pro-life argue that getting an abortion is killing a baby is murd...

... middle of paper ...

...n she let me live...” his mother was 17 and still in high school. She as worried that if she had a baby she wouldn’t finish school and would have to struggle to take care of him. Her first option that made the most sense to her was abortion. As we can see now we know that she didn’t resort to that.

There are other options instead of an abortion. One could set up an adoption plan instead. They both still come with pain but knowing that a child could have a life is a better feeling. An adoption is giving away all legal rights to another family to take care of a child that somebody cannot. There is also open adoption, which is where the birth mother and the adoptive parents come to an agreement where they can get regular updates on the child. They could get pictures, meetings with parents or even play dates with the child. The law however does not enforce that method.