Abortion In Gwendolyn Brooks The Mother

A famous poetic work of Gwendolyn Brooks is “The Mother.” In this moving piece, Brooks speaks in the voice of a mother who has aborted her child. She starts powerfully with, “Abortions will not let you forget/You remember the children that you did not get.” As this was written in 1945 when abortion was a controversial issue (before rights for women and abortions were guaranteed), this bold poem brought awareness to abortion itself, written to reach out to all the mothers who have aborted their children (Shmoop). Brooks wants the audience to realize what truly happens when someone aborts their child and the effect it has on the person, and specifically this mother: she never forgets. Ever. She will always be the childless mother. “The Mother” is filled with grief-filled sorrow, tragedy, and bitterness, with a very somber tone. At times, it is even shocking to hear what this mother has to say. “You will never neglect or beat them or silence or buy with a sweet.” Brooks says here that the mother will never be able to do anything with her “dim, killed” children with a horrible reality; she is imagining what might have been her motherhood (Shmoop). “Believe me that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.” Here, Brooks continues speaking in the mother’s voice, who mourns and begs forgiveness from her aborted children, wondering if she has indeed truly committed a crime and wanting to let her children know that she was not deliberately killing them (Shmoop). “You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you

She wrote about how society had, in a way, aborted, or killed, love with racism and hate. But she used the events of her time as things to write about. She gave her opinion about society to the entire world, speaking in the perspectives of those who struggled. So follow her example and speak up- no one knows what will come of it unless they