“My pregnancies were not separate from me,” writes Charlotte Shane in the latest issue of Harper's Magazine. “The growth would be impossible without my organic matter; nothing about it occurred without incorporating the material of me.” And this awareness of pregnancy's power of physical coercion, its “protracted invasion, debilitation and deadly hazard,” brought with it a certain moral knowledge: The realization that she was pregnant “came with the understanding that I had the right not to be.”
