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WORK TITLE: May Cause Love
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WEBSITE: http://www.kassiunderwood.com/
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https://www.harpercollins.com/cr-124155/kassi-underwood * https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2017/03/17/unexpected-journey-after-abortion#
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LC control no.: n 2016051167
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016051167
HEADING: Underwood, Kassi
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Columbia University, M.F.A. Also attended the University of Massachusetts and Harvard University.
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CAREER
Writer and life coach. Columbia University, faculty.
AWARDS:Pro-Voice Storyteller Award, Exhale, 2013.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and Websites, including the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly Online, Women’s Health, Best Self, Refinery29, Guernica, Al Jazeera, New York Daily News, and the Rumpus.
SIDELIGHTS
Kassi Underwood’s memoir, May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment after Abortion, grew out of an essay she published in the wildly popular New York Times column, “Modern Love.” In the book, Underwood writes about her years’ long journey to healing following an abortion she had when she was nineteen. Underwood notes that she was raised to believe that abortion is a mortal sin, but she also knew that she was single and struggling with a drinking problem, while the father was a drug addict. Underwood remained haunted by her decision for three years, and then she learned that the man who impregnated her was expecting a child. The guilt and grief overwhelmed her, and Underwood set out on a healing journey to deal with her emotions. When Underwood learned that some cultures and religions practice healing rituals particularly for abortions, she decided to try them all. From there, Underwood not only recounts her own healing, but also the stories of the women she meets along the way.
Underwood noted in an online Bust interview with Melynda Fuller: “All along, since I was nineteen, I’ve had this vision that women would come together and create new spaces that aren’t dictated by political messaging. We wouldn’t focus on trying to “change culture” or to end stigma. The truth is, stigma has no power over us. Personal transformation begets social revolution, not the other way around. Abortion has been legal and illegal for thousands of years, and yet, abortions still happened. Women have always found a way to support one another.” The author added: “I think we will go beyond discussions of abortion and start to imagine a society based on the balance of masculine and feminine, where emotions can be fully expressed in all situations, not by pointing fingers but by taking responsibility. I think it all comes back to the individual. The key to revolutionary social activism is looking within.”
Praising May Cause Love on the Rumpus Website, Bromleigh McCleneghan remarked: “Underwood is a trustworthy narrator: unflinching in examining her own failures, and fiercely empathetic, especially of the other women she meets on her post-abortion journey. Indeed, it is this commitment to honoring the experiences of women that renders this memoir most helpful, pushing readers to consider a third option beyond the limitations (and misnomers) of the pro-choice or pro-life dichotomy.” McCleneghan went on to comment that “May Cause Love reminds us of the complex ways women make meaning in the world, find a way out of no way, and find liberation from suffering through naming and claiming their experiences.” A Kirkus Reviews critic was also positive, asserting that “the author shines a personal light on the dilemma that women face when they have to juggle their own needs and desires with a biological accident.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Underwood, Kassi, May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment after Abortion, HarperOne (New York, NY), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2017, Emily Brock, review of May Cause Love.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2016, review of May Cause Love.
Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2016, review of May Cause Love.
ONLINE
Bust, http://bust.com/ (October 24, 2017), Melynda Fuller, author interview.
Kassi Underwood Website, http://www.kassiunderwood.com (October 24, 2017).
Pickle Me This, http://picklemethis.com/ (March 1, 2017), review of May Cause Love.
Rewire, https://rewire.news/ (January 17, 2017), review of May Cause Love.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (June 22, 2017), Bromleigh McCleneghan, review of May Cause Love.
Get May Cause Love everywhere books are sold!
Kassi Underwood
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Meet Kassi
ABOUT KASSI
Kassi Underwood is the author of May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment After Abortion (HarperOne/HarperCollins, Feb. 2017). The New York Times essay that inspired her book was ranked the #1 “Modern Love” column by The New Republic. Betty Gilpin, star of the Netflix series GLOW, selected the essay to read on NPR/WBUR's Modern Love Podcast, airing August 9th, 2017 alongside a conversation with Kassi. She has appeared as a live television guest on MSNBC and performed in the fundraising comedy show, LadyParts Justice.
Kassi's international coaching sessions, “Getting Real to Heal” and “Follow Your Gut,” reach ambitious women with a mission to return to their natural selves and the forces of nature they came here to be. She provides pro bono coaching in women’s prisons and for some patients of reproductive health clinics.
Kassi has addressed audiences across the country since 2011. She has presented lectures and workshops for Planned Parenthood, Columbia University, Fordham University - The Jesuit School of New York, University of California at Berkeley, Haven of Hope for Addiction Recovery, The Maine Correctional Center for Women, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The Amala Foundation, as well as numerous Episcopal churches and many other organizations.
Kassi earned an MFA in literary nonfiction on a teaching fellowship at Columbia University before joining the faculty of the Undergraduate Writing Program. Next she pursued a master’s degree at Harvard University with a focus on spiritual counseling, social justice, and the history of women healers. She is trained in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction from U-Mass Medical School, a student of the metaphysical text A Course in Miracles, and a daily meditator with a decade of experience, including five days alone in the woods to quit Zoloft cold turkey.
Kassi won the 2013 “Pro-Voice Storyteller Award,” presented by Exhale, an organization supporting the leadership of women who have experienced abortion to bridge the political divide in the United States. She has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly digital, Women's Health, Best Self, Refinery29, Guernica, Al Jazeera, The New York Daily News, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Kassi has contributed to NPR and HuffPost Live and been featured on UpWorthy. She has been profiled or quoted in publications such as New York Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bustle, Bust, Rewire, The Rumpus, Religion News Services, Harvard Divinity School website, and many more.
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Kassi Underwood
Kassi Underwood grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. Her work has been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic online, The Rumpus, Refinery29, and Guernica. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she taught on the faculty of the Undergraduate Writing Program. She has been a guest on MSNBC and HuffPost Live, featured on Upworthy, and profiled in the New York Magazine cover story, “My Abortion.” Kassi lectures about personal transformation and the spirituality of abortion. She is a student at Harvard Divinity School and co-host of the forthcoming podcast, Spiritually Blonde.
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Interview with Kassi Underwood, writer
by LEAH on MARCH 6, 2013
Each week, we post short interviews with interesting people about their thoughts and feelings on women and drinking. There is such a wide array of perspectives about this topic, and we are excited to gain insight into as many as possible and to share them with you.
Kassi Underwood‘s essays, book reviews, and author interviews have appeared in The New York Times, TheAtlantic.com, The New York Daily News, The Rumpus, Exhale’s Pro-Voice Blog, Publishers Weekly, and The Days of Yore, among other publications. She won the 2012 Pro-Voice Storyteller Award for her personal essays on abortion and recently embarked on a national college tour to show every woman who’s had an abortion that she is not alone. She is working on an investigative memoir of post-abortion therapies and cultural rituals. Say hi on twitter @kassiunderwood.
Drinking Diaries: How old were you when you had your first drink and what was it?
Kassi Underwood: Thirteen. Kentucky straight. Three or four amber bottles were lined up on my friend’s lowboy dresser. Her mother, far more lax than mine, bought the liquor for us. I poured myself a few drinks, mixing them with something classy like RC Cola, then wandered around the house in a state of oafish bliss. I felt like I’d ingested a magic potion that would solve all my problems. Emotional and social problems, at least. In my next memory, I was crawling up my friend’s slick wooden steps on all fours, with a limp smile, thinking, “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this sooner?”
How did/does your family treat drinking?
Alcoholism runs on both sides of my tree, so my extended family tends to proceed with either caution or irreverence. Most significantly, my father sobered up when I was nineteen.
How do you approach alcohol in your every day life?
I took my last drink–a bottle of Chianti–at age twenty, in bed, in my flat, in Florence, Italy. That was more than six years ago. Because many of my friends are normal drinkers, I serve wine or beer to company. I have to remember that I didn’t quit drinking just to duck out of my life again or to inconvenience people with my personal issues. Just the opposite, in fact. Last summer, my mother and I toured Napa Valley together; I still love to see music in dive bars; and as a writer, I attend a lot of booze-fueled readings. Recently, I ended up on a television segment about how to use alcoholic beverages in your beauty regime. In a sort of cosmic dialogue with my last drink, the beauty editor wiped a red wine treatment on my cheeks. It didn’t send me off on a jag or anything, but I have no plans to start regularly dousing my face with wine.
Have you ever had a phase in your life when you drank more or less?
One memorable dry stint occurred when I got pregnant at nineteen. As if there were an appropriate way to handle a pregnancy I wasn’t going to keep, I still aimed to protect the baby. Maybe it’s telling that I temporarily stopped drinking—a feat theretofore unattainable—only because there was potentially someone else to guard. Quitting for my own health had never appealed to me.
What’s your drink of choice? Why?
I was the opposite of selective. I stopped drinking before the legal age, so I did not often buy my own alcohol. Eventually, certain kinds of drinks stopped working, so I’d make an effort to switch from whiskey to wine to cheap-and-quick Gordon’s vodka. On a spree two months before my last drink, I ran out of liquor, so I broke into my newly-sober father’s liquor cabinet and gulped down the last of a bottle of gin, including the pad of mold floating on top.
Can you tell us about the best time you ever had drinking?
My memory is jammed with happy drinking scenes: sipping mint juleps at Kentucky Derby parties in my home state, out-drinking the boys in college, drunk dancing, drunk night swimming, drunk roller-skating.
I spent one evening in a Burlington, Vermont movie theatre watching this documentary called Festival Express. The film followed Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, and The Band, circa 1970, on tour together in Canada. I was eighteen years old, and my friends and I had smuggled Nalgenes full of Carlo Rossi in our outsize corduroy purses. Once buzzed, we migrated to the aisles and all fifteen of us started cutting rug. (See also: the Hippie Dance. See also: a gorilla skipping in place. See also: dances so god awful they should probably be illegal.) I had just reached the supreme and short-lived feeling that I drank for. Drinking gave me a sense of closeness to my friends at a time in my life when I had begun to feel otherwise bereft of sociability.
What about the worst time?
Any time I had already started drinking and ran out of alcohol, the scene turned tragic. I have no recollection of this, but the group of five girlfriends I lived with in Vermont said I used to survey our evening supply, hike up my eyebrows, and look around bug-eyed, saying, “Are you sure there’s enough alcohol? I don’t think there’s enough alcohol.” You can basically swap “alcohol” for anything else in the world (cash, love, cash, friends, cash) to gather a real sense of the alcoholic psyche, a religion of scarcity. It’s hard to choose the worst time, because there were plenty of embarrassing drinking moments: getting arrested, selling my Ford Explorer for fifty dollars, being physically removed from a stage I tried to commandeer at a strip club in Montreal (dressed in a one-piece Cat Woman suit, no less).
But perhaps my all-time worst drinking bout was in Italy, a few days after Night of the Toilet-Bed, when I slept doubled-over on a toilet seat for eight hours. At that point—living off money I borrowed from a roommate I’d known for only two weeks—I had decided that I needed to get sober, but that I first needed to really grind my life into the cobblestone. So I went to this morbidly cheesy bar called YAB Disco Club. YAB was an acronym for “You Are Beautiful,” and that’s not even the saddest part. That night, I drank three Long Island iced teas in a row, but they didn’t work. I couldn’t get drunk.
Has drinking ever affected—either negatively or positively—a relationship of yours?
I had a habit of picking guys who had worse issues than I did. The Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty springs to mind: “Give me your tired, your poor… the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” I had some really fantastic boyfriends, too, boyfriends I treated terribly, but I’ve always had a special place in my heart for sickly-looking addicts. Sallow skin and gangly. Working on a “Project Boyfriend”–always full of potential–was a distraction from my own drinking, but no matter how far gone they were, I always wound up with a derivative of the same nickname: Alky, Al, Little Alcoholic, you get the picture.
Do you have a favorite book, song, or movie about drinking?
I remember traipsing to and from my first sobriety groups in Florence, earbuds blasting Ani DiFranco’s “Knuckle Down.” “Whiskey makes me smarter,” she sings, and I believed that. It took me awhile to realize that relaxing makes me smarter and that whiskey promotes said relaxation.
What do you like most about drinking?
There was always a certain point in the evening when I’d feel just perfect, like how I imagined humans were built to feel: my boobs grew like three cup sizes, I felt one with my friends and the universe, I could handle anything, I could play. Without a drink, I didn’t know how to have fun. In retrospect, I think that perfect feeling alcohol gave me was presence: a brief flight from time, when I neither dwelled on bitterness of yore nor worried some fear fantasy. Only problem? That peaceful feeling was soon overwhelmed by an invisible beast who seemed to burst out of my ribcage with a mission to consume whatever alcohol I could scrounge up. Didn’t matter who was in the way.
Why do, or don’t you, choose to drink?
Choosing not to drink is tricky because I chose not to drink so many times before I was able to uphold my own decision. A big part of maintaining my sobriety is helping other alcoholics to stay clean, an honor I wouldn’t want to forfeit. (The big secret is that they’re helping me way more).
How has alcoholism affected your life?
Where would I be today without alcoholism? While my father’s alcoholism negatively affected our family during his active years, his sobriety positively influenced us as well. If it weren’t for his example, I think I would have spent many more years out there causing wreckage.
Though I wish I hadn’t hurt anyone along the way and I wouldn’t wish this disease on anyone, I’m now grateful for my own alcoholism. Alcohol saved me from the torture of my own mind before I knew how to quiet my compulsive thinking. Without it, I would have been fatally depressed. And without loud consequences. I needed the disease to beat me down, so I would become willing to seek a more substantial solution to what ailed my spirit for so long. These days, I meditate to achieve a genuine version of the artificial presence alcohol once produced. Sometimes it actually works!
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last reply was september 3, 2011
Mary Allison
August 31, 2011
Wonderful interview, ““Give me your tired, your poor… the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Sigh…..
Ricki
August 31, 2011
Kassie, I am so proud of you. Your written words have always had a profound impact on me. Many years have transpired since I read your personal narrative on your grandmother until this most personal essay. You are an amazing young woman with courage, grace, and wisdom. I feel honored to call you my friend. Keep being the wonderful young woman that you are.
Best wishes,
Ricki
Carrie Mae Rose
September 3, 2011
Great descriptions ~ Night of the Toilet-Bed and Project Boyfriend… I loved reading your interview!!
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Personal Transformation Begets Social Revolution: An Interview With Memoirist Kassi Underwood
BY MELYNDA FULLER IN BOOKS
15812
kassi
Writer Kassi Underwood’s debut memoir May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment After Abortion follows her on a road trip across the United States as she takes part in healing ceremonies after having an abortion at nineteen. Graceful in its example of how one can turn a painful experience into a moment of inclusive activism, the book is now inspiring a new grassroots movement around open conversations about abortion. Underwood took some time to talk to BUST about the experience of writing the book, the current political climate, and more.
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Your memoir covers so many topics — social and moral expectations, obviously abortion, relationships — so seamlessly. Can you tell me a little about the journey that resulted in this book?
I started writing about the abortion right after it happened. When I was 19, before I walked into the abortion clinic, I said, “I’ll never tell anyone about this.” When I walked out, I said, “I’ll never stop talking about this.”
I remember the first time I told someone. She was a girl in my undergarment design course at the University of Vermont. We were in the basement, working at a sewing table. I was ranting about a Supreme Court justice, and I used it as transition to talk about abortion. It was a week after I’d had mine and I told her how much I cared about abortion remaining legal. She said, “My heart goes out to you, because I had one, too.” Then we walked around the table and hugged. After that, I just kept talking about it.
I got sober and graduated from college and moved to Austin, Texas. A day before the third anniversary of my abortion, a man put a bomb on the front steps of a clinic down the street; on the third anniversary, my ex-boyfriend called to say he was having a baby with a woman; and I was depressed in a 9 to 5 office job. All the emotions I’d been suppressing began to come up — I felt like I was losing my mind. But I thought, “I’m a feminist. I shouldn’t be having these feelings.” So I moved to New York City for grad school.
I took a class in Buddhism thinking maybe I could become “enlightened.” One day, I accidentally blurted out that I was writing about abortion. The professor asked if I’d heard of mizuko jizo, a Japanese abortion ritual. I got chills. I thought, “I’m going to do all the rituals.” I didn’t know for a fact that other rituals for abortion existed, but I knew I had to do them.
How did you choose which rituals you’d go through after the abortion?
I just did every ritual I could find. I asked Mother Google what rituals existed and mapped out a course. I was already so shaky and riddled with anxiety that it couldn’t get worse. To get to the other side, I knew I had to go through these rituals, no matter how crazy or painful they were.
I thought ritual would help me learn how to express the complexity of emotion and discombobulation I was experiencing. I needed to find a community where I could say that and they wouldn’t look at my like I had three heads.
How did meeting people with so many different backgrounds affect you as a person?
The first experience that comes to mind is the Roman Catholic retreat. I’m from Lexington, KY, a somewhat liberal place in thought and feeling. Half of my family is Republican, but they lead with love, not judgment. I hadn’t been exposed to hardcore pro-life Roman Catholics before. People who loved me told me not to go. I thought they’d watched too many movies. My mom just thought I was crazy. She texted me: “good luck with the guilt thing.”
During the retreat I grew angrier and angrier towards the people running it. I was sleep deprived and hungry. Then, these people were talking about the “evils of the abortion mills.” I went to my room and started to write about them. I wrote: “They are so judgmental.” I kept writing, “they they they.” Then, at some point, I crossed out “they,” and wrote “I.” I was judging them for judging me. After that, if I saw something supposedly awful in someone else, I would ask what it was that I didn’t like in myself. I choose to see the love in them, no matter what they’re showing me. I choose to see the love in myself.
Why is it important to you to give women an unbiased space to talk about their experiences? And how does the vocabulary play into that?
There are rules about how a person is supposed to talk about their experience with abortion, depending on their beliefs. If you’re pro-choice, you’re not supposed to say “baby” or talk about “healing.” If you’re pro-life, you’re not supposed to be grateful for an abortion.
It’s time to ditch the scripts. We’re encouraging people to mask their authentic selves to make other people comfortable. A woman who talks about healing after abortion is far too often met with skepticism and disapproval; this must end. Using whatever vocabulary feels true to us is a key part of authenticity.
It takes radical authenticity for a person to share honestly about abortion, and radical listening for someone to receive it openly. When I give someone else the power to control how I talk about my own experience, I give them the power to take away my rights.
When you wrote May Cause Love, things were very different politically. With our current administration in place, are you viewing your book’s place in the culture differently or in how you talk to people about it?
I feel so prepared for this administration after writing this book. The stakes seem higher now, but the facts are the same. The abortion war doesn’t work. The pro-choice/pro-life debate doesn’t work. If someone were going to win the war, they would have by now, but my inbox gets pinged by frantic, enraged emails from pro-choice organizations every day. The social and personal dynamics are much more complex than I could explain in a sound bite, but a start is to allow every woman who has had an abortion, whether she is pro-life, pro-choice, pro-voice, or nothing at all, to heal completely if she feels so inclined. Activists love to focus on destigmatizing abortion; we will get where we want to go faster if we support healing.
My publisher tweeted about my book, and some reproductive rights activists made comments that didn’t feel good to read. They said things like: “I don’t know anybody who had to do weird rituals” and that I was “preying on vulnerable women" because my story deals with healing. Women who seek healing after having an abortion are often rejected — rejected by women who support abortion rights. That’s just crazy. The pro-choice side says we shouldn’t feel anything, so they either don’t talk to anyone or go where their pain will be heard, to the pro-life side.
I noticed some mention of a movement forming around the publication of your book on social media. Can you tell me about that?
It’s amazing. Right now, a group of women who I’ve never met are building a grassroots community all across the country to spread the message of May Cause Love. It’s all about authentic conversations about abortion and the possibility of healing, transformation, and freedom. That political revolution begins with personal transformation. What’s particularly inspiring to me is that the vast majority of them have experienced abortion, but not all of them felt inclined to heal due to deep pain. What they do feel inclined to do is to stand guard for the women in search of healing, against anyone who questions their motives or tries to suppress their voices and experiences.
All along, since I was 19, I’ve had this vision that women would come together and create new spaces that aren’t dictated by political messaging. We wouldn’t focus on trying to “change culture” or to end stigma. The truth is, stigma has no power over us. Personal transformation begets social revolution, not the other way around. Abortion has been legal and illegal for thousands of years, and yet, abortions still happened. Women have always found a way to support one another. I think we will go beyond discussions of abortion and start to imagine a society based on the balance of masculine and feminine, where emotions can be fully expressed in all situations, not by pointing fingers but by taking responsibility. I think it all comes back to the individual. The key to revolutionary social activism is looking within.
Follow Kassi Underwood at kassiunderwood.com and on Facebook and Twitter.
top photo: Instagram/Kassi Underwood
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Melynda Fuller is a New York-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, HelloGiggles, TimeOut New York, and Bookslut, among others. She is currently working on a collection of essays. You can find more of her published work at melyndafuller.com. Find her on Twitter: @MGrace_Fuller.
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Underwood, Kassi: MAY CAUSE LOVE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Underwood, Kassi MAY CAUSE LOVE HarperOne (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 2, 14 ISBN: 978-0-06-245863-6
How one woman overcame the traumatic experience of abortion.Essayist Underwood, who studies at Harvard Divinity
School and co-hosts the "Spiritually Blonde" podcast, was caught by surprise with her pregnancy at age 19. She always
imagined being a virgin until marriage, marrying a man she loved, and having their first child a few years after the
wedding. "My first pregnancy was supposed to be about joy," she writes. However, she believed that, despite the
suffering involved, she needed the abortion since the baby, a failed relationship with the father, and being in love with
someone else were all the wrong things at the wrong time. Then she spent years trying to overcome the incredible
sadness she felt afterward. Underwood intimately describes the events leading up to her relationship with Noah, a drug
dealer and user, while the man she truly loved, "Will-B," was in the military and overseas. She also chronicles the
abortion and the tactics she used to move on. These included a Buddhist ceremony commonly used in Japan to help
women move beyond abortion, a Roman Catholic retreat, a water baby ritual, meditation, consultations with a
representative from Planned Parenthood, and more. Through it all, she continued to struggle with her true feelings about
her relationship with Will-B, where the timing of any declarations of love was always out of sync. Underwood's writing
effectively exposes her emotional conflicts about her abortion as well as those of the many women with whom she
discussed this often taboo subject. The author shines a personal light on the dilemma that women face when they have
to juggle their own needs and desires with a biological accident that has the power to completely change their lives,
whether they birth the child or not. A poignant memoir about the years of healing that are often required after having an
abortion.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Underwood, Kassi: MAY CAUSE LOVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471901911&it=r&asid=9b0e4fbe742344e5ce14ccccc2ac44cd.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471901911
---
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May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of
Enlightenment after Abortion
Emily Brock
Booklist.
113.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2017): p20.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment after Abortion. By Kassi Underwood. Feb. 2017. 352p.
HarperOne, $26.99 (9780062458636). 363.46.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Underwood was 19 and a drunken wreck when she found herself pregnant. Raised in conservative Kentucky,
Underwood understood that abortion was an unfathomable sin. Still, she knew she was in no place to raise a child.
Three years after her abortion, the drug addict who had impregnated her told her he was about to become a father, and
Underwood found herself reeling. She remained in the depths of despair for years, running from grief and guilt. Though
she did not regret her decision, she knew she needed to heal, eventually seeking out various healing practices. Over
time, as she experienced a Buddhist ceremony, a Catholic retreat, many therapy sessions, and a Jewish ritual, she slowly
faced her psyche and began to mend. Underwood wrote the book she had been longing for as a young woman. Full of
rich emotion and excellent storytelling, Underwood's memoir of strength and healing reads almost like fiction. (It is also
full of accurate medical and scientific research.) Underwood's spiritual journey explores several religions, making her
experience more available to any reader. This will be an excellent resource for anyone struggling with an abortion or
miscarriage, or for readers seeking to better understand those who have done so.--Emily Brock
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Brock, Emily. "May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment after Abortion." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p.
20. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479077884&it=r&asid=81cd7951bebb405d135e5ba89299c1b5.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479077884
---
10/2/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507001550237 3/3
May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of
Enlightenment After Abortion
Publishers Weekly.
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p138.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment After Abortion
Kassi Underwood. HarperOne, $26.99 (352p)
ISBN 978-0-06-245863-6
In this brave and unsparing memoir, Underwood, a writer and lecturer, tells of getting pregnant at 19 with her drug
addict quasi-boyfriend and choosing to have an abortion. She struggled for years afterward to come to terms with the
consuming sense of loss she experienced as she repeatedly failed to find a support network. When her ex-boyfriend
emails her on the third anniversary of the abortion--to tell her his new partner is pregnant with a girl they're naming
Jade, which is what he and Underwood would have called their child--she truly starts to unravel, tormented by her
unresolved grief and memories of the procedure. Six years after her abortion, she's finally ready to begin the healing.
Underwood tries various methods to help herself, including attending a Roman Catholic retreat run by staunch prolifers,
taking a vow of silence in the woods while quitting Zoloft cold turkey, meditation, and a Buddhist "water baby"
ritual. Underwood travels through uncharted and harrowing waters at times; her story, though painful, is moving and
heartfelt. She eventually creates her own "road to recovery," and by mapping that road she hopes to provide a voice for
women and men suffering in silence. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment After Abortion." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p.
138. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225099&it=r&asid=e53d0e7374cbcf623634075a32eb937e.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225099
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GRIEF IS NOT REGRET: MAY CAUSE LOVE BY KASSI UNDERWOOD
REVIEWED BY BROMLEIGH MCCLENEGHAN
June 22nd, 2017
A single-stall ladies’ room with cinderblock walls and institutional grade toilet paper is not the ideal location to take a pregnancy test. But I’d felt really strange the previous weekend at the graduate student retreat, and my period still hadn’t shown up, so as I drove out to the church where I worked for the middle school lock-in, I picked one up. Nine months before my wedding, I desperately hoped it would be negative.
Two years later, almost to the day, I peed on a stick in our first floor parsonage powder room. My period was once again late, and though I generally felt okay, my breasts ached whenever I took the stairs too fast. We’d only started trying to get pregnant a few weeks prior, but when no second blue line emerged, the tears did.
Sarah, a clergywoman half a generation older than me, had an abortion when she was pregnant for the fourth time, when she was already a mother of three, when her contraception failed. She had no doubts; terminating the pregnancy was absolutely the right thing to do. “I do not see this as a theological question. I know that when you want a child, the moment the stick turns pink, it is real: a baby, your baby. I know that when you don’t want a child, there is no amount of moralizing or badgering that can make you want to be pregnant.”
Sarah is wise beyond measure, in my estimation. We can mourn the loss of pregnancies that never were; we can marvel at hearing the heartbeat during that first eight-week appointment and, at the same time, we can know that the “heart” could not sustain human life at that point, know that the pregnancy tissue resembles a blood clot more than a child. When women do not want a pregnancy, we may not experience the marvel and awe some claim are instant and “natural”—or, if we do, they are overshadowed by fear, and grief.
Sarah captures beautifully what is often missing in conversations about abortion: women have myriad experiences of pregnancy. Timing, partners, economics—so much can make a difference in whether a pregnancy is a welcome gift or an accident with potentially dreadful consequences. For too long, voices on both sides of the debate over abortion access have argued that an early pregnancy is either/or: an opportunity for medical decision-making for the pregnant woman or a human child from the moment of conception. But the complicated reality is that pregnancy is, for many women, a time of conflicting feelings and responses.
A few months ago, I realized it had been awhile since I’d menstruated. This was not entirely disconcerting, as I was still nursing our third daughter. But my period had returned over the summer, come for another cycle, and then vanished again. I’d had a tubal ligation in the hours after the baby’s birth, and so the likelihood that I was pregnant was extremely low. I’m not a litigious sort, but as I contemplated the possibility with my husband, I shook my fist in the air and ranted that “somebody’s gonna get sued.” I didn’t—don’t—ever want to think about pregnancy again. I am done. I love our daughters, love babies, love, even, being pregnant, but I cannot afford another kid—not in terms of time or money or risk. Still, there has been something marvelous and wonderful and holy about making babies with my husband; could I really terminate a pregnancy we began together?
*
Kassi Underwood’s astonishing new memoir May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey after Abortion chronicles a different sort of complexity. Pregnant at nineteen when the birth control she used with her addict boyfriend failed—through either user error exacerbated by varied chemical dependencies or terrible luck—Underwood knew that a pregnancy, and an invitation to her mother’s house in Kentucky to have and raise the baby, would entirely derail her plans and dreams. Though she’d always longed to be a wife and mother, she wanted to do it without dropping out of college; she wanted to do it without fearing her burgeoning alcoholism would put the baby at risk.
She was able to obtain her abortion with relative ease, though she had to use the four hundred bucks her mother had sent for car repairs and subsequently convince someone on campus she was responsible enough to borrow a car. But though the pregnancy—and the relationship—is over quickly, the experience continues to impact her. As she gets sober, as she moves to Austin and falls in love again, as she’s accepted into the MFA program at Columbia University. Though her abortion was absolutely the right decision for her, though she did not regret it, she did grieve it. It was more of a loss—of what, she wasn’t exactly sure—than she anticipated.
What is astonishing about Underwood’s telling is not the facts of the story—plenty of young women find themselves in similar situations; plenty more find themselves undone by the unexpected emotional complexity of their lives—but the wisdom she seeks, finds, and shares. She embarks on a pilgrimage inspired by an Onion article (“Rock-Bottom Loser Entertaining Offers from Several Religions”), researching university courses on Buddhism and following the leads of “Father Google.”
The result is a gorgeous and rich memoir that betrays her Ivy League MFA and leaves you unsurprised by her decision to pursue graduate study at Harvard Divinity School. Underwood’s story transcends common political division and religious definition. She seeks wisdom from fifteenth century Tibetan Buddhists, 21st century Jews, Planned Parenthood counselors, and the pro-life Catholics who run a retreat called Rachel’s Vineyard.
Underwood is a trustworthy narrator: unflinching in examining her own failures, and fiercely empathetic, especially of the other women she meets on her post-abortion journey. Indeed, it is this commitment to honoring the experiences of women that renders this memoir most helpful, pushing readers to consider a third option beyond the limitations (and misnomers) of the pro-choice or pro-life dichotomy: the “pro-voice” response. Aspen Baker, co-founder of Exhale, coined the term in 2005, “to represent our approach to creating a social climate where each person’s unique experience with abortion is supported, respected, and free from stigma.” Underwood makes use of the framework while also lifting up the very real legislative and economic hurdles that impact women’s abilities to make their voices heard.
Modern Love ran the essay that launched this memoir, and in the years since its publication, Underwood has become a collector of abortion stories: of the ways “religion can make an abortion sacred, or sometimes burden us with additional guilt;” of the economic, educational, and bodily injustices “written on our womb stories.” Reading each story that Underwood shares, I find myself nodding with each woman, regardless of her experience: whether she grieved or celebrated, whether she did both or neither. I also thought back to my friend Sarah, who claimed there’s nothing theological about the decision to seek an abortion.
Sarah’s right, in a way: there’s no one-size-fits-all doctrinal solution to the problem of abortion, or the need for it. But theology—religion and faith—is also concerned with the ways in which human beings make meaning of our lives. In that way, the good, hard work of encountering critical decision making moments, the potential of creating life or becoming a parent, the discerning of what is the best—holiest, healthiest—response to suffering and the unexpected is deeply theological work.
May Cause Love reminds us of the complex ways women make meaning in the world, find a way out of no way, and find liberation from suffering through naming and claiming their experiences.
Bromleigh McCleneghan is a pastor outside Chicago and the author, most recently, of Good Christian Sex. More from this author →
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Pro-Choice Activists Should Heed Kassi Underwood’s Push for Healing After Abortion
I Tied My Tubes at Age 31. And It’s Not Up for Discussion.
Hillary’s Not Campaigning, But Not Exactly Going Away
Search Rewire
CULTURE & CONVERSATION MEDIA
Pro-Choice Activists Should Heed Kassi Underwood’s Push for Healing After Abortion
Jan 17, 2017, 7:05pm Katie Klabusich
As one of the most anti-choice administrations in U.S. history is set to take office this week, just two days before we mark the 1973 decriminalization of abortion through Roe v. Wade, pro-choice activists must make a concerted effort to create space for all those who need and have had an abortion, including those who felt regret.
56
Underwood is candid about years of self-medication and regret, how her choices affected her relationships with others as well as herself, and the spaces she has occupied that don’t fit into a convenient political narrative.
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Texas has seen some of the nation’s most regressive abortion restrictions in recent years. This series chronicles the fall-out of those laws, and the litigation that has followed.
In the face of relentless attacks from anti-choice groups and the politicians they fund, it is somewhat understandable that the pro-choice side historically has shined the brightest light on abortion stories of women who are admirable and strong or tragic. But, over time, we have done a disservice to those whose complicated narratives are silenced by our need for “acceptable” ones.
This is partly why writer and lecturer Kassi Underwood felt she didn’t find the community she needed in the unapologetically pro-choice camp after her abortion at 19. She wasn’t ashamed of her choice, rather it was that she had to hide the emotions that came after. In the decade since, her feelings about her pregnancy and the life she wanted have changed dramatically several times over. Underwood reflects on her experience in her upcoming book, May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment After Abortion. Over time, she has come to love the teenager who made the choice, the child that was not to be, the adult she has become, and the people whom the universe has brought into her life, past and present.
Out next month, May Cause Love is a powerful narrative for those who support abortion rights, people who call themselves “pro-life,” and those who don’t know where they fall or how they feel. Underwood’s story and the stories of those she tells have never been more important, because they touch on feelings not often addressed by the people most affected by them. [Full disclosure: She quotes me briefly in her chapter on abortion storytellers.]
As one of the most anti-choice administrations in U.S. history is set to take office this week, just two days before we mark the 1973 decriminalization of abortion through Roe v. Wade, pro-choice activists must make a concerted effort to create space for all those who need and have had an abortion, including those who felt regret. Even as lawmakers use this very complicated emotion as a tool to further restrict access to care through mandatory waiting period and counseling laws, among others, activists would do well by learning how to talk about regret (and grief) at the same time that we are fighting against stigma and misunderstandings about what goes into the decision.
As Underwood writes: “There is no shame in regret. There’s no shame in regretting an irreversible decision a person is forced to make during a time crunch imposed by the law and ramped up by one’s own biology.”
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Underwood opens her book by explaining the pressure she put on herself after having an abortion. “I was twenty-four and had spent five years chasing my dreams like someone was holding a gun to my head … working to make my abortion a worthwhile investment, trying to be happy,” Underwood writes.
Like so many, Underwood spent the first part of her adult years in pursuit of the all-American script: career, marriage, family. She knew she had made the only choice she could as an unexpectedly pregnant 19-year-old with ambition. And besides, the potential father wasn’t exactly in a place where he could be an engaged, supportive parent or partner. Over time, however, she wondered about the choice—was it the only choice? Who decided that? What would her life have looked like?
“I was sorry about the abortion, not necessarily because I’d categorically chosen wrongly, but because the other voices were so loud,” she explains, frustrated that the “collective conscience around girls and pregnant people and motherhood and money had filled [her] head with opinions that did not belong to [her].”
Unsure how to find her own voice again, Underwood sought community; it would take her participation in multiple spiritual rites and rituals to allow herself the healing necessary to realize that she could create the community she needed.
“It was settled in my mind that I would partake of every such healing technique for abortion that I could afford, both religious and secular,” she writes. “My abortion was the heart of my life. A diamond that refracted light into my love partnerships, my friendships, my body, my mind, my ambitions, my questions, my feelings about womanhood, my relationship with history and with God.”
Her expedition would take her across the country and back; deliver her accidentally into anti-choice, shaming territory; teach her how to grieve; and give her experiences with Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and a group of “wild women” who helped her write a “new Constitution” wherein she declared her truth and needs that would guide her future conduct.
Throughout the book Underwood is, at times, painfully honest about her thoughts and feelings. She is candid about years of self-medication and regret, how her choices affected her relationships with others as well as herself, and the spaces she has occupied that don’t fit into a convenient political narrative. During a Buddhist ritual called a mizuko kuyo, for example, she asks her “water baby”—her mizuko—for forgiveness.
The mizuko kuyo is a Japanese Buddhist ritual originally intended for abortion, but has expanded to include miscarriage and stillbirth as well. Kuyo means “respect.” Women created this space to honor the potential children that weren’t: “We don’t apologize to be forgiven,” Underwood writes. “We apologize to forgive ourselves.”
Having given herself permission to feel for this water baby, as she came to call it after discovering the phrase and participating in a mizuko kuyo at the New York Buddhist Church six years after her abortion, she continued seeking validation and space for her story. She read Ava Torre-Bueno’s book Peace After Abortion and sought her out.
“I sat like a rapt student as Ava broke down what appeared to be a crisis of grief in the United States, where, it turns out, grieving is almost as taboo as abortion,” Underwood writes of her meeting with Torre-Bueno. “We have very few models for grief and mourning in this country, Ava said. We have no education in loss … Grief is the emotional, physical, and spiritual process by which one experiences a loss—any loss.”
Torre-Bueno’s description of loss is one of the highlights of the book, as it transcends the topic of abortion. Most people live with regret and wonder over the forks in the road of their life; the licensed clinical social worker very effectively positions abortion as just one more choice some have made.
While widespread “abortion regret” and its various spinoff “disorders” created by anti-abortion researchers and activists are not real (an estimated 95 percent of those terminating pregnancies do not feel regret), there will always be those who look back and consider how their life might have been different. Some of us are more prone to backward reflection and grief for what we didn’t have or do than others; abortion is one of many decisions that can prompt such reflection.
Underwood writes:
“All choice involves loss,” Ava said. We carry all sorts of griefs, not just the deaths of loved ones. Leaving a crummy job for a sexy new career is a loss. Marriage is a loss of loves not chosen, as well as a loss of singlehood and independence. With some choices, the alternative remains a mystery: one college over another, abortion over a child.
Perhaps if we hadn’t politicized grief and regret, those who fall somewhere along the spectrum between “OMG I shouldn’t have!” and “I wish I hadn’t felt I had to” would not have gotten lost in the shuffle. And while anti-choice groups are largely responsible for politicizing abortion and the possibility of grief and regret—private feelings that should never have been weaponized for public consumption—abortion advocates can take the compassionate step of welcoming these politically inconvenient narratives as acceptable ones to share openly.
Demanding that space for herself and others like her was part of what pushed Underwood to write May Cause Love. She realized that we don’t allow for grief without regret either.
“‘Grieving is scary,’ I said [to Torre-Bueno], ‘especially when so many people don’t get it—like most people talking about abortion in public,” she writes. “So far, I’ve heard two options: grieve your heart out, and then sign this affidavit to try and overturn Roe’—I was referring to the pack of legal documents distributed at Rachel’s Vineyard [weekend retreats to “redeem hearts broken by abortion“]—‘or don’t grieve at all for a first-trimester pregnancy termination in college that allowed you to pursue your education, career goals and personal freedom.’”
Eventually, her desire for community would put her in touch with Aspen Baker of Exhale Pro-Voice, a nonprofit founded “by and for women who have abortions” to provide emotional support regardless of story or political leanings. Underwood embarked on a national tour with other women telling their abortion stories—many of them as inconvenient to the political climate as hers.
Underwood quotes Exhale tour-mate Mayah Frank as saying: “I was extremely depressed about it for years, but I’ve never wanted to take it back, either.”
Certainly, Frank is not alone, and it’s long past time we intentionally made more space for stories like hers and Underwood’s in pro-choice/reproductive rights spaces. Our position on bodily autonomy is not weakened by honoring such lived experiences. Rather, we show our strength as a movement and true concern for people’s well-being by welcoming them. May Cause Love is an extraordinary contribution, an extended hand inviting more of those who wish to share into the abortion storytelling space.
As Underwood writes: “Everybody wants a place to tell the truth without being judged.”
TOPICS AND TAGS: Abortion, Abortion Care, Abortion restrictions, Access to abortion, Book Review, Human Rights, Law and Policy, Mainstream media, mandatory waiting periods, Media bias, Politics, Reproductive rights, Roe v. Wade, Roe vs. Wade
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March 1, 2017
May Cause Love, by Kassi Underwood
I never had what Kassi Underwood terms as a “post-abortion meltdown”, which is the sentence I initially planned to open this review with, but then upon pondering I started to recall things I’d long ago forgotten. Such as that in the months after my abortion, I started working with a colleague whose girlfriend was pregnant, accidentally, and they were making a go of it together, and everything about their arrangement made me feel incredibly lonely. I would become unnecessarily preoccupied with the details of their lives. I feared that if I’d perhaps squandered my one chance to have a family. I remember a conversation with my best friend about reconciling feminist principles with my sadness about my situation, and then I remember waking up on the first day of what would have been the last month of my pregnancy and crying hysterically without even knowing why, as though my body knew before my mind did that something had been lost. But I also know that I felt much better after that. And later that year I would get the woman symbol tattooed upon my ankle, as a way to remember without having to actually remember, and it must have worked because all this seems far away and vastly unimportant now. When I look at the tattoo on my ankle, I don’t even remember that my abortion was a reason for it. “My abortion is the foundation of feminism,” is the thing I always say now, and it’s all conflated. My feminism is also a foundation of me. So you see, it’s with me always, even these if days I barely recognize it.
(The interesting thing about the preceding paragraph is that not once do I affirm that in spite of my sadness, my abortion was still the right decision. When I wrote the paragraph, it never occurred to me to do so. And now after, I’ve gone back and tried to insert the sentence, but there is nowhere it fits properly. I’d only be writing it anyway to give assurance to you, my reader, but so now I’m going to do a radical thing and not even bother with that. Inspired by Kassi Underwood’s example, I am going to present my abortion as a thing that happened in my life that is ordinary enough and extraordinary enough to exist outside—and between, above and beyond—the simplified bounds of morality.)
So no, I didn’t have a “post-abortion meltdown” per-se, but then I don’t have Kassi Underwood’s remarkable flair for the dramatic. As a writer, a narrator, and a literary character, she comes across as a person who does nothing halfway, which might explain how she ended up with an alcohol addiction, but then it also explains how she turned her post-abortion story into a spiritual journey, what I’ve been calling the Eat Pray Love of abortion memoirs, the recently-released May Cause Love.
It was a book that made me really uncomfortable in places, which is saying something, because I talk about abortion all the time. But I’ve never talked about how the way that Underwood does, confronting uncomfortable truths about the experience, daring to consider its spiritual aspects. And so this was a book that expanded my mind. She begins her story in childhood, growing up in Kentucky with strong ideas about family and motherhood and the kind of woman she wants to be. It all goes a bit wrong (the love of her life is serving overseas, she’s in her first year at college and gets knocked up by a junkie) and she gets pregnant. The decision to have an abortion isn’t an agonizing one (and I am willing to entertain the notion that it only ever really is on television) but then it’s getting over it that’s the hard part. Acknowledging her sadness at not feeling ready to have her baby at that time, and then having to deal with the same guy having a baby with someone else just a couple of years later—her realization that she could have made a different choice. Getting over her abortion is also complicated though because it’s the urge to make good of her second chance that got her sober, that drove Underwood to make something of herself—who would she be without that drive? The questions she has and the ideas she grapples with aren’t the ones you ever read about in news coverage so fixed on the polarity of the abortion debate, but they’re so much more interesting, and kind, and useful.
The memoir chronicles her experiences learning about the spirituality of abortions, including taking part in a Japanese ritual for mourning abortions, to a Catholic post-abortion retreat (which is kind of horrifying, but Underwood’s lack of judgement is admirable [ps I now have this fantasy of telling pro-lifers that I’m not judging them, the same way they like to tell me that, and just seeing what they make of that]), a witchy Jewish circle of wild women helping her release her burden, meeting with an abortion grief specialist, and taking a five-day vow of silence in an isolated cabin in Vermont. She yearns to make peace with her decision, to find her way forward in her life, and to reconcile the seemingly contradictory experiences of her abortion—that the experience of pregnancy meant something to her, that her baby was a baby, that if she hadn’t had an abortion her ex-‘s daughter wouldn’t be alive today, and that somehow her abortion had been an act of love.
May Cause Love is a strange book, not just in terms of subject matter, but in structure and tone. As a narrator, Underwood is tricky, breezy, rendered unsteady sometimes in present tense instead of steeped in context and explanation. She’s also completely audacious, in the most incredible way—imagine not only not apologizing for owning your own soul, but demanding to be transported to a higher plane. It was so refreshing and illuminating to read about abortion in these terms, and while the storyline about the boy she spends years hung up was much less compelling to me than everything else, sometimes that’s the way that life goes. And life itself is full of surprises, just like this remarkable book.
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An Unexpected Journey After Abortion
March 17, 2017
HDS student Kassi Underwood
Author and HDS student Kassi Underwood / Photo: Silvia Mazzocchin
Kassi Underwood was broke, 19 years old, unwed, an addict, and in college a thousand miles from home when she became pregnant and had an abortion. In the several years that followed, coping with heartache and loss, she struggled with drugs and alcohol and rocky relationships.
In her new memoir, May Cause Love, Underwood, a student at Harvard Divinity School, describes creating a roadmap of transcendence through a cross-country spiritual journey that helped her heal and discover her authentic self.
HDS: In your book, you write about how the U.S. has very few models for grief and mourning. “We have no education in loss,” you write. Do you consider your book a model for confronting grief?
KU: I think a model for confronting grief could be—and probably is—its own book. So many of us know we’ve got to grieve, but we don’t know how. I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know I needed to grieve until a Buddhist abortion therapist named Ava Torre-Bueno told me. She told me every choice involves loss.
Grief is part of everyday life. If I’m looking at the dessert menu and choose the key lime pie over the chocolate cake, I’ve experienced a loss—a tiny loss. I got married a couple of years ago, and there was a loss involved with that choice. If we’ve chosen something, we’re supposed to be happy about that decision because choice is a function of power. But the reality is, we’ve killed off all other possibilities, so we have to grieve them.
Grief delivers us to the core of who we are; it’s up to us to share it. People can tell us they love us all day long, but we won’t believe them if we’re still hiding parts of ourselves. We’ve got to tell the whole truth in order to feel the love people are giving us. That’s why I called the book May Cause Love. It’s not just about abortion. It’s about all the rooms of healing and why it’s worth it to keep opening the doors.
In the book, I talk about an exercise Ava taught me: 30 seconds of grief per day. You just sit very still and focus on your heart and wherever you feel emotional pain—chest, solar plexus, gut, wherever. In meditation, we can stay up in our heads. In a grief practice, we focus on our physical bodies and feel pain without trying to stop it or fix it or intellectualize it. Grieving is a daily practice, like meditation and brushing our teeth. It’s healthy, and it’s essential.
HDS: You write that it can be difficult for other people to cope with another person's loss because it can bring out their own "ungrieved grief." How can we be better listeners or more present in dealing with grief around us?
KU: I recently gave a reading of my book in New York. Afterward, a young woman told me her mother had died. I told her I was sorry. She said, “You’re sorry I’m sad.” I said, “No, I’m sorry your mom died.” I could tell she was unsatisfied with my response, so I said, “What did you want me to say?” She said: “I want you to say, ‘That blows.’ ” So I said, pretty loudly, “That blows!” And she said it again, even louder. And then she told me all about her mom.
So we’re all figuring this out together. Just follow the griever’s lead.
Staying current on your own grief will help you to be present with someone who’s grieving. We spend eternities avoiding our emotions and holding back the tears we don’t even know we need to cry. It can be uncomfortable to see someone expressing what we’re suppressing, so the tendency is to try and cheer them up—in other words, we try to get them to stop grieving. We might assure them they’ll have another baby, or a better life without one, or they’ll get a new job or a new wife. If you feel uncomfortable, then perhaps you need to cry.
It’s OK to cry with someone who’s grieving. The point is to let them fully express themselves in that moment so that you can support them in completing that piece of grief. There’s usually nothing for you to do except to be there. Grief is like a bodily function. Let people finish.
HDS: Why do pro-choice groups see your story of pain and healing after your abortion as problematic for them?
KU: Pro-choice activists who’ve read my book have emailed me the nicest notes, so let’s start there. Generally speaking, though, people tend to judge books by their covers; and apparently, people have been really confused about mine. Several pro-choice activists told me they’d been worried that, in the last chapter, I’d end up protesting at an abortion clinic in a brand new chastity belt. (Spoiler alert: That doesn’t happen.) Some have confessed to scrolling through my Instagram account and Twitter feed to try and figure out which side I’m on.
There’s this pro-choice script that says: “After my abortion, I felt a great wave of relief. It was the right decision for me. The end.” I memorized the script soon after I terminated my pregnancy. I was so desperate to connect with women, and so confused about how to achieve connection, that I started reciting various versions of my story that would make people comfortable, but none was entirely true. I basically imprisoned myself in a script.
Three years later, I was living my feminist dream: sobriety, a salary, and a straight white male assistant. And my ex-boyfriend emailed me to say is new girlfriend was six months pregnant and they’d chosen the same name I’d suggested for the baby he and I didn’t have: Jade. I just fell apart. Suddenly, I had secret concerns about the “ball of cells” that could have been a baby and feared I’d go to hell, even though I didn’t believe in hell. This story did not fit any script.
Historically, pro-life groups have talked about abortion as an emotionally traumatizing event. As a result, pro-choice groups tend to downplay any emotions that could be construed as negative and any implications that someone needed long-term support around abortion. But I learned that both erasing and exploiting women’s emotions are ancient forms of patriarchal oppression.
Women have been told to suppress our emotions for ages, but one of our superpowers is expressing them. I don’t mean we should yell or be controlled by our emotions. I mean emotions are like arrows. We can follow them to wholeness, authenticity, intuition, community, and love. Once I figured this out, I realized that healing after abortion is an act of power.
Some women who’ve read May Cause Love want to explore these possibilities after their abortions and form a community around the book. We’re creating this community right now all across the country. Currently, we’re all women, but anyone who wants to join in should email us at maycauselove@gmail.com.
All that said, I’m finding out that this book isn’t just about abortion. I’m hearing from readers who found the book resonant with their own journeys through disordered eating, romantic dysfunction, and self-doubt. Pain is a latent source of power; all healing is the full expression of that power.
HDS student Kassi Underwood
HDS student Kassi Underwood's memoir "May Cause Love" was published February 14, 2017, by HarperOne. / Photo: Silvia Mazzocchin
HDS: You seem to be open to many types of spirituality, but yet you mention prayer quite often, and you specifically mention prayer to God. Who or what is God to you?
KU: Fraught as “God” may be, I use this word because people tend to have some context for it. I could have used any word—love, trust, universe, higher self, energy, him, her, they. I think it’s more like: Where is God to me? God is in and through everything—unless I’m in a bad mood.
HDS: What impact did it have on you to participate in healing rituals of different spiritual practices?
KU: In the study of religion, we often seek out distinctions among traditions, but I looked for the similarities. For years I’d been pretending to be strong, when in fact, I was suppressing thoughts and feelings around my abortion and I felt isolated and anxious. As lucid and focused as I tried to be during the rituals and spiritual practices, I was in such a freaked-out bewildered haze that I didn’t even know what I was trying to produce until I had produced it. I rode a train home after the last ritual feeling whole, alive, and free. Very shortly thereafter, I traveled the country to share my story with a crew of women who'd had abortions and finished writing my book.
HDS: How important has sobriety been in your journey of healing?
KU: We’re talking about a trajectory from sloppy drunk sleepovers with strangers to showing up in a Buddhist temple alone with a genuine desire to grow. Sobriety was key to healing.
It took two years of sobriety for me to stop cracking jokes about the things that made me sad. First I used alcohol to cover up pain. Then I used staunch pro-choice feminism. Privately, I was asking questions, like, “What if I didn’t have to end the pregnancy? What if I’ve done something terribly wrong?” I’d sneak into the bookstore to see if the abortion memoir I wanted to read was on the shelf, but I’d find nothing. So I got this addiction therapist named Larry. I’d hint to Larry that I was maybe having some feelings about my abortion, but I was full of anxiety: What did the need to heal say about me, about my abortion, about abortion? I didn’t want to find out.
So I got serious about sobriety and started a practice of prayer, meditation, and self-examination. I hoped that’d be enough, but it wasn’t. Then a guy from my sobriety meetings took me on a date to meditate with him at a Buddhist community called Shambhala. A few months later, I moved to New York for graduate school in writing. Partly to impress the aforementioned boyfriend and partly to make a move toward enlightenment, I enrolled in a course called “Tibetan Buddhist Auto/Biography,” taught by Sarah Jacoby. She told me about mizuko kuyo, a Japanese Buddhist ritual for people who’ve had an abortion. That’s when I decided to go out and learn about the spirituality of abortion through all the religious rituals and secular teachings I could afford.
HDS: Are you an activist?
KU: I wouldn’t label myself an activist. I believe more in revolution than in activism, but activism at its best is revolutionary. Revolution causes a complete turnover of the established order that makes way for a new possibility to emerge. We need a completely new way forward around abortion, based on nothing we have ever seen before.
So, I'm with the hundreds of millions of people on the planet who have experienced abortion. Every single one of us has a story to tell and the freedom to share it with somebody. We've got that freedom now. Women have been terminating their pregnancies for thousands of years; they’re on record since at least 2700 BCE. Only one organization that I’m aware of takes a public stand for all of us without taking a side in the debate: my friends at Exhale, who became a meaningful part of the story I tell in May Cause Love.
After reading my book, strangers who have never terminated a pregnancy—including men who (used to) publicly oppose abortion—have said things to me like, "I totally related to your story." I think that's incredible—it's a big deal to relate to an experience we used to judge. Not everyone needs to heal after an abortion, but nearly everyone in the world needs healing around something. And we all have some part of our lives that makes us wonder, "What would happen if everyone found out about that?" What I discovered is, when we are authentic, there are no sides. There’s no divide. Others’ needs become our own. There’s real love, which, I might argue, is the reason we’re all here.
HDS: Why did you write May Cause Love? Did you write it for yourself as part of your healing process, or did you write it for the person who experienced what you did and doesn’t know where to turn?
KU: I wrote May Cause Love because it’s the book I’d wanted to read. When I was 19 and pregnant, I went to the library because I just needed someone to level with me. I never thought I’d have an abortion—ending a pregnancy had been my greatest fear. You need more than a pamphlet in this situation. I wanted to read a memoir by a woman who’d felt similarly conflicted and would say something like, “This is going to suck a lot, in so many ways, but you’re going to heal and be better than you were before. Hang in there.” I wanted someone to tell me she’d walked through a dark tunnel of depression and chaos and her life still turned out.
All I found were two books of essays. In one book, every woman was relieved once she’d ended her pregnancy. In the other book, every woman regretted her abortion. It was maddening. Here I was, trying to make a serious irreversible decision, and I couldn’t find any information that seemed authentic, honest, and devoid of political motives.
I think we all want to learn how to live by watching somebody else fall down the way we fell down and watch them stand back up so we know it’s possible. I couldn’t find the woman I needed, so I had to become her. Everyone who has an abortion deserves to know that it’s absolutely possible to emerge with peace of mind and a thrilling life. I wrote this book for them.
HDS: What would success look like for you with this book? Is it selling a million copies? Is it hearing a kind word from someone who was helped by reading the book?
KU: I spent years being afraid to say what I’m saying now. I was afraid of being discredited or ignored because my story didn’t fit into a political narrative that’d make people comfortable. After my publisher shipped off review copies to magazines, I had one last shot to make minor edits. I cut 20 pages and wrote completely uncensored. That’s the finished version.
It’s freeing to tell the truth, even if people misunderstand, and even if it’s unpopular. That’s what makes it feel like a success. I hope someone who reads my book will know they don’t need to hide any part of their self, and even if they fear never feeling normal again, they will be okay.
HDS: How did you end up at Harvard Divinity School?
KU: I think God is in experiences of abortion, and I had a feeling that I was supposed to come here to prepare for the book to live in the world. I don’t know how else to describe it, but the feeling was so strong that sometimes I couldn’t sleep.
—by Jonathan Beasley
For more information, visit http://www.kassiunderwood.com/. May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment After Abortion is out now and available everywhere books and e-books are sold.
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A Lost Child, but Not Mine (Updated With Podcast)
Modern Love
By KASSI UNDERWOOD JULY 28, 2011
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ON the third anniversary of my abortion, I found out via MySpace that my ex-boyfriend was having a baby with another woman. It was none of my business, except I somehow convinced myself that his new baby was a replica of ours, and as such I felt a sense of ownership, of responsibility for the child’s well-being.
My college roommate in Vermont had introduced us. He was road-weary that first night, having just driven up from a concert in Kentucky, my home state. He was 20, a ski-lift operator, a community college student. I was a blond Episcopal-bred 19-year-old studying literature and costume design.
Early on, he told me he was on probation for drug-related offenses, which was forcing him to remain clean and sober. It was easy for me to accept his blemished past because I had my own struggles with drugs and alcohol, making me feel like Nancy to his Sid.
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He and I talked textbooks and compared rap sheets. In his ramshackle apartment, we belted out Bob Dylan songs as he twirled me across the sloping floorboards. He gave me piggyback rides up my dormitory steps and carted me around town on the handlebars of a bicycle.
Two months after we met, his probation ended. Without supervision, he began crushing up OxyContin and sucking the powder into his nose through a rolled-up dollar bill.
On St. Patrick’s Day I stayed after theater class, sewing a corset. Clad in a threadbare flannel shirt, he stopped in to help me clip the bones. I hoped nobody could see the dope in his pinned eyes or the pregnancy in mine. My period was two weeks late.
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“If it hasn’t come by April, we’ll take a test,” he whispered.
Several weeks later, after a university doctor delivered the news, he and I lay side-by-side on his bare twin mattress. “I’m not ready to be a father,” he said.
I nodded, planting my head on his chest. I stared at the water-stained ceiling and prayed he would score a lucrative job instead of more OxyContin. I let myself imagine that I could clean up my own act and finish school and we could hire an au pair, and everything would be fine. But I knew it wouldn’t happen that way.
I had promised myself not to tell my parents, but when I called my mother in Kentucky, I burst into tears as soon as she answered the phone. In the background, my father said, “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?” It had been our collective worst nightmare. “Come on home,” my mother sobbed. “We’ll rear the child here.”
I told her I just couldn’t.
The truth is, I had ambitions. While I adored children and romanticized the idea of one day raising a small brood dressed in elaborate get-ups of my own design, I wanted a family on my terms: happily married with enough money to live well. After college, after graduate school, after I had started a career. There was no fantasy in raising a child alone. In deciding against adoption, I blamed alcohol: the chance that I had already harmed the baby with my drinking.
But my ambivalence remained, and when I quit drinking, again thinking of the baby, my boyfriend was lucid enough to notice. We lay entwined on his secondhand couch one night when he muted the TV.
“You want to have this baby, don’t you?” he said.
“We could call her Jade,” I said. All 11 of my grandmother’s siblings had names starting with J. Mick Jagger had a daughter named Jade. Naming her Jade would be a no-brainer.
“Jade’s pretty,” he said.
“But we can’t go through with it,” I reassured him, reminding myself that we didn’t have the emotional equipment. “It’s better this way.”
In late April, heading to the clinic, he slept in the passenger seat as I fiddled with the radio. Most offices do not allow partners in the room during the procedure, but when I pressed my feet to the stirrups, he was there to knead my shoulders. I dug my fingernails into the nurse’s hand. He and I watched each other instead of the ultrasound machine.
“I’m hot,” I said. “I’m blacking out. Please take off my socks.”
“You’ve got to breathe, honey,” the nurse said.
“Take off her socks!” he hollered.
His support and innate if untraditional sense of duty almost made me think twice about ending the pregnancy. I thought he might have been a nurturing father after all.
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I emerged from the appointment emotionally unscathed, or so I thought. The five-minute procedure had ended my insufferable mélange of nausea, exhaustion and shame. I briefly saw a therapist, troubled that I did not feel guilty.
Soon I started drinking again, was arrested for drunken driving and was fired from three jobs for coming in slurring my words or for showing up late or not at all, while my boyfriend eventually disappeared into heroin. I waited for the countless rehabs to work their institutional magic on him, but they didn’t. Our relationship ended on good but sorrowful terms.
Not long after we broke up, he met a girl at a music festival, and a couple of years later she gave birth to their child, whom they named Jade, of all things. They managed to stay together during his stints in jail. By now I was following them on Facebook, where they had migrated like just about everyone else.
Meanwhile, I went into treatment, quit drinking and moved to Austin, Tex., for a job. With sobriety and a salary, I couldn’t stop thinking about the baby that wasn’t, a loss somehow made more painful by his baby that was. I spent my workdays browsing photos of his little girl, believing in some twisted respect that I was glimpsing the face of the child I could have had. On lunch breaks, I went home to cry in bed, longing for a paranormal miracle.
By the time I called him, his daughter was about to celebrate her first birthday. He was living at a halfway house in Boston, where my company was flying me for a conference. I harbored a secret motive to find out if he dwelled on the loss as much as I did, so I asked him if he would meet me.
I figured I would bawl in his track-mark-scarred arms. We would plant a tree in remembrance. Then we would raise his (our?) child in my studio apartment.
He came ambling up to the corner on Newbury Street. I waited in a business suit, disappointed that he was not pushing a stroller. Gone was his shaggy brown hair, mischievous smile and weatherworn Grateful Dead jacket. He had turned hip-hop, from his puffy white Adidas to his crooked white cap. His teeth had browned from the drugs.
We sat down for cappuccinos in a fancy cafe where we could afford nothing else. He told me that his ex-girlfriend had recently drained his meager bank account and vanished, leaving her infant behind. He confessed that paramedics had recently resuscitated him after he overdosed in a restaurant bathroom. Rehab followed. Now he scrimped by on construction work. He aspired to save for a deposit on a roomy apartment for him and his child, who was living with his parents.
I felt an urge to run to his parents’ home and cradle his baby in my arms, as if she were the responsibility I had shirked.
“I think a lot about what happened,” he said.
“Me, too.”
He stared ruefully into his steaming mug.
“But,” I continued, “if I had had that baby, you wouldn’t have Jade.”
Could her name be a coincidence? Maybe when they picked her name, he didn’t realize he was remembering.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, flashing a relieved smile; something was lost, and he got to keep it.
I drew my lips to match his cheery expression even though I felt shorted. I had graduated with honors, seen the first book I edited published with my name in microscopic print, and been accepted to an Ivy League graduate program. I kept trying to secure the next accomplishment that would make my decision worthwhile.
Meanwhile, he got Jade, yet he couldn’t take care of her. An overdosing jailbird father stared back at me, buttering crackers with a silver coffee spoon.
THE heat of summer hung down on our shoulders when we hugged on the bustling street corner. As we parted, I walked up Gloucester Street toward the conference center; he headed toward the pickup truck he’d borrowed from a friend at the halfway house.
In the three years since, he has spent much of his time incarcerated for drug-related offenses. I wish I could share my sobriety, my degree and my career to rent that apartment for his little girl, but reality has finally sunk in: the abortion is mine alone, just like Jade is his.
Kassi Underwood is an M.F.A. candidate at Columbia University and is working on a memoir.
A version of this article appears in print on July 31, 2011, on Page ST6 of the New York edition with the headline: A Lost Child, but Not Mine. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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