March 15, 2022

Looking for Jane, by Heather Marshall

What people who haven’t thought much don’t tend to know is that abortion is not the opposite of adoption, or infertility, or miscarriage, or motherhood, or even choosing not to have children at all, and also there are plenty of people who’ve experienced two or more of these things, and that these things don’t even exist on some kind of moral spectrum, but instead, they’re a vivid constellation of lived experiences, and what I love about Heather Marshall’s extraordinary Looking for Jane is the way the story connects them all, making plain what so many women already know but still might not have the courage to put into words even almost 35 years after abortion was made legal in Canada.

Because the abortion rights activists didn’t win this fight just for themselves. This fight and this victory was for their daughters, and their daughters’ daughters. To make sure a horrible cycle was broken, and the next generation would be better off than their own. To leave these women a world where no one can tell them that they don’t own their own bodies. Where they don’t need to hang themselves or try to slit their wrists in a bathtub just to know what it feels like to have control. It all comes down to having the right to make the choice.

—Looking for Jane

What a radical thing this novel is, even with its old-fashioned cover with an image of a woman from behind, with its sepia tones suggesting this would be a safe bet for your great-aunt’s book club. Because it definitely is—your great aunt knows something about reproductive justice that those of us who came of age after the Morgantaler Decision of 1988 might always have taken for granted, never knowing a time when pregnant people weren’t free to make their own reproductive choices. Her generation will remember a time when pregnant girls were sent to “homes” where they lived—steeped in a shame they’d carry for the rest of their lives—until their babies were born, and then subsequently adopted. Or else the girls got married in a hurry and had to drop out of school, leave their jobs, give up on their dreams, and maybe it would all turn out to be worth it, but how do you ever know?

Looking for Jane begins with a letter that was never received, a letter that a mother wrote to her daughter, to be opened after her death, informing that daughter that she had actually been adopted, and that her birth mother had not willingly given her up for adoption after all. The letter finds its way into the hands of Angela, who is currently mourning two miscarriages and trying again via IVF for a pregnancy to create the family she and her wife have been dreaming of. Angela is adopted herself, and so the letter she finds proves especially resonant, and she begins determined to track down the woman who was intended to receive it almost a decade ago.

And then the book takes its reader back to 1961, the bad old days, when Evelyn Taylor finds herself removed to a maternity home and all her choices and autonomy removed from her in that process, and she’s unable to advocate for herself when she decides she wants to keep her baby, after she learns that babies being born at the home are actually being sold. The rules at the home are cruel, dehumanizing, and serve the patriarchal power of the Catholic Church—and this experience is what inspires Dr. Evelyn Taylor, almost years later, to have pursued a medical career, trained with Dr. Henry Morgantaler in Montreal, and be risking everything to provide pregnant women with abortions. She joins the Abortion Caravan protest in Ottawa in 1970—read my starred review of Karin Wells’ spectacular book on the subject, and how wonderful to see this story be rendered in fiction, because this is a part of history that every Canadian should know—helping deliver a coffin to the Prime Minister’s doorstep as a symbol of the more than one thousand Canadian women who died each year after illegal abortions, and then joins the protest in the House of Commons, women shutting down parliament after chaining themselves to their seats.

Ten years after that, Nancy Mitchell accompanies her cousin for an illegal abortion (legal abortions in Canada in 1980 had to be permitted by a panel of doctors, which meant decisions were arbitrary and no doubt race and class factored in big time, as both things continue to make abortion more or less accessible for pregnant people today) which goes very wrong, and so when Nancy finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy not long after, she is careful to find an abortion via an underground network of providers whose work was safe and reputable—and whose clinics would be the target of police raids. And this is how Nancy connects with Dr. Taylor, and comes to volunteer at her clinic at great personal risk, continuing to do so until 1988 when abortion was legalized and providers didn’t need to hide anymore.

But of course the fight wasn’t over, as anyone who’s paying attention knows well. Abortion providers are threatened with violence to this day. In 1992, Dr. Henry Morgantaler’s clinic in Toronto was firebombed at its location just around the corner from my where I live now, and I knew absolutely nothing about any of this ten years later when Dr. Morgantaler performed my own abortion, when it never even occurred to me not to take my access to abortion for granted, or to consider how hard my foremothers had fought for it. Because I’d never read a book like Marshall’s, a book that connects the dots, which spells out the patriarchal forces intent on keep women from having freedom over their own destinies, underlining just how much reproductive freedom underlines our personal foundations.

(There’s more to it too—a long history of forced sterilization of Indigenous and racialized women, the “sixties scoop,” by which Indigenous children were taken from their cultures and adopted into white families, the foster care system which keeps too many racialized women from raising their own kids. Marshall’s book is definitely the history of whiteness and reproductive justice, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.)

I loved this novel, and also that it’s one of the bestselling titles in Canada right now, because it’s a daring and radical text dressed up as a women’s book club pick. It’s a moving and absorbing read, heartbreaking and infuriating in places, unabashedly Canadian in the most interesting way, but also universal at once.