A look at abortion in poetry, fiction, essays, creative nonfiction, and written by Judy Juanita. Beginning with her mother's Depression-era struggles, Juanita traces how shame, faith, and morality shaped women's choices to abort or carry to term. Brief essays highlight the complexities of Black womanhood and collective struggle faced by women in the Black Panther Party. In 1968, while balancing her studies at San Francisco State and work with the Black Panther Party newspaper, the narrator discovers she is pregnant. Desperate and isolated, she attempts unsafe self-induced methods before learning about California's new Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967, which allowed her to obtain a legal abortion. Reflecting on her roles as both participant and witness in the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, she challenges the tendency to minimize women's sexual and emotional contributions, arguing that they were essential to sustaining revolutionary work. Through painful examples of exploitation, Juanita exposes the hypocrisy within male-led movements that preached liberation while perpetuating gender oppression. Over time, through her writing, spiritual reflection, and after a divorce, she transforms her trauma into understanding and reclaims her voice.

Two appendices are included, one an abridged history of abortion, the second, anonymous personal testimonies from the online site "Shout Your Abortion" from women who chose multiple abortions. The theme of mortality appears throughout several stories and testimonies; women reflect on how abortion made them think about the fragility of life, from their own perspective and the potential perspective of a child. Some women faced life-threatening pregnancies or situations of abuse that endangered their health, forcing them to make decisions for survival. Others mourned the emotional weight of their choices but also recognized the importance of valuing their own lives and well-being. Choosing to abort is not simply a political or moral issue of right and wrong, but one tied to safety, survival, and the meaning of life itself. The fiction, poems, essays, and testimonies raise the question: Is morality subjective to the individual, or is it established for the individual by society?.