Complicated Choices Around Abortion - Abortion in the U.S. - Elle
This article appears in the November 2014 issue of ELLE magazine.
I went to Katha Pollitt’s apartment one sunny afternoon last summer, bearing fancy sandwiches and a decent bottle of rosé. The sandwiches were our lunch; the wine meant more.
The venerable columnist of the left-wing magazine The Nation lives with her second husband, political and social theorist Steven Lukes, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The apartment was very warm; sweat would soon bead on my upper lip.
Reporters sometimes ply interview subjects with alcohol in hopes of lessening their inhibitions, getting them to say the impolitic but “true” thing. But not in this case. I knew Pollitt would be eager to expound on her important, revelatory new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights—the very subject of which is impolitic. She greeted me at the front door in dark, loose pants and a cotton-knit top, the kind of comfortable clothes one wears to write. Her hair was short and spiky, a little damp, as if she’d just come out of the shower. She was barefoot. Did I say it was hot in there?
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