Hannah's Holiday Abortion Gift Guide, Vol.1
This one is for your kiddos/niblings/students/community babies--and for anybody who loves them.
It takes a really, really special book to explain abortion to kids in a way that is clear, that is honest, that is beautiful, and that helps them to feel safe. Well. I think you know what I’m going to tell you next, which is that the author Carly Manes & illustrator Emulsify have created that book. For you, for your kids, for your communities and families and clinics and libraries and bookstores and gathering spaces.
If you’ve seen me evangelize for this picture book in the past, it’s because it is a treasure on my family’s own bookshelf and a source of light in my own dark hours, dark days, dark weeks of last winter.
After my own abortion, I was so grateful for this book’s existence as I grappled with the intersection of motherhood and abortion care, with my then-1-year-old child’s experience of my abortion and with the questions he might someday have. I read the book to him then, and I read it to him now that he’s almost 2. And, often, I read it to myself. Children’s books are never really just for our children. On some of these re-reads, his good soft weight settled in my lap and his downy little baby-shampoo-scented head in close kissing range, I know it’s going to be a crier. Other days, I feel the joyful comfort of seeing our old familiar friends: the richly, brilliantly, gorgeously illustrated people who, across the book’s pages, live their full and liberated lives, of which pregnancies, miscarriages, births, and—yep, abortions—play their parts.
All this to say: I want this book in every abortion clinic waiting room, for the kids who accompany their parents to appointments and for the teens who are denied this information in their homes and schools and for all of us.
I want this book in Little Free Libraries and community centers and shelters and libraries and bookstores. It’s available in both English and Spanish, it’s $20, and—trust me—you know someone who needs the flood of serotonin and the warm affirming hug of it. You should buy a few, to take us all—babies to grandparents to childfree spirits to those of us not in existence yet, or anymore, or ever—into 2023.
Happy happy merry merry, pals.
Love,
Hannah