melannen | now for something completely different

now for something completely different

So today I am going to take a little bit of a break from recs posting, because I was reminded of a project I started a few months ago, when I was seeing something in the news that seemed both horrible and inevitable.

It's an AO3 bookmarks collection of fics with the summary, "Someone has sex they want, which leads to a pregnancy they don't want, which leads to an abortion they do want, and they don't regret it a bit." Because it occurred to me that if we want to change the narrative, the first step is to start a different narrative. And fanfic seems like one place to start to put a story into the general culture.

So if you, too, wish we could change the stories we hear around abortion, or at least diversify them, here is the collection. Please share it with people who might want or need to see it! Please submit any fanworks that you think might fit the theme? And if you're so inspired, please write more stories about people who have abortions and it isn't a punishment or a regret!

To stay vaguely on theme: When I was going through the abortion tags looking for stories to add to the collection, I did notice that there were enough stories with a particular element to call it a trope - the trope of "I needed a ride to the clinic and I couldn't ask my friends or my lover so I asked my enemy instead." As you might guess I really love this trope!

Here is my favorite fic on that theme, both in the collection & with that trope:

baby let's take the long way home (10579 words) by plonk
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù, 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn
Characters: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī, Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Abortion, Mpreg, With A Twist, Enemies to Lovers
Summary:

“Oh, hey,” Wei Ying says as the audiobook starts up. “Snacks?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh i absolutely wrote that fic in FMA. *goes to add.*

Yes, perfect for the collection, thank you! Also I barely know who Riza is but in isolation that was really good, I loved all the complexity and ambiguity of the relationship but whether a kid is a good idea is never really one of the complicated questions.

Thank you!

There is obviously a lot going on in that scenario (she's trained as a soldier in a military dictatorship that is fighting immoral wars of aggression and that institution is coercing her toward the termination so they can send her to kill some people) so she's not exactly making a fully free choice from a position of empowerment but however it shook out, she wasn't planning to have a kid at that point in her life with that guy, and that was part of the impetus for the story.

(And obviously happy ending is a bit of a stretch but the bad stuff doesn't happen because of the abortion).

I am flexible about the happy ending part, "bittersweet" or "looming sense of doom because canon" are fine!

I did get to the part in your story where they first brought up the military requirement and I wasn't sure about it for the collection, but I loved the way you made it clear she *did* have other options, and she picked that one, and it *still* wasn't that complicated a choice. You don't have to be 100% empowered and free to still be able to own a choice as your choice that you made for yourself, and that's an important story too!

Yeah, I started from a place of 'This canon portrays a fully gender- integrated military in an equivalent time period when reliable widespread birth control would not have been available in our real world, so what's the implication of that?'some readers did not like that tho. . .

you're great and I am grateful for you. (I've been using your recs as a cope this last week so you were already great.) (I mean you were also great before the recs.) (although the recs project led me to the discovery that there's no explict-rated Lone Power AO3 fic, wtf is up with that???)

One of the great things about fandom is when your coping mechanism can become someone else's coping mechanism too. :D

YW fandom is less than 1% explicit overall, so I don't think it's just an LP problem, but it's definitely a problem someone could fix!!

this post and the collection profile disagree slightly on the mission of the collection, so I am currently debating whether Marinette going "I do want Adrien's babies, but Paris cannot afford for Ladybug to be off her game and my mental health cannot take adding the responsibility of cleaning the apartment toilet once a week, never mind raising a baby, so I am getting an abortion and it will be the right decision but I need to be sad about it first" is or isn't in mission parameters

I mean point is moot because I hurt too much to write, but

A certain amount of bittersweetness or sadness or even angst and massive mood downswings is totally in parameter. A lot of the stories involve people saying I want a baby but I don't want a baby now, and I think even a person who is as clear as possible that they never want to be pregnant might have a little bit of angst about the question of roads not taken, just like you would with any choice. (And another narrative that should probably get out more is "some people have a major mood crash due to hormone swings after, which is not the same thing as being traumatized by the abortion" and a lot of the stories cover that too.)

I made the collection profile very concrete because mostly I want to be able to reject stories where the abortion is lack of choice or is shaped as a punishment for having sex or, well, all the other narratives you've probably seen. And I wanted someone who was looking for stories on that theme to be pretty confident that they wouldn't have their feet kicked from under them.

I would probably think hard about adding a story to the collection that went very hard on "I can't have a baby right now because [reason] so I have to get an abortion" because that's one of the super common narratives used to erase the choice (often used by pro-forced-pregnancy people when it's *their* pregnancy), because I guarantee you, whatever the [reason], somebody else went through with the pregnancy in that circumstance anyway. So that's why I tried to focus on choice and the person knowing what they want when I wrote up that profile. But there will be stories in a gray area there too. I may go in later and try to make it a little more clear.

(I also threw in a few stories that were about people being enthusiastically pro-abortion-rights or being abortion providers that don't exactly fit the general structure but were close enough.)

There's already a Ladybug story in the collection that I really liked, did you see it? But you should write yours too whether it 100% fits my collection or not. We need more of all kinds of abortion stories.

Edited 2021-09-07 14:37 (UTC)

That is an interesting thought. I might check that fic out.

Ooh - I don't have any fic recs on this subject, but BoJack Horseman actually did an episode specifically based on this exact premise! Like the producer actually apologised to the scriptwriter in an interview for asking them to come up with a whole episode about abortion where the actual getting of an abortion causes zero conflict whatsoever, lol. But they did it! (In... a very BoJack Horseman way, haha.)

That episode also brought about this very relevant incredible sight gag.

Edited 2021-09-03 06:41 (UTC)

Oh, cool! Bojack Horseman kept doing really great stuff. I love the balloon. I think I might have to make the collection an icon now. :D

A lot of the stories I linked *do* have conflict related to the abortion (how do I get it, how do I pay for it, do I tell my sex partner, do I tell my parents, am I 100% sure, etc.) but mostly it's external conflict. I would totally be up for more stories where the only "conflict" is their friends fighting over who gets to be in charge of the "have a happy abortion" party though!

A near-example from paracanon.. there’s an abortion storyline in the Buffy S9 comics. It ends in a cop-out where she wasn’t actually pregnant for reasons of sci-fi, but Buffy’s certainty about her decision and the support from the person she asks to go with her come in a series of quite powerful scenes prior to the copout, and I’d certainly include it on the broader abortion-in-fandom syllabus.

Alas I can't bookmark a canon installment.

I'm surprised I didn't find any Buffy stories in my first pass, that fandom seems like a natural! Maybe I should look harder.

I would be surprised if no one has written fic about this incident, it was 2012-ish and there were some months between the abortion convo and the reveal. But they might be buried deep in the Buffy/Spike tag with few other useful meta details!

Found one! It’s a little ambiguous though: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1533158

Oh this one is better I think: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338822

But there’s surprisingly little coming up in the fandom. A few here, but the above is the only one I clicked on. It’s mostly crossovers and Buffy/Giles looks like: https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=✓&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=Abortion+&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&commit=Sort+and+Filter&tag_id=Buffy+the+Vampire+Slayer+%28TV%29

Edited 2021-09-08 00:09 (UTC)

The Spike & Jenny at the top of the list is okay too! It fits your mortal-enemy-is-the-one-one-I-can-call theme sort of, but I’m not 100% sure if it fits the collection, you will have to see. (All three of these are pretty short.)

Ah we crossed comments. :P

Oh I looked at that one you linked, and it looks like she does not think there was consensual sex? That's something I am deliberately not including, partly to make the collection accessible to more people, partly because "the abortion was okay because she didn't ask for the sex" is one of the narratives I want to stay away from in the collection. And a *huge* proportion of the fic does - if you filter "rape/noncon" out of the abortion tag you lose over 3/4 of the fics. So I think it's worth having a collection that actively avoids that.

I did find a Jenny Calendar one I really liked but it might be too depressing for the collection. Also I do appreciate that so far all Buffy writers agree that Spike is the person you ask for a ride home from the clinic! Powerful "will drive you to your abortion" energy, that man.

Hmm, true. I am no longer sure what is canon and what’s other stuff I’ve read, but as I recall canon went more in the direction of Buffy having a night of consensual letting-loose fun and now there are consequences to handle. Fic plays up the trauma angle. (What actually happened in canon that night is Andrew drugged her and switched her brain to a robot body (for some reason the robot body peed pregnancy hormones, shrug emoji), which Buffy saw as considerably more of a violation than drunk party sex.) So it’s iffy for your list from a number of perspectives including the obligatory joss ick factor.

Still surprised there’s not more fic though.

I think for these purposes, "sex you don't remember" counts as noncon automatically.

But yeah the required Joss ick is probably why there's not more fic that fits.

(Also ROBOT PISS WTF. Although now I want to work "robots always have positive pregnancy tests" into other fandoms. Universal headcanon now. If there are two lines you're either preggo or secretly a robot. Quick review of LFT chemistry confirms that if robot piss contains peroxidase they probably test positive for everything.)

Edited 2021-09-08 04:12 (UTC)

"I needed a ride to the clinic and I couldn't ask my friends or my lover so I asked my enemy instead."

oh my gosh what a BRILLIANT idea for a trope, I love it

General "I needed a ride home from the clinic and that deepened our relationship" turns out is a super common structure for abortion!fic but of course I liked the enemy ones best. :D

the trope of "I needed a ride to the clinic and I couldn't ask my friends or my lover so I asked my enemy instead."
A trope I have only just learned about but love already.

There are only barely enough for it to count as a trope probably, but I want more.

I really like you making this collection. Plonk's story is the first time I remember encountering this since Te's Angel's You Need. (I think the story in question has disappeared from the internet, but it was the first time I'd ever seen abortion like that in a story.)

Angels You Need still has the parts by Te up on Teland but the ones by Mary are down. Do you remember which part it was in? I haven't reread that in so long, but I tracked it down recently for my "all-time fic to save forever" list.

Oh, what a great idea for a collection! I definitely see a few stories in there I want to read.

There's also a MASH fic I love that would probably fit your collection: Walking Wounded by ignaz. My personal bookmark of it has notes you might not want -- nothing bad, just some reflections on MASH fic -- so I figured I'd just drop the link here so you could add a clean one if you'd prefer.

the trope of "I needed a ride to the clinic and I couldn't ask my friends or my lover so I asked my enemy instead."

Welp. That's a Brenda and Sharon frenemy fic I'm about to write.

Oh that's great! Thanks for the rec.

I'm adding a bookmark on my account for every story that's completely clear of any opinion other than "does it fit the theme" - since I'm adding works where I don't know the fandom at all, that seemed fairest - but I wouldn't mind other people's bookmarks too, so you can go ahead and add yours as well if you want!

This is an excellent concept and I will signal boost it shortly.

The only story I've written about someone having an abortion so far is "All That I Know" for _The Martian_ which might not fit your parameters -- a trip on a hard-science spaceship is simply not a situation where a pregnancy can be viable (this is discussed in the story), so for Beth to have chosen not to have an abortion would have been both pointless and probably suicidal. But I don't think I presented it as a punishment, just as a thing that happened that they dealt with just like all the other Things that happened on their eventful trip. What do you think?

(Of course I can always write a story in future. *contemplates*)

...I think that if it's the fic it must be, you have been one of my favorite writers all along and I never made the connection to your AO3 name. ^^;;; um hi?

I looked at that fic for the collection when I was looking at The Martian for recs! I think it's one of the ones that falls into the gray areas I mentioned above? "If I keep the baby we will almost definitely both die" is one of the cases where there really *isn't* any real question of wanting it or not. But it doesn't do any of the things I really wanted to not do, and in the fic they do process it as an affirmative choice they are making. It was the kind of edge case that I wouldn't add it myself, but will approve if someone else submits.

oh my goodness blushes

well I shall go submit the story. :D

PS thank you. beams shyly

no you! if I'd realized I would have been too shy to talk to you in the first place !!

Oh, this is really neat. Thank you.

I have some in my bookmarks, because I've had an eye out for them for a LONG time, but ... *shuffles feet* ... I don't know how to add things to a collection.

Oh good! Someone else collecting them!

Assuming you're not the author of the work or the mod of the collection, you have two options: go on AO3, bookmark the work, and then in the "create bookmark" dialog, type the name of the collection in the "add to collection" box (there's an auto fill). If it's not on AO3, go to my bookmarks-bookmark external work - ditto. If you already have a bookmark, go to edit on the bookmark and you should see the collection option.

Since the collection is moderated, it won't appear until I review and approve it.

Alternatively, show me the links and I'll make the bookmarks for you!

I got your bookmark submission and I am wibbling. I had been avoiding "forced pregnancy" stories (because I wanted to emphasize choice, not just in the abortion itself but the whole situation, that choosing to risk starting a pregnancy is no more of a moral ill than choosing to end it.) But I am unsure whether to file that one as forced pregnancy or not! They did choose to touch the thing and they (should) know the risk of touching a thing...

I'm not sure either! It turns out I haven't been very good about bookmarking such things, and the only other one I could find is DEFINITELY a forced pregnancy -- because it's really really painful how rare abortion is in fic (not to mention TV) even when the pregnancy is forced.

I linked to this.

If you don't mind me saying, these seem to be largely atypical abortions. From what I know of the various fandoms, it looks like most of them are first-time pregnancies of adolescents or young adults, but the typical person seeking an abortion (59% of patients) is already the parent of at least one child, and either in their 20s (the majority at 60%) or their 30s (about 25% of all people seeking abortions are in their 30s). Fewer than 4% of abortions are for people under the age of 18.

(These stats are for the USA.)

That might be something for people writing for this collection to keep in mind. More parents having abortion, not so many non-parents.

I was more-or-less linking all the stories where there was no noncon and the abortion isn't treated as a tragedy! I would love a greater variety.

There were a couple I considered abd didn't link that involved younger people helping parents get to the clinic (one was Harry and Aunt Petunia) but they all kept the person getting the abortion very opaque and focused on the younger one, and had at least vague implications of marital rape, so it was impossible to tell if it fit the other qualifications. Maybe I should go add them back in.

But yeah, fandom in general should write more about older people in established relationships!

... damned if I don't really, really want to write a Ginny Weasley-centric fic for this collection now.

I'm submitting this fic for consideration: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8583838/chapters/19683277.

I am so late to this party, but can I just say how much I love this? Also it's giving me plotbunnies. :)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

now for something completely different

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject