Reviews with content warning for Abortion - You're the Only One I've Told: The Stories Behind Abortion

Reviews tagging 'Abortion'

You're the Only One I've Told: The Stories Behind Abortion by Meera Shah

22 reviews

lingfish7's review

emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

📖🎧This book was probably the most educational and informative nonfiction I’ve read this year. If you want to understand the abortion issue more and apply empathy to real people, this is a great resource. The author covers a different person in each chapter and their story of getting pregnant and ultimately making the decision to end the pregnancy via abortion. There is someone in every age group, racial and cultural identity, socioeconomic background, and religion. The author, who is an abortion provider, really covers her ground sharing stories that emphasize people and complexity of this issue. The stories included range from the 1980’s to present day.

I grew up in a conservative home where I was taught that being pro life meant saving babies and pro choice meant murdering babies. There was no other discussion on the matter, no empathy for the mothers who feel they cannot have the baby. It was such a simple worldview. But life isn’t that black and white. The reason the abortion issue is so controversial is because it’s filled with immense nuance. I think the turning point for me in the past 5 years has been acknowledging the hypocrisy of being “pro-life” while also withholding birth control, sex education, and childcare from these women. Does the pro life side care more about an unborn fetus than a woman whose life is at risk by her pregnancy? Or more about the fetus than, say, the health and livelihood of that baby out of the womb?

My own worldview has shifted drastically since 2016 and I can say that this book found me at the perfect time. I’m so glad that Dr. Shah took the time to write down these stories and engage in the conversation with empathy and compassion. I can say from my prior experience reading pro-life Christian books, they ironically have a complete lack of empathy and compassion. They tend to condemn the women that would choose to “kill their own babies” and demonize anyone who would stand for reproductive rights. But I wish I knew the “other side” sooner. I wish I had taken the time years ago to put my biases and background aside, and understand on a deeper level.

I won’t go into more detail, because I would probably end up writing an essay instead. Read this book if you want to go deeper. Read it if you want to become more open minded about the world and its complexity.

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shannonmmay's review

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emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

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sydneybedell's review

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emotional informative medium-paced

4.25

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fanchera's review

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challenging emotional informative sad medium-paced

4.0

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yourbookishbff's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

You're the Only One I've Told, by Dr. Meera Shah, is an incredibly compelling collection of abortion stories. Dr. Shah is a physician who provides abortions and reproductive healthcare to patients in New York, but her compilation of stories spans experiences across (and outside of) the US. She highlights a diverse cross-section of people, effectively evidencing the thousands of intricacies in any reproductive healthcare decision. Each story is told in close collaboration with the story's owner, and each story is complemented by contextual details about the specific state/country the patient lived in (and thus, the various legal challenges they faced).

In bringing these stories together in a single collection, Dr. Shah examines the personal, relational, familial, religious, cultural, medical and legal layers in every decision, showing us just how complex pregnancy decisions can be. We hear the stories of single people, married parents with children, nonbinary and trans people, people of color, young and not-so-young people, people seeking care hundreds - and sometimes thousands - of miles from home, people who have had multiple abortions, people who have encountered planned pregnancies with complex diagnoses and people who have encountered unplanned pregnancies and so many more. No two stories are alike, making the black-and-white legal barriers they each face all the more absurd. It is particularly eye-opening to see just how inaccessible reproductive healthcare is to the people highlighted in these stories, and this was written and published BEFORE the reversal of Roe vs. Wade. Abortion access has been steadily eroding for decades, and when you see intimately in these accounts the real people that these mostly state-led restrictions have impacted, it's heart wrenching.

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