ABSTRACT
“Abortion for beginners” is a short comedic performance essay based on the author’s experiences growing up in an anti-abortion household. Reflecting on how three “abortion films” – The Silent Scream, Dirty Dancing, and Cabaret – have shaped not only her understanding of abortion, but also her emergence as a pro-choice queer feminist, Cowan imagines how abortion may at once be immoral and desirable, and urgently necessary for the “pursuit of a future of stupid decisions, mistakes, risks, failures, great loss, and potential.” Written as a love story to abortion, this essay is also a glimpse into the ways that a young person might navigate their way out of a repressive family situation: “indeed, queers and abortions, we are the same thing. Living in a family that taught me to hate queers as much as abortion, I needed to become an abortion before I could become a queer. I imagined myself never having been born, never having existed, in order to make a life full of queer impossibilities.”
