I’m the Daughter of a Rape Survivor—That’s Why I’m Pro-Choice

My mother is one of the eldest daughters of 16 children born in the South to cotton fields and sharecropping. But there was also a bit of that Nikki Giovanni poem “Nikki-Rosa,” love and creativity through Grandmama’s genius at making do with a little and unflinching faith—whatever the hand dealt her—and the hardworking life she navigated.
As a girl, Mama tried to escape the terrors of poverty, the overcrowded tiny place on a former plantation, her father’s alcoholism, and his mistreatment of her mother, as well as some harsh realities of Black southern life.
She was good at school but dropped out at 17 due to the aforementioned. She headed to Chicago to stay with her mother’s sister in an apartment on the West Side. There, like many Black migrants from the South, she found a dynamic, grungy, scary urban—not-so-utopian—new world. I was a fully grown woman with a child of my own before I knew much about the trauma she had left behind down South and the new ones she endured in the North.
When she stepped off the train in Chicago in the mid-1960s, my mother was already a teen rape survivor. He was, ironically, supposedly a good guy—a newly minted college student—and she, a 16-year-old dating novice on a double date with her big sister, two years her senior.
She suspected nothing when her gentlemanly date suggested they talk in the car as her sister and her date visited inside a local joint. When he started driving and kept going over her protests, she said her mind froze—but she fought. She managed to jump out when he slowed, but there were only darkened, unfamiliar fields surrounding her.
Later, her sister comforted my hysterical mother and washed the blood from between her legs and the dirt from her face and hair. This was the same big sister who had soothed her when she got her first period, explaining what was happening when she had no idea. The sisters did not tell my grandmother or anyone for a good while about the rape in the fields.
In Chicago, a stranger hiding under the stairs of the apartment building grabbed my mother and made her strip as he held her at gunpoint—she was saved by a cousin who came looking for her when she didn’t see Mama emerge from the building.
I wish that had been the last of such experiences for her, but it was not. Mama was assaulted several times. I was the result of one of these and so was her first pregnancy. She wanted to get an abortion, but there was no Roe v. Wade yet and the doctor wouldn’t perform one. There was one unsuccessful abortion attempt. Another girl told Mama to drink a mix of lime juice and whiskey or vodka to induce a miscarriage. Mama ended up at death’s door in the emergency room but did not miscarry.
Upon knowing the circumstance of my origin, folk sometimes remark on how lucky it is that my mother—my heartbeat and compass—did not end her pregnancy. My mother is a magnificent person—a truly phenomenal woman, shaped in part by all she survived. I’m grateful to be here, of course. But had I never been, I wouldn’t have known. Above all, my mother deserved the choice to control her own body and life.
I grieve for her. What other fabulous lives might she have forged for herself if she could have? Raised by a staunchly Christian mother and a missionary herself now, abortion is a complicated issue for my mother—neither a pro-abortion advocate nor someone who wouldn’t have chosen differently if she could have and who certainly has not attached to her daughters the necessity of motherhood.
My mother likely would not have chosen to have any children—something she once expressed. I am not bothered by that at all and do not feel her love any less. Mama was the second eldest daughter, there were always babies to take care of during her childhood. Given that and the rest of what she went through, I get it.
In my mind’s eye, I see Mama, her beautiful, young girl-woman self in the southern sun picking cotton and riding that train to Chicago dreaming of a fantastic, different kind of life.
Trauma and motherhood before she had full freedom and experience enough to choose shaped her life in terrible ways, and she made the best of it. When I became pregnant, I didn’t worry about what wasn’t an option—because a safe, accessible one was available to me. I didn’t have to face arrest or flee to another state if I chose it.
I came of age when Roe v. Wade was a reality. Despite never-ceasing debate about it, reproductive choice seemed inalienable. I cannot imagine my mother’s situation nor fathom a return to a version of it for girls and women now and in the generations to come.
Stephane Dunn, PhD, M,A, MFA (University of Notre Dame), BA (University of Evansville) is a writer, filmmaker, professor, and cultural scholar and focuses on the historical and contemporary politics of race and gender.
Professor Dunn teaches creative writing, film studies, screenwriting, American and African American cinema, literature, and popular culture Morehouse College and is one of the co-founder’s and first directors of the Morehouse Cinema, Television & Emerging Media Studies (CTEMS) department. She is the author of the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press), and the novel Snitchers (2022).
All views expressed are the author’s own.
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