Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh

Women’s Health + Pot + Protesters

(NOTE: Some of the links in this blog are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on Amazon. Thank you for supporting my writing in this manner. More details here.)

*****

 This book got reviewed in the Washington Post by my favorite reviewer, Ron Charles. And it got reviewed in the New York Times by a favorite author, Richard Russo, who said he was gobsmacked by it. It was also named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe. Clearly, that’s enough accolades to cause me to read the book.

But beyond that, I was interested in what I thought was the topic – a women’s health clinic that does abortions. Having just read Looking for Jane about the “Jane Network” for clandestine abortions in the years before Roe v Wade, I thought this would give me an inside look at another option for women, though in a different time period. And while “Mercy Street” is such a clinic, there are four different characters in the book – all of them with some connection to Mercy Street – but only one of whom is going to tell us what goes on behind those closed doors.

Here are the four main characters. All of them are well developed by the author:

• Claudia Birch counsels patients at Mercy Street and gives a lot of insight into the clinic’s inner workings. She also is a highly stressed individual thanks in part to the ongoing protests that take place outside the clinic. Helping her manage her stress is…
• Timmy, her pot dealer. He is a guy who is feeling his own stresses thanks to the coming legalization of pot, and thanks to a teenage son who can’t live with him due to the work he does.
• Then there’s Anthony, a young man with a head injury. He lives on disability, and is a Catholic who goes to mass regularly. Not only is he a customer of Timmy’s, he’s also a protester at the clinic. A misfit in life, he thinks Timmy is his best friend. His second-best friend is a person he met on line…
• Victor Prine, who is an unhinged antiabortion crusader with his sights set on Mercy Street. He uses Anthony to get photos of the people coming to the clinic. He’s very much a racist, enraged with white women for aborting white babies and NOT doing their duty to increase the white population. Uck!

Clearly, an explosive day on Mercy Street seems in the cards.

Since it was a desire to read abortion-related information that brought me to this book, that is the content I will focus on. A revealing scene takes place between Claudia and the mother of a teenager who is having an abortion at the clinic as they speak. The mom tells Claudia, “I had one…a hundred years ago, when I was in college. I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t tell anyone.” Claudia asks if the mom told her daughter, and she did not. This leads to Claudia thinking, “One in four American women would, at some point, terminate a pregnancy. Most, it seemed, carried the secret for the rest of their lives.”

I found this statistic to be painful. I found Claudia’s PS on the topic to be painful. And I found the book’s dedication to be painful, “To the one in four…”

More painful stuff came in a conversation Claudia has with her ex-husband, but still good friend, Phil. He reminds her that he has no problem with abortion but amends it with the statement, “assuming there’s a good reason.” She asks him to define “good” and then in her head she runs down many of the good reasons she knows about because of her work:

• “My son is autistic and day care won’t take him. I can’t handle another kid.
• I got fired. Evicted. I got into law school.
• I’m afraid to go off my meds.
• I just need to finish (high school, chemo, probation. My PhD. My tour of duty.)
• My mother would never forgive me.
• I want a different kind of life.
• I must escape this monster, raise the drawbridge, bar the door. If I bear his child I will never be free of him; he will take up residence in my life.”

All heartbreaking, right?

Also heartbreaking is the story Claudia tells us of Baby Doe. The child’s body was found, and ultimately, the ones who killed her. The mom was an accessory to the crime and the mom’s boyfriend was the murderer. Claudia makes the case for abortion for those not cut out to be a mom, “As a fetus, [Baby Doe had] been protected by Massachusetts law…as a person, she was utterly dependent on a woman who couldn’t raise her and didn’t want to. Once she became an actual person, Baby Doe was on her own.”

You can see there is a lot of meaty information to discuss just from the one-fourth of the book focusing on Mercy Street itself. This caused me to like the book a lot. But darn! I was hoping to be like Richard Russo – gobsmacked.

In spite of the non-gobsmacked sentiment, I did have a favorite line, worthy of saving for all time. It’s the author’s comment on Claudia when she was young, “Her information about sex came mainly from Justine, who knew as little as she did, but with greater certainty.” Since I have a couple of friends who know everything about everything, I laughed out loud reading this!

I can’t close without mentioning the ending. It was not at all what I expected. But no spoilers from me. You’ll have to read the book to learn what I mean.

*****

Click here to learn more about Mercy Street on Amazon.

*****

If you like the way I wrote this review, you will like other things I have written. Please try my blog and/or my new book, Love, Loss, and Moving On. And if you are in the mood to shop, don’t forget to visit me on Etsy. Thank you!