I write about things that keep me up at night...
you’re a teenager is not what you believe when you’re in your 30s or in your 50s.
“In America, we legislate reproductive rights. Laws are meant to be black and white, but the situations in the lives of women that cause them to make these decisions to terminate are thousands of shades of grey.”
For research, she interviewed 151 women who had terminated a pregnancy. Of those, only one regretted that decision. Yet years later, the vast majority still hadn’t told anybody.
“It broke my heart because when women don’t tell their stories, the narrative that gets written about them is one of shame.”
She also spoke to pro-life advocates who, she says, were not religious zealots but felt a deep personal conviction. All were appalled by acts of violence committed in the name of unborn children. She shadowed Dr Willie Parker, an abortion provider and devout Christian in the Deep South who chose his work because of his faith, not in spite of it.
“I observed a five-week abortion, an eight-week abortion and a 15-week abortion,” she recalls. “The five-week and the eight-week abortions took less than three minutes and the products of conception look nothing that would suggest a dead baby.
“The 15-week abortion took seven minutes, was more complicated, and mixed among the tissue and products of conception were tiny, recognisable body parts, like a tiny hand, an elbow. Of course, that gives you pause. But I also interviewed the woman who had the abortion. She has three children under the age of four, could barely afford to feed them and she knew if she had a fourth child, she would not be able to feed them.
“So, is she a good mother or a bad mother? It really depends on which side you’re standing on.”
What drives Jodi to write about such uncomfortable subjects?
“I write about things that keep me up at night, things that I worry about as a woman, as an American and as a mother. There’s no shortage of them.”
Jodi herself had a blissfully normal childhood. She was born on Long Island, New York. Her mother was a nursery school teacher while her father worked on Wall Street.
After studying English and creative writing at Princeton, she had a succession of jobs while writing in her spare time.
Today, she writes in her attic at a large home in New Hampshire, which she shares with her husband Tim Van Leer. They have three grown-up children. She can switch off from fictional dilemmas when she ends her work day, she reflects.
“I have an amazing husband and four awesome dogs, and when I come downstairs there is such a clear line of demarcation between the very fraught situation I’ve been writing about and the life that I live.”
SHE WAS THE QUIET ONE