SOURCE: "Abortion and the Fears of the Fathers: Five Male Writers," in Abortion, Choice, and Contemporary Fiction: The Armageddon of the Maternal Instinct, The University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 101-31.

Wilt is an American educator and nonfiction writer. In the following excerpt, she discusses the conflicts and issues associated with abortion in Waterland.

Empathetic with women characters, deeply conflicted about women's choices, male writers in the twentieth century still resonate most profoundly to the special exposures of the man in the matter of maternal choice. [In As I Lay Dying] Faulkner's Addie Bundren makes a discovery: she had remained complete and somehow untouched during intercourse, but in her first pregnancy her "aloneness" had been "violated." Pregnancy was rape. But birth made the violation "whole again." It is true that the circle binding the violated mother and child never loses the elementary violence introduced by the father: "Only through...