Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get.

This line is from Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “the mother,” first published in her 1945 collection *A Street in Bronzeville*. Brooks, writing in mid-20th-century Chicago and attentive to the interior lives of Black women, gives voice to a speaker addressing the children she has aborted. The poem is not framed as a public argument about policy but as an intimate reckoning with memory, grief, and self-accusation. In an era when abortion was widely illegal and often discussed obliquely, Brooks’s poem stands out for naming the experience directly and exploring its lingering psychological and emotional aftermath.

The speaker insists that abortion does not erase attachment; instead, it produces a durable, involuntary remembrance. The paradox “children you got that you did not get” captures how pregnancy can create a sense of relationship and possibility even when it ends before birth. Brooks dramatizes a mind caught between justification and remorse: the abortions are acknowledged as acts the speaker chose, yet they generate a continuing presence—an imagined chorus of lives that might have been. The lines compress the poem’s central tension: bodily autonomy and necessity on one side, and the persistence of maternal feeling, guilt, and mourning on the other.