Loved and Wanted
A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood
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4.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Haunting, wild, and quiet at once. A shimmering look at motherhood, in all its gothic pain and glory. I could not stop reading."
—Lisa Taddeo, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Three Women
A stressed family, an unplanned pregnancy, and a painful, if liberating, awakening from the author of the lauded memoir Her
Christa Parravani was forty years old, in a troubled marriage, and in bad financial straits when she learned she was pregnant with her third child. She and her family were living in Morgantown, West Virginia, where she had taken a professorial position at the local university.
Haunted by a childhood steeped in poverty and violence and by young adult years rocked by the tragic death of her identical twin sister, Christa hoped her professor’s salary and health care might set her and her young family on a safe and steady path. Instead, one year after the birth of her second child, Christa found herself pregnant again. Six weeks into the pregnancy, she requested an abortion. And in the weeks, then months, that followed, nurses obfuscated and doctors refused outright or feared being found out to the point of, ultimately, becoming unavailable to provide Christa with reproductive choice.
By the time Christa understood that she would need to leave West Virginia to obtain a safe, legal abortion, she’d run out of time. She had failed to imagine that she might not have access to reproductive choice in the United States, until it was too late for her, her pregnancy too far along.
So she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy named Keats. And another frightening education began: available healthcare was dangerously inadequate to her newborn son’s needs; indeed, environmental degradations and poor healthcare endangered Christa’s older children as well.
Loved and Wanted is the passionate story of a woman’s love for her children, and a poignant and bracing look at the difficult choices women in America are forced to make every day, in a nation where policies and a cultural war on women leave them without sufficient agency over their bodies, their futures, and even their hopes for their children’s lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Parravani (Her) exposes motherhood's serrated edges in this searing exploration of love, autonomy, and abortion. Forty-year-old Parravani was deeply in debt and unexpectedly pregnant with her third child in 2017, and her tenure-track position at a West Virginia college provided the family's only stable income, but still fell short of covering the bills. Certain this pregnancy spelled the end of her career, Parravani wanted an abortion, to which her husband responded, "It's your body." But one local gynecologist refused her request, and another would only prescribe her RU 486 if she promised not to tell anyone else at the practice. "Reduced to a vessel, I was rage-filled," she writes. Options elsewhere were too far away and expensive to be practical. "Every path seemed strung with a trip wire." Throughout, Parravani elucidates the nation's patchwork of abortion laws and data about women who seek to end their pregnancies, finding that states that restrict reproductive freedoms also have the poorest health outcomes for infants and children. From the point at which Parravani decides to carry her son to term, the book turns to building a devastating indictment of how environmental contamination and inadequate healthcare harmed the two of her children born in West Virginia. This is a powerful account of what many women face in the U.S. today.
