Julia Cohen on Intergenerational Abortion and Choice

For the New England Review, Julia Cohen's new essay, "All the Space in Between Is Water," is about intergenerational abortion, choice, and how the right uses the Holocaust in anti-choice language. "I didn’t think I would ever have an abortion or write an essay about it. That was for someone else’s body and someone else’s essay." More:

...But my government is telling me that Jews are not citizens or were never gassed or that the organization that helped me manifest the toughest choice I’ve had to make is equivalent to the Nazis that did gas my family. Using that logic, I am a Jew asking a Nazi to gas my child. What history is this?

In Illinois, Arthur Jones, a Neo-Nazi, announces he’s running for Congress. He describes himself as the former leader of the American Nazi Party and even Trump is not enough of a white supremacist for his liking. We were foolish enough to send this naïve, Jew-loving fool into the White House. The Illinois Republican Party repudiates his candidacy, but he goes on to win 26.5 percent of the vote in 2018. In Illinois, 56,350 citizens voted for a Nazi. In 2012, when Jones ran in the Republican congressional primary, he only received 3,861 votes. He is a Holocaust denier, claiming the Holocaust was nothing but an international extortion racket by the Jews. It’s so juvenile, but I want to show him my family tree. I want to show him the stubby branches, where my family died in concentration camps. Where is an abortion on a family tree? Is it a bud? Is it in the slight inky smudge of my name, the dot of the “i” before my name ends?

As a kid, on April Fools’ I loved going to school and learning how my friends had pranked their families: Saran wrap over the toilet bowl; short-sheeting the bed; sewing the hems of pant legs shut so they could not be pulled on. These were playful, but I saved the list for when I was at camp, trying out what meanness felt like. I got in trouble with my friends, at Jewish sleepaway camp, for picking on the daughter of the woodshop instructor. We put stones in her backpack before a hike. We snickered as she walked the trail ahead of us, weighted down. But I saw her face when she opened her backpack at the campsite. A betrayal heavier than stones. Distressed, she told the counselor. We got in trouble. Parents were summoned. I had to call my mom on the phone in front of the camp director and was afraid of her anger. Instead, she said,

I get it. You’re trying out different ways to be a leader. Meanness is one way to get people to follow. How did it feel?

Read on at the New England Review.