On the Precipice in Reproductive Dystopia
In 2011, in search of fiction about Occupy Wall Street, I happened upon “The Stockbroker Who Deep Down Wanted to Join In,” by Karen E. Bender, a short story about a man who encounters the Zuccotti Park encampment and surprises himself with his reaction, on the verge of making an enormous change. In her latest collection, The Words of Dr. L and Other Stories (Counterpoint Press, 2025, $27.00), Bender brings readers another slate of characters on the precipice, longing for connection, all the while inhabiting terrifying realities that resemble ours. Her dystopias in which reproductive rights are in peril are unfortunately no longer so dystopian.
The nameless female protagonist of the collection’s title story, “The Words of Dr. L,” navigates a world where pronatalism has become a treacherous entity known as Protection, while she attempts to obtain an abortion from a doctor who induces them using words. “I wanted to be a door, not a trap,” says our protagonist, “…to live in as many houses as I could design,” a statement living in stark contrast to her childhood friend, Joanne, who longs for a baby, and also for acceptance by the Protection, Joanne must never know of the journey the protagonist is on to free herself from an unwanted future. The tension propelling this story forward isn’t only the question of whether or not our protagonist will get the abortion, but also the isolation women feel from one another, particularly when they dare to deflect the script that’s not just prescribed by social pressure, but enforced by government, and implemented by fear.
Bender’s other characters dangle in liminal spaces, too. Take the young girl in “Separation,” who dreams of escaping a burning planet (another story setting that cuts a little too close to the bone right now) while knowing that the forces promising to protect citizens aren’t to be trusted. And Anna, in the story “Data,” is trapped in a Covid-esque reality in which her teenage daughter, who has tested positive, rages behind a closed bedroom door, while her mother awaits the worst. Daily realities persist in all these scenarios: broken computers, supermarkets devoid of produce, clothing to be purchased. Establishing these daily routines allows the reader to experience the loss that comes with change. In “The Hypnotist,” a daughter searches for her own identity after a lifetime of close connection with her father (“what a joyous shared deceit!”), only to watch him drift away from her as he inevitably ages.
Fiction allows us proximity to situations that we would never normally imagine our way into. Whether these women and those adjacent to them live in a world we recognize as our own, or live in some spiked, threatening future, many realities of being human don’t change. Bender’s stories are illuminated, lit with color (“the sky a hard, glossy blue, like a plate”) in spite of the trying circumstances of those living within them. It’s often a beautiful day, but unnerving actualities lurk beneath the surface.
We don’t also need to live on a burning planet with untrustworthy leaders, or amid an unpredictable global pandemic, exhausted by threats to our fundamental rights, to understand what it feels like when our parents age, or we can no longer connect with our friends, when we’re on the edge of a dramatic shift in our lives.
The smooth prose of these stories escorts us towards soft, barbed realizations: loss, isolation, and new starts do not require catastrophic change in order to occur, they are ahead of us no matter what.
Chanel Dubofksy is a writer and editor in Brooklyn.
