Abortion In Gwendolyn Brooks Poem, The Mother

Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, The Mother, portrays the feelings a mother possesses following an abortion. On a more complex level, The Mother portrays the remorse felt by taking the future from unborn children. Brooks’ juxtaposition of avoiding and accepting the reality of what the speaker, a mother, did to her unborn children portrays the remorse mothers feel following an abortion. In the first stanza, the speaker uses a second-person narrative to distance herself from her abortion. She uses “you” to put the remorse on other mothers who have also had abortions to lessen her guilt. Because she puts the effects of her abortion on other women, she avoids the reality of what she did. However, in stanza two, the narrative shifts to first-person. This shift in narratives allows the mother to accept the reality for what she has done. By addressing the thoughts and feelings resulting from an abortion as things she has felt, the speaker shows how she understands the fate of her children was her doing. Even though the speaker possesses a somber tone towards her actions, she accepts what she has done. This juxtaposition of avoiding and accepting the reality of what the mother did to her aborted children conveys the guilt

The title suggest that the speaker will be a mother, contrarily the speaker does not have any children. However, even though she does not have tangible children she has the “voices of the wind” as her children. The guilt of taking the lives and futures away from her children haunts her. What could have been stays with her and instead of turning away from it she embraces it and calls herself a mother. She calls herself a mother of the “voices of my dim killed children” who never had a chance to live. By Brooks naming the poem The Mother, she portrays how even when a mother does not have children due to an abortion, she feels guilty for taking away a mother