We needed to know, so we learned it- you know, just like you learn anything. Lying there, some would ask, so we said No, we're not doctors we're women just like you. The poem, 'In the Service we said,' demonstrates Arcana's ability to use simple vernacular to achieve a statement of 'truth':

The final section, entitled 'Here, in the heart of the country,' focuses primarily on narrating the lives of girls and women who came to the Janes for assistance because of the personal accounts, this section is extremely moving. Complex arguments are raised in poems beginning with 'Jocasta interviewed in Hell' and moving to the wry and darkly humorous 'For all the Mary Catholics' and 'Opposing Arguments.' The book works very well as a collection, moving from the first section on birth and conception to a second section of poems on birth control, medical and social myths, and onto a section about the mystification of women's conceptual health entitled 'Information rarely offered.' The next section, entitled 'Don't tell me you didn't know this,' contains some of the strongest poems in the book. The poet manages to express the ineffable in work that is accessible, fierce, funny, and full of lyric intensity. The poems are clear-voiced, compassionate, and passionate. In this book, Arcana deftly writes about a complex subject, managing to present powerful political poems that are at once grounded in women's lives and bodies. But most of the poems are drawn from the personal experiences of the girls and women Arcana knew through her work with clinics, Planned Parenthood, and other organizations.

Some of the poems in the collection were inspired by this pre-Roe abortion work as well as through stories Arcana discovered in newspapers about elections, legislation, and incidents of terrorism and assassination perpetrated by the anti-abortion movement in the United States. women's health movement, the Abortion Counseling Service, now called 'Jane,' worked with more than eleven thousand women and girls (the youngest under twelve, the oldest over fifty), all of whom came to the underground group for abortions prior to the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v Wade. In the preface of What if your mother, poet Judith Arcana writes about her experiences from 1970 to 1972 as a 'Jane,' a member of the Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.

Reading Like A Girl by Rishma Dunlop