The Event

“I had brought into the world a life and a death at the same time.”

Annie Ernaux – The Event

The Crossing of Appearances is a text inspired by the book The Event, written by Annie Ernaux, 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, which narrates traversing that uncertain and then-illegal path of deciding not to be a mother in a society that condemns abortion from moral, social, religious, and legal standpoints.

The Crossing of Appearances

No woman grows up dreaming of her first abortion. Of the day she’ll have to walk trembling to a house without notice where a lady will help her get rid of that.

No woman grows up prepared for priests, doctors, and legislators to decide about her body.

No woman learns how to birth a dead thing after spending three days with a probe inside her body waiting for a fetus to hang between her legs.

No woman longs for the day she’ll be taken to a hospital between the delirium of life and death, so doctors can save her from what they denied her and she did in clandestinity.

No woman is ready for her funeral rites to be performed by the same priest who has no God when impregnating, but is faithful to him as an argument to force abortion and refuse absolution.

No woman dreams of the day of her first abortion, of the eternal silence that will rest upon her, in which all the women of the world fit in a single head, and which under the decisions of a bunch of men will be condemned to eternal secrecy.