The Lost Baby Poem

Abortion is the entire occasion for “the lost baby poem,” and the theme makes the poem particularly sensitive. Abortion is a longstanding and contentious political debate even beyond the United States, but the poem avoids political ideologies or principled stances. Instead, the poem presents abortion as an individual and fundamentally personal experience. The speaker does not philosophize, nor does she invoke any presumedly universal moral schema. Rather, the poem presents her lived experience and the distinct obstacles she faced.

The speaker agonizes over the decision, running through memories of circumstances she feels were extenuating—revealing she likely does perceive some moral weight in her decision, and it was near impossible for a woman of her time to not internalize the ubiquitous cultural condemnation. At the same time, the destitution the speaker describes necessarily deprived her of agency, and the question arises what kind and degree of choice she truly had; even had she sustained the pregnancy, a born child would die or be taken from her and “slip like ice into strangers’ hands” (Line 11). Despite her drastically limited scope of freedom, however, she feels she needs redemption. The whole of the poem suggests the speaker’s pain is largely grief and guilt over a lost relationship, rather than dismay over broken rules—and in the last stanza, she reclaims the relationship through dedicating her life to atonement for “the lost baby.