Author: Julia MacDonnell

Julia MacDonnell has published two novels, a story collection, and countless articles, essays and book reviews. She developed her quirky vision and questioning voice over a lifetime of creative exploration. The second oldest of eight children in a Scotch-Irish Catholic family, she broke away early, rebelling against her family’s rigidity and pious prayerfulness. Familial relationships have remained an abiding concern throughout MacDonnell’s writing life.

Our Abortion Stories: Shamed Into Silence, ‘We Weren’t Fit To Become Mothers’

I was forced to give my son up for adoption, moments after giving birth. Boom. Gone. Just like that. I had no hope of ever seeing him again.

This shameful secret—my pregnancy and loss of my child—festered inside for more than 50 years. Decades later, my middle-aged son reached out by email and we met, a longed-for experience that soon turned into a nightmare. I had no idea that reunion in adoption is often shattering. The pain and anguish I wasn’t allowed to feel when I gave him away exploded inside me.

Our Abortion Stories: Red Stain on a Yellow Dress

“Serena’s going back to Maggie’s Farm but not for long. Where, after that, she doesn’t know, but it does not seem to matter. Because she knows now that it is over. Soon she will stop bleeding. She can go on with her life.”

In 2021, writer Julia MacDonnell published a collection, The Topography of Hidden Stories, which included a story particularly relevant at this historical moment. Recently, she described this story, “Red Stain on Yellow Dress,” as a “fictional meditation on what young women may have experienced in the epoch before the passage of Roe v. Wade” and added a warning that the story is “gritty and bloody, the way things used to be. Maybe you’ll weep when you read it, the way I did when I wrote it.”