By Sam Schieren
Divided into 60 short chapters, one for each year of Houston’s life, Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom—equal parts memoir, manifesto, and literary journalism—protests the degradation of women’s freedoms with grace, mercy, anger, and humor. The book is woven from threads that range from the shifting landscape of abortion rights in the United States; lyric tributes to the literal landscapes Houston, the survivor of a horrific childhood of traumas, “turned to . . . for [her] mothering” (13); and calm yet searing reflections on the sexual, corporal, and psychological violence Houston suffered at the hands of her own father and how this shaped her belief in the unalienable right of a woman to decide what happens “inside her own body . . . and in the shape of her one precious life” (3); as well as a careful selection of data about the effects of forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, without exception for rape or incest. These threads are bolstered by rich anecdotes from friends and students (including Terry Tempest Williams and a bounty hunter), songs, letters, and curated excerpts from Supreme Court decisions that serve as a chorus behind Houston’s unflappable, clear-eyed perspective on our troubled moment. And, of course, there is a healthy dose of the exceedingly improbable and always wildly entertaining stories from Houston’s own “wild and romping”(59) pursuits of freedom.
Without Exception is a deeply American book: colorful, wild, and layered, like the landscapes it simultaneously loves and laments for their mothering and their ongoing destruction. The book seethes at times with an irrepressible anger, as when in a chapter titled “Some Sick Shit” Houston imagines a dystopic future in which two scraggly survivors of the climate catastrophe discover a newspaper covering the Dobbs decision and are aghast at the male impulse to force women to create more humans while the planet was already straining towards collapse (41–42). But more often Without Exception is carried by Houston’s tranquil, reflective voice, which somehow always seems to be talking specifically to you. It is occasionally sad or angry, but more often wry, careful, and generous. Reading it, I sensed Houston writing her characteristically thoughtful, deeply personal truth. But it felt like something else too. An assembling of small offerings to be exchanged for the betterment of the world—here, the book seems to whisper, this is what’s at stake; here are the concerned parties; here is what we’re losing; and here I am in the middle of it all, witnessing so many futures being taken from the women of America; so, take this and have some mercy.
Houston shows us time and again, how it is not only possible but necessary for a woman to set herself “free from her father’s house” (39), and choose the shape of her own life. After Houston freed herself, she found herself three times threatened with a return to the “curtailed freedom” she had vowed to forever leave behind. Each time, she chose not to submit, to abort her early pregnancy, and continue her preferred pursuits of happiness, freedom, and knowledge. As I read Houston’s book, lingering in the back of my mind was the Republican meme of the crazy childless cat lady, most famously employed by JD Vance, to condemn pro-choice Democrats. How different his fantasy is from the childless women of the real world, I thought. “I know how to navigate by the stars, how to mush a team of dogs, how to ask an Icelandic mare to move out in a tölt as opposed to a trot or a flying pace . . . how to steer a double kayak through a series of sea caves with tiny openings called the nostrils” (29), Houston writes, elaborating what not having children has taught her about the world. This freedom, as she frames it, has permitted her not only to explore 80+ countries, to write books, and to teach all across the world, but to mentor undergraduates and graduate students, and even mother some, “in [her] own slant way.” Childlessness, Houston argues, often allows women to choose more ambitious, unique, and important shapes for their lives. The book was written before Kamala Harris began her campaign, but the Democratic candidate for president seems the perfect case in point.
Not only does a childfree life make room for personal ambition, argues Houston, and not only can it be fulfilling, but it can offer greater mystery in its many possibilities. In one of the more moving passages in the book, just after an amusing yet excoriating portrait of a two-week arctic excursion with a disgraced physics professor turned atheist cult leader, Houston writes, “The problem is the dominant cultures’ radical fear of mystery, their incessant desire to control and often annihilate anything they don’t understand. The mystery of the land, the mystery of a woman’s body . . . of gender fluidity, of difference . . . of life in all its mind-expanding, soul-exploding, heart-annihilating array” (118–119). It is this mystery of what a life without children might be like, I think, that must motivate Vance and company to denigrate it.
It is this same cynical failure of imagination, that led Justice James Ho, of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, to encourage medical providers to challenge the legality of mifepristone, “on the grounds of aesthetic injury, not to the mother or to the child, but to those people who take pleasure from laying eyes on a baby . . . including doctors who wish to gaze on them in the womb” (79). Here Houston lets her anger free: “Nowhere does Ho consider that a doctor might not, in fact, derive all that much pleasure from looking inside an 11-year-old girl who was raped by her uncle” (80). But as she often does in Without Exception Houston channels this anger into grace: In fact, “the doctor might,” she writes, “derive something like pleasure from providing a pill to a woman already overburdened with children and debt, or a young woman at the top of her class at MIT who might, unburdened by an unwanted pregnancy, discover a container that makes plastic obsolete” (80–81).
In this same chapter, I found myself chuckling at a line that were it not for the corruption in the judiciary, “we could only conclude Justice Ho is insane” (80). I realized then I’d actually been laughing quite a bit as I read. In fact, the book is often quite funny. Of her own physical size and gender-fluid body, Houston writes, “I like being big enough that I can wrestle with a runaway horse and win . . . that I can fall from that horse at a full gallop and have enough padding to bounce” (20). Of her aversion to having a child that would consume the Earth’s scarce resources, she writes, “I like animals more than people, puppies more than babies, foals more than babies, even kittens more than babies . . . If I could give birth to and raise a leopard cub, for example, that would be the sort of motherhood I might find irresistible” (28). And of her second aborted pregnancy, she writes, “The man I got pregnant with that time was named David, though for reasons I don’t fully understand, whenever I think of him, I think of him as Jeff” (72).
Without Exception offers readers a window into Houston’s lifelong fight to free herself from her father, the torturer; from gender, embracing her genderless body; from the past, knowing “it’s possible to look too hard into the rearview mirror” (33); and from men and children and the rootedness both often require. The kind of freedom she describes is not the freedom of escape, but the freedom of transcendence; not a grand epiphanic transcendence, but a small, quotidian one, made of daily choice, which Houston roots in self-determination, a healthy shamelessness, and caring for and learning from nature. Such a transcendence requires one to continue to make choices to unshackle oneself, whenever one can, from systems of coercion and control, including the expectation of motherhood. We must, through storytelling, grace, and mercy, try to create a new climate in which, “at the end of a long and full existence, one, two, or five abortions are not the defining secret of a woman’s emotional life” (150). Houston’s own version of freedom was made possible by her access to legal abortion, of which she has had three. The first came simultaneously with the publication of her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness. It seemed to Houston then like she’d been given a choice to give birth to that great book or to a child. She chose to give birth to the book, which was wildly successful, and opened her life to a new, mysterious world of possibilities, like conversations with Toni Morrison, who told Houston the ultimate responsibility of those lucky enough to be free was to “to free somebody else” (157). Without Exception takes on that mantle.
