We all have these stories, even if they’re not our own—stories of friends or aunts or mothers. Stories of women who have faced the miracle of the human body in less than miraculous circumstances, women who have starred their own power dead in the eyes and made a decision, women who have considered “life�—not as existential philosophy—but as a pragmatic and urgent (more urgent than anything has ever been) question.

It’s breathtaking and devastating to see a handful of these stories gathered in one place. The new anthology, Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion, edited by Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont, is not to be missed. It adds dimensions to the word “choice,� to the question of pregnancy, even to the field of what it means to be female.

In consistently original voices and beautifully crafted writing (not always such a hallmark of anthologies), these stories enfold you in a dark but deeply compelling fog and remind you of how totally powerful and pained we sometimes are. Some stories literally had me in tears on the subway, some smiling on my couch, a few outraged and angry at a world that still causes women so much suffering with its callous bureaucracies and hypocritical politics.

Janet Mason Ellerby’s essay about her forced adoption pre Roe vs. Wade reminds us that pregnancy is not just about the choice to have a baby or not, the choice to raise a child or not, but the choice to fully possess one’s own body. She writes:

My body was not my own; perhaps it had never been. When it had escaped my parents’ control, Alec had immediately taken it up, and when he had abandoned it, a baby had claimed it. It may sound as if I am unwilling to take responsibility for my actions, but in fact, I did not completely understand that my body was my own dominion, that I could say what did and did not happen to it.

And Pam Houston, ever crystal clear in her sassy logic, writes of a friend who told her:

People are pro-life because it gives them a way to proclaim their potential innocence in the eyes of God. I’m prochoice because I’ve never had any illusions about my own innocence. God has been able to see through me right from the start.

That touched me deeply as we approach this anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. I’ve never had an abortion but I’ve been through a couple with friends, and I have to say that, though the experiences were sometimes spiritually and emotionally confusing, one thing was always clear to me. Women are profoundly powerful and often left with the most messy and miraculous of life’s questions; they deserve these choices because they can handle them. God (or whoever or whatever) knows that better than anyone.

Next Time: Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit and then Flying Too Close to the Sun by Cathy Wilkerson.