"Lucky Girl" by Bridget Potter; The Best American Essays 2011

The essay “Lucky Girl” by Bridget Potter is a very interesting story about a girl in the 1960s who is pregnant during the time when abortions were illegal. She does not mean to get pregnant, being young, and just recently independent from her childhood, so when she finds out about the pregnancy, she is willing to do anything to get rid of it and pretend it never happened. Also, since she is an unmarried woman, there are plenty of consequences for pregnancy, such as unemployment or social ostracization. She and her boyfriend try the superstitions they thought might undo the pregnancy, but in the end none of them work. Finally, she goes to a doctor to see about an abortion, but there is nothing he can do because of the law. She keeps looking, and ends up (as a last resort) going to a clinic in Puerto Rico with a lot of borrowed money to get the procedure done. In the end, the baby is aborted and the main character is not infected, hence the title “Lucky Girl.” There was a high chance of infection due to the fact that no professional doctor would break the law. Near the end of the essay, Potter alludes to Dante’s Inferno when she says “the name of the place was the Ninth Circle, the lowest region of Dante’s Hell, below which lies only Lethe, the river of forgetfulness” (154). This reference can be related to the narrator’s situation, having gone through hell to get her baby aborted. Even in her situation though, she is not in a place where she can forget what she had to do. This piece was a memoir by Bridget Potter, having experienced this same event when she was only nineteen. Potter is now an executive producer, having worked her way up in Hollywood. She has a degree and an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University. While there, she instructed in the University Writing Program. Having worked for most of her career in media, she knows a lot about engaging an audience and getting her message across. I believe that Potter did an impeccable job of informing about her experience during a different time, especially through her use of allusions, which helped the reader to connect. The intended readers would be anyone who is going through a time of difficult choices.

Map of Dante’s Hell; Allusion to the 9th Circle

http://www.clockworksky.net/rp_dante_hell.html