William Carlos Williams Takes on Dobbs v. Jackson

*William Carlos Williams* by Hugo Gellert; Crayon, ink and pencil on paper; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; © Estate of Hugo Gellert

Last year’s execrable U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which struck down a woman’s right to an abortion, has many worthy and valiant opponents in the areas of social justice advocacy and public law who I pray will grow in number.

William Carlos Williams’s “A Cold Front” (below), published in Poetry in the memorable month of September 1939, however, delivers, without political rhetoric or excess drama, a potent and particularly timely image of the toll unwanted pregnancies can take on the life of one woman—leading us to ponder what might have happened if she had not had the services of someone like Doc Williams to rely on.

Williams, a pediatrician in his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey, as well as one of the twentieth century’s finest poets, drew on his medical practice in the composition of poems and stories of extraordinary clarity and humanity. In “A Cold Front,” a doctor begins with a stark description, “This woman with a dead face,” and then goes on to objectively report the facts of the case: a woman with seven foster children and a new baby as well as one on the way wants pills for an abortion. (How intimate and frank Williams’s language seems for 1939!)

Williams displays in the second stanza his exceptional ear for the rhythms of American speech, rhythms which always emerge in context. “Uh hum,” the woman says blankly, “while/her blanketed infant makes/unrelated grunts of salutation.” That last phrase is deliciously dry, and the contrasting sounds made by mother and infant are subtly telling.

In a phrase lightly echoing Psalm 23 (“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies”), the doctor compares the patient’s acute exhaustion in the most natural of terms. She’s “like a cat/on a limb too tired to go higher//from its tormentors.”

Then, as now, a good doctor grasps the urgency of such a situation. “In a case like this I know,” he says, “quick action is the main thing.”

William Carlos Williams

A Cold Front

This woman with a dead face
has seven foster children
and a new baby of her own in
spite of that. She want pills

for an abortion and says,
Uh hum, in reply to me while
her blanketed infant makes
unrelated grunts of salutation.

She looks at me with her mouth
open and blinks her expressionless
carved eyes, like a cat
on a limb too tired to go higher

from its tormentors. And still
the baby chortles in its spit
and there is a dull flush
almost of beauty to the woman’s face

as she says, looking at me
quietly, I won’t have any more.
In a case like this I know
quick action is the main thing.