July 17, 2025, 2:45pm

Kylie Cheung’s forthcoming e-book Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans is a searing investigation into the intersecting buildings that management the lives of ladies and pregnant individuals. In her introduction, Cheung writes that the e-book “is my greatest try and contextualize the deeper impacts of abortion legal guidelines, notably on endemic gender-based violence in our society.” The e-book is brief however extensive ranging, addressing the world post-Dobbs, the criminalization of being pregnant, the methods abusers excert cruelty and management, and the way politicians have deserted and failed susceptible People. As Rita Smith of domesticshelters.org is quoted within the e-book, “We’re seeing a cultural shift in what the worth of ladies’s lives is.”

Cheung is a reporter for Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Each Day, and was beforehand a employees reporter for Jezebel, the place she coated all kinds of points. I beloved Cheung’s information e-book, and was curious what different writing had impressed Cheung whereas she was engaged on Coercion.

“What’s attention-grabbing,” she instructed me, “is the books that I instantly regarded as books which have influenced me weren’t essentially about abortion or reproductive rights instantly.” It is a reflection of how she thinks about abortion, as not “this single difficulty that exists in a silo” however somewhat one thing formed by a “enormous confluence of techniques of energy.”

In inspecting abortion and the violence inflicted on ladies and pregnant individuals by means of a wider lens, Cheung instructed me she was explicitly “difficult this concept that gender-based violence solely takes type as interpersonal violence,” and as an alternative “demonstrating how the state itself may be an abuser.” She wished to put in writing a e-book “that explicitly takes the place that abortion bans are state violence and that the anti-abortion motion’s place is a basically violent one.”

Liberating Abortion by Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone and Relinquished by Gretchen Sisson

Cheung discovered inspiration in Liberating Abortion and Relinquished, two books that broadened her excited about the problems round abortion care and being pregnant.

Relinquished particularly, “actually complicates these narratives you’re instructed the place adoption is the choice to abortion,” Cheung instructed me. Adoption shouldn’t be a easy choice, particularly given an American context the place so many individuals lack sources and assist. In apply adoption shouldn’t be a easy answer, however as an alternative an “emotionally difficult and capitalist business,” as Cheung put it.

Feminist Metropolis: Claiming Area in a Man-Made World by Leslie Kern

In the identical vein of considering extra broadly concerning the buildings round anti-abortionists’ want to regulate the lives of pregnant individuals, Cheung advisable Feminist Metropolis by the feminist geographer Leslie Kern. The e-book explores not solely how cities fail ladies by means of their design, but in addition provides hopeful options by imagining methods we are able to construct extra secure, welcoming, and simply cities.

“It was simply so eye-opening for me,” Cheung mentioned, “how cities and concrete planning, public life, and on a regular basis options of life exterior of the home are inherently exclusionary towards ladies and pregnant individuals and moms.”

Kern’s emphasis on imagining a greater future was one thing Cheung tries to hold into her personal work. “It was inspirational for me,” she mentioned, “to consider constructing one thing new, past simply being vital of issues all day.”

Regular Life: Administrative Violence, Crucial Trans Politics, and the Limits of Regulation by Dean Spade

Cheung’s excited about what options may appears like was additionally impressed by Dean Spade’s e-book Regular Life, which articulates a forceful problem to the authorized equality framework for social change, and champions extra grassroots approaches to justice and security that transcend merely searching for state recognition of rights.

Cheung instructed me that this e-book got here to her at a time, “after I was simply beginning to have doubts concerning the Democratic Get together and neoliberal identification politics, and this notion that ladies and queer individuals and marginalized teams want identity-based illustration greater than we want redistributional insurance policies” was hanging to her.

She was cautious to emphasize that she thinks rights are essential, however that considering of them as the one method ahead “coexists with the fact that beneath that state of issues, our wants weren’t being met and folks had been being criminalized.” It is a mind-set that “has so many cracks and fissures the place so many various susceptible individuals will fall by means of these cracks,” she mentioned.

Coercion has some forceful critiques of not simply the proper and the anti-abortion motion in America, but in addition the ways in which “Democrats have failed us whereas weaponizing concern in actually coercive methods,” Cheung mentioned. And whereas they’ll’t shoulder the blame utterly, and even most of it, “a whole lot of the place we’re at present is due to Democratic fecklessness or telling individuals to not dream larger,” she mentioned.

A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk

We talked quite a bit about Rachel Cusk, and the way stunning and attentive her writing is. “It takes me perpetually to learn her books,” Cheung mentioned, “as a result of each different sentence, I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s probably the most superb sentence.’”

Cheung singled out A Life’s Work as a “e-book that basically modified my life.” Cusk is “very sincere about these items,” Cheung mentioned, “that you just’re not presupposed to be sincere about.”

In A Life’s Work, Cheung “discovered a lot concerning the elementary and virtually mundane form of violence and terror of being pregnant even beneath the perfect and most very best circumstances.”

Coercion could be very attentive to those small indignities too. Along with dialogue of coverage and statistics, Cheung’s e-book is stuffed with evocative, searing particulars. She credit Cusk with illuminating the non-public facet of what she writes about.

“I’ve simply spent a lot time reporting on the insurance policies,” Cheung mentioned, “however I believe earlier than studying [A Life’s Work], I hadn’t actually thought that deeply about how mysterious and unsettling being pregnant may be.”

My Work by Olga Ravn

One other e-book that reframed how Cheung thought of being pregnant, parenting, and writing was Olga Ravn’s My Work, a novel a couple of lady who’s misplaced after giving beginning and turns to literature to manage.

Turning into a mum or dad is one thing that “will clearly disrupt your capability to supply or not really feel such as you’re being egocentric once you’re writing,” Chueng mentioned, one thing that she’s skilled a point of in her personal life, albeit to a a lot lesser extent: “I already really feel that now after I’m not spending sufficient time with my buddies.”

Excellent Victims And the Politics of Enchantment by Mohammed El-Kurd

One of the crucial highly effective sections of Coercion explores the overlaps in ways and motivations between anti-abortion state violence and anti-Palestinian state violence. Cheung talked to me at size about how a lot she loves Mohammed El-Kurd’s Excellent Victims, his e-book on Palestinian dignity that weaves collectively historical past, private expertise, and reporting. The e-book, Cheung mentioned, combines El-Kurd’s “sensible political thoughts and the ethical readability of his arguments.”

Cheung’s considering on Palestine and on abortion is linked, she mentioned, and Coercion “could be very a lot about understanding state violence and gender-based violence as conjoined.” The 2 coercive agendas share a method of seeing the world and working in it. Cheung instructed me that she’s “at all times seen imperialism and Israel’s occupation and genocide of Palestine as equally co-opting a whole lot of the ways of abusers and individuals who perpetrate gender-based violence.”

El-Kurd describes the ways in which Palestinians, like victims of sexual assault, are made to “audition for credibility or humanity.” To be a sufferer in these contexts is to be “beneath cross-examination,” Cheung mentioned, “You’re the one who’s begging for these primary elements of respect and humanity that individuals, your oppressors, are simply born holding.”

Know My Title by Chanel Miller

Chanel Miller’s memoir about her personal trauma and transformation was a e-book that reminded Cheung to not overlook the people in her writing. Cheung instructed me about how a lot she admired Miller’s “brilliance as a storyteller, how humorous she is, and the silliness of the e-book.” Miller’s deeply private writing struck Cheung too, particularly the “very relatable nonlinear nature of her therapeutic.”

Miller’s e-book is a reminder to be cautious of an over reliance on statistics, since “there’s this side of humanity that will get in some methods erased once you’re similar to, ‘have a look at all of those horrible statistics.’”

The Feminist and the Intercourse Offender by Judith Levine and Erica Meiners and The Proper to Intercourse by Amia Srinivasan

Cheung credit each of The Feminist and The Intercourse Offender and The Proper to Intercourse for difficult her considering on subjects she has coated broadly. The Feminist and the Intercourse Offender particularly made Cheung rethink how the American authorized system impacts each victims and the accused. “What does justice for them appear like?” Cheung instructed me.

And Srinivasan’s e-book, “takes on so many daring subjects about intercourse, about violence, about attraction, intercourse work, intercourse training, criminalization,” Cheung mentioned, “and presents so many views which are all actually compelling and but usually at odds with one another.”

It’s the form of advanced considering that defies easy explanations, and the form of writing that Cheung needs to do in her personal work. She tries to be incisively “difficult to a whole lot of preconceived beliefs,” as she put it.

Coercion does simply that, asking the reader to contemplate  how the online of various techniques and social buildings allow extra entrapping types of violence and management. Coercion is a brief and direct e-book, providing an outline of the anti-abortion motion’s ideology of violence, and the dimensions of the coercive agenda is overwhelming and maddening.

The anti-abortion wrestle, Cheung instructed me, is “a matter of life, whether or not that’s company over your life, or the power to pursue a dignified life, or the power to flee your abuser, or the power to outlive.” It’s additionally a matter of demise, she mentioned, “with so many materials penalties for pregnant individuals, for victims of home violence, for many who have just like the least sources beneath capitalism and white supremacy.”

Cheung’s writing is as clear and decisive as a thunderclap, guided by the power of her convictions and the readability of her arguments. She’s a author who is aware of what she believes, and her prose is undaunted.

“I like how I write,” she instructed me, “and I believe that my anger, and the issues that I really feel, and the issues that I consider, and my outrage actually comes by means of. I don’t know methods to write in every other method.”