Caitlin E. Stobie is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Thin Slices (Verve Poetry Press, 2022). Her personal website is www.caitlinstobie.com.

• Acknowledgements Credits Introduction: Abortion, discourse and ecological metaphor 1 ANIMALSPregnancy as parasitism in Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree Listening to beastly riddles Slavery, gestation and infantilization Translating negation A human being and powerful 2 PLANTSUprooting desire in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town Autopoiesis and the Bildungsroman Apartheid’s abortive environments Seeds of disgust, roots of deviance Creative formations 3 MINERALSThe in/organic tragedy of Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning Transforming ‘rock bottom’ Reproductive agency in two abortion scenes Beating hearts or striking rocks 4 HUMANSQueer vitality and Bessie Head’s fiction ‘Something or someone’ and The Collector of Treasures Creative ferment in the Personal Choices trilogy Coda: New African time Conclusion: Questioning power, transforming futures References Notes

Caitlin Stobie’s Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction situates literature front and centre in important debates about reproductive technologies and women’s bodies in southern Africa, and more broadly. The book confronts questions of secrecy and shame around the subject head-on, pointing out in powerful and persuasive ways that southern African fiction was theorizing abortion and agency in openly feminist terms throughout the period of anti-apartheid struggle. In discussions of Wilma Stockenstrom, Zoe Wicomb, Yvonne Vera and Bessie Head, Stobie argues compellingly that creativity represents a force for social justice.