Grief and Fury

Christa Parravani ’99’s new memoir, Loved and Wanted, is a devastating account of women’s limited access to reproductive health in 21st-century America.

Parravani was in a floundering marriage and struggling to make ends meet as a writing professor in West Virginia when she learned she was pregnant with her third child. Unable to get a safe abortion, she carried the baby to term—only to see West Virginia’s poor health care system fail her son, who was born sick.

Publishers Weekly says the book is “a powerful account of what many women face in the U.S. today.”

LOVED AND WANTED
Christa Parravani ’99
Henry Holt and Co., 2020

This story appears as part of the Smithies Create column in the Winter 2020–21 issue of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly.

Photograph by Nina Subin