When an 18-week ultrasound revealed that her son had only developed half of his heart, Jill Christman did not know what to do. In her 2026 memoir, The Heart Folds Early, Christman unspools her ultimate decision to terminate the pregnancy, shedding light on the various heart-wrenching reasons a mother might choose not to carry a baby to term.
Christman’s memoir underscores a universal truth: no one knows what they will do in any given scenario until they find themselves in that situation. Any discussion of the conditional (what would I do?) is merely a thought experiment with no grounding in the reality of an impending decision. In the question of abortion, many politicians want women to believe the opposite: that we are morally superior if we do know with 100% certainty that we would not have an abortion, regardless of the conditions. From this premise, we can extrapolate that politicians without uteri will never know what choice they would make about an abortion because they will never be faced with these situations. As Christman argues, laws around abortion are necessarily based on this kind of unhelpful thought experiment.
Christman’s memoir is a story of both love and grief. Christman integrates her grief at losing her fiancé into this story about grief and motherhood. Recovery from trauma is often equated with the ability to reinsert traumatic memories into a timeline of the self. This book reads like the narrative stitched together from the incorporation of traumatic and normal memories. It is clear how much work Christman has done to be able to write about these events with such clarity of purpose and evident care for both her readers and herself. In her acknowledgements, Christman explains that it took her a long time to write this book, remarking that she reapplied herself to her writing after the 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. A careful reader can appreciate not only the timeliness of this book, but the processing work that she was able to do from the vantage point of time.
From the first chapters, Christman reveals her mastery of writing about grief in somatic ways that reject clichés. This skill is central to her ability to describe the grief in different chapters of her life while analyzing the patterns in her actions. Christman bravely shares the fears that are, for her, vitally connected to motherhood. She describes in-depth her tendency to imagine worst-case scenarios and catalog negative outcomes, especially in the age of early prenatal testing. As she had never heard of hypoplastic left heart syndrome (her son’s diagnosis), Christman demonstrates that many of our greatest fears are things that we do not yet know to fear. The realities of fear’s connection to motherhood from its earliest stages raise questions about the tenuous sense of certainty positive test results can provide and the impossibility of being ready for worst-case scenarios. Christman explains her own reasons for terminating the pregnancy while maintaining respect and compassion for people who have made different decisions in the same situation.
This memoir is a nexus point between the personal and the political. By shedding light on the specific and varied lived realities that lead pregnant people to seek out abortions, The Heart Folds Early complicates the political story of abortion while providing the specificity of one woman’s experience with grief and motherhood. By excavating her own feelings and the complexity of her experience, Christman’s story is one of both universal and specific appeal. Both those who have experienced something similar to Christman and those who have wondered whether something that evokes fear is still worth wanting and fighting for will find something to connect to in this memoir. Christman’s candor about grief inspires the reader to confront and integrate their own grief into their life rather than letting it define them.
Works Cited
Christman, Jill. The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir. University of Nebraska Press, 2026.