Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood

Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood reads quickly- as if the author is conveying her story through a coffee date conversation. The chapters are the breaks where Parravani stops to offer her children a snack, wipe someone’s face or answer a question.

This memoir should be celebrated for two reasons: it shares the complexity of motherhood in a very accessible and empathetic way, and explains how women’s reproductive choices are thwarted every day in ways that cannot be ignored.

Parravani is forty years old with two children and one steady source of income when she gets a positive pregnancy test. She is an adjunct professor at a West Virginia college and her husband is financially and emotionally unreliable. This unplanned pregnancy is a nudge to a precarious drop-off. The author and her family are barely scraping by monthly as it is. The tragedy is, Parravani wants to want this baby.

As required by law, she seeks abortion as early as possible but due to administrative bureaucracy and sabotage from healthcare systems, she is unable to. Parravani carries her son to term and he is loved and cherished. But her memoir closes with this “Love is a word not strong enough to describe what I feel. But it’s a word anti-choice laws and activists use to trap mothers… Choice is complex. I can both want to have had reasonable access to abortion and love and want my son.”