Is it possible to be a mother and pursue a creative life? Yes, but it is never easy | Sophie Brickman

A new book explores how pregnancy and motherhood affected the lives of artists including Audre Lorde and Susan Sontag. At our current moment, the questions it raises take on additional urgency

When Susan Sontag had an abortion in the early 1950s, the abortionist used no anesthetic and had to turn up the radio to smother her screams. When Audre Lorde had breakup sex with her boyfriend and later realized she'd gotten pregnant, she cobbled together two weeks' pay and gave it to a nurse for a painful and terrifying procedure that she later wrote was a kind of shift from safety towards self-preservation". When Ursula Le Guin got pregnant by her Harvard boyfriend, who had assured her that you didn't need to use a condom the second time in a night, her progressive parents paid what amounted to a full year's tuition at Radcliffe to get her a professional, safe and clean abortion, one she didn't speak about for decades. And Alice Walker opted for illegal abortion because, in the unsparing words of biographer Julie Phillips, her alternative was suicide".

Reproductive rights - including access to abortion, contraception, fertility treatment and healthcare - are a necessary part of creative mothering," Phillips writes in her illuminating new book, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, which features the stories of all of these creative women, and more, in a quest to understand that overlap in the Venn diagram of motherhood and creativity. All of them saw control over the timing and material circumstances of their pregnancies, whether they were able to achieve it or not, as essential to the practice of their art."

Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age