I reached out to my dear friend and kick-ass writer Ef Deal first to write the foreword of INCUBATE: A horror collection of feminine power last year because I had read her novel, ESPIRT DE CORPSE and I knew she was an author with her fingers on the throbbing pulse of women’s fight for equality. Even so, I was blown away when the foreword came in.
Usually a foreword is glanced over and forgotten about. I certain have written more than my share and never ever received a word on them beyond River’s notes to correct my typos. Still, I think they are important to establish the mood of a book, set the tone, so readers are prepared for what they are about to step into.
Everyone who has opened a copy of INCUBATE has come to me about Ef’s Foreword. It has brought people to tears and incited the righteous fury I so wanted to capture in those pages.
So I reached out to Ef Deal again, and asked if she had anymore to say, for the book’s re-launch. At first she wasn’t sure.
And then she sent me this:
If you’ve read the Foreword to Incubate, you know the source of my dark side, and you know the reason I write stories about strong women, women fighting the patriarchy, women fighting for their identity, women who have been crushed and still find the courage to claim their right to exist. My novel Esprit de Corpse may be a rollicking adventure, but the reality of rape and its power to destroy lives is central to the characters. The undercurrent of women’s — young girls’ — lack of autonomy continues in the second book Aéros & Héroes due out later this year.
As a young teenager fearing my boyfriend would be drafted, I fought for the right for 18-yr-olds to vote, for the end of the war, and for the end of the draft; we won. But as an 18-yr-old legal adult, I was stunned to find I did not have full rights as a citizen in my own country.
We had earned the right to vote at 18, but we still couldn’t earn the same salary as a man in a professional position, couldn’t buy our own car, couldn’t get a student loan, couldn’t get a credit card, couldn’t work if we were pregnant but we couldn’t get a prescription for the birth-control pill if we were unmarried (sometimes even if we were married), couldn’t serve on a jury in some states, couldn’t get into a military academy or elite service and couldn’t fight on the front lines, couldn’t get into Harvard or Yale, couldn’t take legal action against employers who groped, raped, or “grabbed by the pussy,” couldn’t get abortions, and couldn’t — gotta love it — COULDN’T REFUSE TO HAVE SEX WITH OUR HUSBANDS FOR ANY REASON. Husbands could beat us, imprison us, torture us, and abandon us, and we had no recourse. Absolutely no justice.
In 2016, women across the US watched, horrified and incredulous, as the profane pussy-grabbing man was elected President, a man I knew personally to be a rapist of young girls, underage girls, because some of those girls were my former students looking for a glamorous job in the Atlantic City casino scene. I have been watching and waiting for that creature to receive the justice due him, and as years passed, I despaired of that hope. Even today, we see a man established as a rapist on the ballot for the 2024 Presidential election.
THAT is the country we live in, so yes, I’m still angry.
Good ol’ boys snickered and women cringed as the judge appointed by that pussy-grabbing obscenity wept and lied about his own pussy-grabbing past, as if no one knew what “FFFF” and “Devil’s Triangle” meant. We women had been victims of those college dickheads, and we could not believe no one called him out for his perjury. He was ultimately appointed to the Supreme Court to sit beside Justice Pubic-Hair-On-a-Can. We should have known in that hour the dickheads were coming for us women.
“Find’em, federalize’em, felonize’em, forget’em.”
In the year since Dobbs, the country continued its relentless judicial abuse of women. States rushed in to outlaw all abortions in all cases, even creating bounty-hunter laws to arrest women on felony charges if they seek abortions in a “free” state. Yes, this was Dredd Scott all over again.
They criminalized miscarriages and stillbirths.
Let that sink in. Women bleeding out in hospital parking lots because doctors are forbidden to help them when they miscarry. Women arrested under felony charges for miscarrying into toilets. These used to be the headlines of sleazy tabloids at the check-out stands. Now they are a fact of life. A fetus has a right to life; a woman does not.
I recognize “Abortion” is a charged topic, one that I had to weigh personally. I would never choose to have an abortion as a matter of convenience or for birth control. However, I was told directly after my first child—delivered by a drunk doctor via a crooked cesarean slice from navel to nethers who badly closed, leaving scar tissue that bound up my uterus—that a second child would likely not thrive, and a second pregnancy might lead to a lot of medical damage to my body given all the mess my first doctor left. Before I even had a chance to weigh the decision, I was pregnant again, and I chose to stay pregnant. It’s not that I believe life begins at conception; I don’t. I also don’t believe in the “sanctity” of a blastocyst. I wanted a second child, and I was willing to weigh the risks against the blessing.
But at least I had that choice. If at some point the fetus died, if at some point my body rejected it, if at some point my life was endangered, I could go to the hospital and my health would be assured. I don’t know what I would have done if the pussy-grabbers and dickheads had denied me that assurance.
Today, the denial of self-determination is being extended beyond the issue of abortion to the issue of bodily autonomy for all. Self-righteous men and women pleading religious supremacy pass laws denying the rights of transgenders and to those seeking to become transgender. In my 30 years of teaching and youth ministry, I’ve observed the torment of teens who know they are born into wrongly-gendered bodies. They ache to be seen for who they are. They long to be released from the ugly cage of flesh that denies them a full life, denies them their identity. They just want the right to exist, and our country refuses to guarantee them that right.
You bet I’m still angry. And I will continue to write kickass characters who refuse to back down in the face of abuse and who find the strength to rebuild their lives after being destroyed.
That’s why the stories curated in Incubate are so important, so powerful, so relevant right now a year later. The rage that engendered them can only continue to grow if the injustice of our country’s treatment of its citizens — ALL of its citizens — is allowed to stand.
- Ef Deal, 2024
LC W. Allingham 
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