Everything the speaker of «Abortion Pill» knows about another woman's death arrives secondhand. The first three lines all begin "I heard," which turns the scene into rumour. We see the girl who "writhed and cursed all night" only as a story passed along. The distance matters, because the speaker is deeply implicated. The "you" of the poem is a man who, we learn, promised marriage to both women.
The central idea is survivor's guilt in a tangled form. The speaker feels relief and grief at once, since the dead woman lived out the future the speaker walked away from. The poem never argues about abortion itself. It studies luck, and how thin the line is between the woman who lives and the woman who dies. Because the speaker is alive only by having "jumped ship," her safety comes with an uncomfortable debt.
The poem's construction supports this. The opening stanza ends four lines on one sound: night, tight, daylight, alright. The repetition has the insistent rhythm of a lullaby, and the last word is the mother's promise that "it'll be alright." The next line, "Until she was gone," breaks that promise flatly, and the chiming rhyme starts to sound like false comfort. After that the rhymes loosen (gone/done, better/later), as if the poem were losing its composure. The lines are long and uneven, closer to speech than to strict metre. It reads like something confided to a friend rather than something polished for an audience.
The most striking moment is the single word "Funny," set alone on its line. It is a bitter pause, a joke with nothing funny in it. The speaker has just heard that the man "promised to marry her later," the same promise once made to her. What follows is another silence: "I refrained from mentioning that you once promised that to me." The man's promise works like a script he has recited more than once, and the speaker's quiet suggests she is still carrying something she cannot say aloud.
The imagery is compact and well chosen. "Jumped ship" suggests escaping a vessel that was always going to sink. The sacrificial "sheep" comes with it, led to "the alter of love" (the text as given spells it "alter," but "altar" is clearly meant). Ship and sheep are nearly the same word, differing by one vowel, as the two women differ by one decision. There is also a pattern of whispering. In the first stanza the mother "whispered" reassurance, and in the third a voice at the back of the speaker's mind keeps "whispering" that "that could have been me." One whisper tries to comfort, the other haunts.
The final stanza is the most emotionally complicated. "Caught at a hard place" looks like a trimmed version of the familiar idiom about a rock and a hard place, with the rock missing. Whatever the reason, the dilemma that follows is between two feelings rather than two choices: to be "thankful that I'm safe" or to "cry for the life that probably took my place." The word "probably" admits she cannot be sure, yet "took my place" makes the dead woman a substitute. Then comes the hammering conditional, "Had I not left, / It could have been me," repeated until it sounds like a verdict. Only in the last line does the title's object appear, when the pill "failed to it's job." Describing a drug as a worker who missed a task is chillingly clinical for a death the poem has made so painful.
The poem's significance lies in its viewpoint. It does not speak for the woman who died, who remains nameless and heard about, or from a position of judgment. It speaks from the near-miss, the person who sees her own possible ending in someone else's. The writing has rough edges, and the grammar slips here and there, but the plain, direct voice suits a speaker who is still working out whether she is lucky, guilty, or both. By leaving that question open, the poem asks readers to sit with it too.