Past Due: An Analysis

A critical reading of Anne Finger’s Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth.

Anne Finger’s memoir “Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth” represents a classic example of the feminist principle that “the personal is political”. Her account of her life as a feminist, disability activist and campaigner for reproductive freedom and the story of her giving birth to a potentially disabled child, may be read on a superficial level as an exercise in autobiography. However, as this review will argue, it would be more accurate to read Finger’s memoir as part of a feminist project to represent the convergence of the personal and political in contemporary feminism and thereby resist those forces that would label, categorize and dehumanize women, the disabled and the marginalized.