Abortion After Roe

Abortion is--and always has been--an arena for contesting power relations between women and men. When in 1973 the Supreme Court made the procedure legal throughout the United States, it seemed that women were at last able to make decisions about their own bodies. In the four decades that followed, however, abortion became ever more politicized and stigmatized. Abortion after Roe chronicles and analyzes what the new legal status and changing political environment have meant for abortion providers and their patients. Johanna Schoen sheds light on the little-studied experience of performing and receiving abortion care from the 1970s--a period of optimism--to the rise of the antiabortion movement and the escalation of antiabortion tactics in the 1980s to the 1990s and beyond, when violent attacks on clinics and abortion providers led to a new articulation of abortion care as moral work. As Schoen demonstrates, more than four decades after the legalization of abortion, the abortion provider community has powerfully asserted that abortion care is a moral good.

In the decade after the 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion, advocates on both sides sought common ground. But as pro-abortion and anti-abortion positions hardened over time into pro-choice and pro-life, the myth was born that Roe v. Wade was a ruling on a woman’s right to choose. Mary Ziegler’s account offers a corrective.

"Abortion is--and always has been--an arena for contesting power relations between women and men. When in 1973 the Supreme Court made the procedure legal throughout the United States, it seemed that women were at last able to make decisions about their own bodies. In the four decades that followed, however, abortion became ever more politicized and stigmatized. Abortion after Roe chronicles and analyzes what the new legal status and changing political environment have meant for abortion providers and their patients"--

The real story of the medical campaign against abortionthrough the eyes of pro-choice physicians. The real story of the medical campaign against abortionthrough the eyes of pro-choice physicians. Read more from Beacon Press author Carole Joffe on RHrealitycheck.org "Well-researched and clearly written. . . Provides a compelling narrative of the dedication of doctors who have braved society's continuing ambivalence toward women's right to choose." —K. Kaufmann, San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle A fabulous read. . . intense and absorbing. —Marge Berer, Women's Review of Books

INTRODUCTION: FETAL STORIES; 1. Discovering Fetal Life, 1870s-1920s; 2. Interpreting Fetal Bodies, 1930s-1970s; 3. Defining Fetal Personhood, 1973-1976; 4. Defending Fetal Rights: 1970s-1990s; 5. Debating Fetal Pain, 1984-2007; EPILOGUE: FETAL MEANINGS; NOTES; BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction Finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 A New York Times Notable Book of 2021 One of TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 "The scope is sweeping, the writing is beautiful. It’s an epic story worthy of the impact this one case has had on the American psyche." —Michel Martin, NPR "Stupendous…. If you want to understand Roe more deeply before the coming decision, read it." —Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court’s most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart. Despite her famous pseudonym, “Jane Roe,” no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers—a previously unseen trove—and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America. Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma’s life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe. Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for adoption. Prager found those women, including the youngest—Baby Roe—now fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time, from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from conception. The Family Roe abounds in such revelations—not only about Norma and her children but about the broader “family” connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets. An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life.

2013 marks the 40th anniversary of the US Supreme Court's abortion decision in Roe v. Wade. In recent years, attempts to overturn the ruling have reached a fevered pitch, with nearly 100 new laws going into effect. The chilling effect of these laws has been to establish a reproductive health care system in these states that makes abortion legal in name only, and which places women - especially poor, rural or those of colour - into a separate health care class, with few choices or control. Featuring a foreword by Gloria Feldt.

Roe's privacy rationale inspired left-leaning movements unrelated to abortion--around sexual orientation, class, gender, race, disability, and patient rights. But groups on the right used it as well, to attack government involvement in American life. Mary Ziegler's analysis shows that privacy belongs to no party or cause.