4 stars: Very good.

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The title says it all. Sarah Weddington was a 27 year old activist and new lawyer in Austin, Texas. her own abortion in Mexico (with no after effects, thankfully) and her volunteerism led her to argue what is possibly the most important case involving women to SCOTUS. This book covers that--but also the years since (published in 1993) as Roe. v. Wade started being whittled away (and so much worse now). She has a closing section with real things that people can do to help sustain women's rights over their bodies as well as women's rights in total.

Some excerpts I found important:

"Before abortion became legal in California in 1967, the county hospital in LA had a ward called the Infected Obstetrics Ward. It had about 60 beds for women suffering the results of botched abortions, and sometimes abortions they had performed themselves. From mid 1970 through 1972, nearly 350,000 women left their own states to obtain legal abortions in NY, one of the few states where abortion was then legal and available to non residents."

"Jane Roe asked if it would help if she had been raped. We said no, the Texas law had no exception for rape. It was just as illegal for a doctor to do an abortion for someone who had been raped as it was in any other situation... We did not want the TExas law changed only to allow abortion in cases of rape. We wanted a decision that abortion was covered by a right of privacy. Our principles were not based on how conception occurred." [Lawrence Tribe talks about this extensively in his exemplary book "Abortion: Clash of the Absolutes".

"One of our arguments [in Roe] was that the original anti-abortion statues were adopted because of a lack of medical techniques to prevent infection, but that abortion in early pregnancy was now statistically safer than carrying a pregnancy to term. We wanted to show the court that the original basis for the statute was no longer valid."

"I was able to cite Means' article, which documented that at the time the Constitution weas adopted, there was no common law prohibition against abortion and abortions were available to the women of this country."

"[upon hearing of her victory in Roe she said to the press] "I would much prefer that we did not have an abortion problem, that instead pregnancies be prevented" and "my vow to lead the legislative battle to liberalize the flow of contraceptive information to minors".

"In essence [Justice Douglas' opinion] those who oppose abortion place the entire value on the fetus and none on the woman; they seem to look right through her, as if she were invisible, and see only the fetus".

"Many who share my beliefs are pro-choice, not pro-abortion. The best analogy I've found is divorce. No one says "I'm pro-divorce" When someone announces wedding plans, the response is never "that's terrific. Maybe someday you can get a divorce. In fact, most people try hard to avoid divorce, but we do know many who have been through one. We are not for divorce, but we do not make divorce illegal, although some countries, such as Ireland, do. We know that making divorce illegal would only cause different and more difficult problems".

In the Webster hearing, Justice O'Connor asked an especially apt question: "If tehre is no right of privacy, what would keep the government from being able to require women to have abortions in the future?" Or, one might add, from forcing women to bear children, a la Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale"? " [the answer, of course, is *nothing*!!!]

Abortion is also an issue elsewhere in the world. It is illegal in most of Latin America, where illegal abortion is the greatest cause of death for women 18 to 40 years of age.

[Talking to people on speaking tours, Weddington says in closing} "Their faces and voices flood back as I write, and I wish I could share all their stories with you. They make me believe that people will not voluntarily go backward, will not acquiesce when the freedom of choice is taken from them. First comes determination to act: that I sense growing. Then comes action. ( )