Our Choices
Women's Personal Decisions About Abortion
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- $49.99
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- $49.99
Publisher Description
Relationships, sex, pregnancy, and abortion are among the topics discussed with engaging frankness by sixteen women in this collection of oral histories. Our Choices: Women’s Personal Decisions About Abortion presents readers with the opportunity to understand the abortion choice in a way that statistics and abstract debate cannot. The accounts show how pregnancy and abortion are inextricably tied together in the complicated social and psychological lives of men and women. By exploring the women’s feelings about becoming pregnant unintentionally and the circumstances surrounding that occurrence, the stories reveal much about how men and women communicate with each other about sex, the effect of pregnancy and abortion on relationships, and how a woman’s upbringing has shaped her knowledge and attitudes regarding sex and abortion.Our Choices: Women’s Personal Decisions About Abortion includes stories of both legal and illegal abortions from the 1950s through the 1980s. The women included represent a variety of socioeconomic, cultural, and religious backgrounds, reminding readers that any woman can potentially be faced with the decisions surrounding unintended pregnancy and abortion. The issues raised cover the trauma of an illegal abortion, abortion versus adoption, abortion following rape, abortion as a medical procedure, and the role of family and partner support.Women who are considering abortion or who have had an abortion in the past will gain a deeper understanding of this complex and private experience; their partners, families, and friends will be better equipped to provide help and support. Professionals, including counselors and health care providers, will want to read this engrossing book and refer their clients to it. Students in women’s studies and health care programs, policymakers, ethicists, and others with an interest in women’s issues will find the book enlightening. It should be read by anyone wishing a more complete knowledge of abortion and the vast array of issues it encompasses.Our Choices: Women’s Personal Decisions About Abortion can be sold in family planning clinics to clients, used in pregnancy counseling training, and retained for reference by both public libraries and family planning clinics, reproductive rights organizations, universities, and women’s centers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sixteen women tell their highly individual stories about having abortions in America. The range of experience is wide--from an illegal abortion in a hotel room to a more recent one in a contemporary clinic--though Hoshiko fails to explain how these stories were selected or how representative they are of women's experience with abortion. Still, this is an opportune attempt to add more--and relevant--voices to a debate that promises to continue for some time. One woman tells of the illegal abortion performed by her doctor husband with meat skewers; in another a young woman compares the clinic she visited to a factory production line. There are some common elements across the individual accounts. Each narrator affirms the importance of legal abortion, for example, even those women who had been fervently anti-abortion before their own unwanted pregnancies. A short foreword by Norma McCorvey, alias Jane Roe, provides a historical context, and an appendix of pro-choice organizations leaves no question which side of the issue Hoshiko (a research associate for the Association for Women's AIDS Research and Education) lands on. Her introduction is a reasoned look at the available alternatives to abortion and their respective failings.
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