GIVEN NO CHOICE

A journalist surveys the history of the abortion rights movement.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, 12 states now have total bans on abortion, leaving more than 23 million women of childbearing age without reproductive freedom. With this book, McDevitt seeks to “provide the next generation of feminists with a primer on reproductive rights history.” While mostly focused on sociopolitical movements in the United States, the volume opens with a brief history of abortion that emphasizes its ubiquity across ancient civilizations, from China to Egypt, as well as the varied Christian responses across two centuries. (The Catholic Church’s anti-abortion position was not finalized as a doctrine until the 1830s.) The author pays particular attention to the 20th and 21st centuries, from the Progressive Era activism of Margaret Sanger in the early 1900s up through the Dobbs case. Discussing the 1960s and ’70s, McDevitt highlights the ways in which both Republican and Democratic politicians have dodged the issue, carefully avoiding alienating coveted Catholic voters while similarly navigating the demands of pro-choice activists. After 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision, the U.S. saw a dramatic partisan divide on the issue, and the author describes how Republicans chipped away at Roe through measures like the Hyde Amendment, which prohibited the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. While national politics guide the book’s chronological flow, what stands out is the author’s ability to connect top-down history with smaller-scale stories that make this history both sweeping and deeply personal in scope. Readers learn of 1940s-era underground abortion clinics and of the tragic stories of women like Porsha Ngumezi, a Texan who died in 2023 after being denied a life-saving D&C procedure following a miscarriage. Though McDevitt doesn’t shy away from expressing staunch opposition to the anti-abortion movement, this is no mere polemic; the work is grounded in scholarly research, and the text includes interviews with dozens of activists, including Patricia Ireland and Gloria Feldt.

A well-researched overview of the struggle for abortion rights in America.