YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE I'VE TOLD

Women’s candid stories bear witness to the state of reproductive health care.

Family medicine physician and chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood, Hudson Peconic, Shah has long served as a reproductive health advocate. As in recent books such as Diana Greene Foster’s The Turnaway Study and Annie Finch’s Choice Words, Shah’s profiles of 17 women—of diverse racial, ethnic, and gender identity—testify to the complexities of choosing to abort a pregnancy. The author contextualizes each woman’s story with information about reproductive rights and access in different states, treatment in various facilities, and the challenges a woman faces within different cultures. “Being a woman of color, specifically Indian American, and a daughter of immigrants,” writes Shah, “has given me some insight to the intersections and complexities that come with being pregnant.” Her subjects include an unmarried woman in Austin, Texas, forced to undergo a mandatory 24-hour waiting period before an abortion could be performed; a teenage daughter of West Indian parents who sought an abortion in the 1990s; a biracial 15-year-old granted judicial consent so she could proceed with an abortion; several women who chose abortion when faced with evidence of the fetus’s severe abnormalities; and a genderqueer individual whose experience made Shah aware that “gender diversity among patients should be matched with gender diversity among health care providers.” For some women, abortion was proscribed by their religious background or family beliefs; others were unable to be helped at Catholic hospitals, which provided other medical services. Some women were forced to go out of their home state, incurring huge expenses besides the cost of the procedure. “Abortion is health care,” Shah writes. “But there is no other form of health care that requires patients to face as many obstacles.” These moving stories, taken together, sharply reveal the connections among “reproductive justice, gender justice, racial justice, and economic justice.”

A strong contribution to discussions of reproductive rights.