Recall Abortion

Bad products are recalled every day: the Ford Pinto, faulty tires, dangerous prescription pills, contaminated lettuce. If a product is found to pose even a modest risk to those who use it, you can bet it will soon be pulled from the market. . . . Unless that product is abortion.

Abortion is a legal medical procedure that has been provided to millions of American women. Since the Institute of Medicine first reviewed the health implications of national legalized abortion in 1975, there has been a plethora of related scientific research, including well-designed randomized clinical trials, systematic reviews, and epidemiological studies examining abortion care. This research has focused on examining the relative safety of abortion methods and the appropriateness of methods for different clinical circumstances. With this growing body of research, earlier abortion methods have been refined, discontinued, and new approaches have been developed. The Safety and Quality of Abortion Care in the United States offers a comprehensive review of the current state of the science related to the provision of safe, high-quality abortion services in the United States. This report considers 8 research questions and presents conclusions, including gaps in research.

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.

At a UN General Assembly Special Session in 1999, governments recognised unsafe abortion as a major public health concern, and pledged their commitment to reduce the need for abortion through expanded and improved family planning services, as well as ensure abortion services should be safe and accessible. This technical and policy guidance provides a comprehensive overview of the many actions that can be taken in health systems to ensure that women have access to good quality abortion services as allowed by law.

An indispensable resource for students, scholars, and activists concerned about current attacks on abortion rights, this book offers an unmatched account of the emergence, consolidation, and consequences of the antiabortion movement's paternalistic abortion regret narrative. Abortion Regret explores the emergence and consolidation of the antiabortion movement's paternalistic efforts to "protect" women from abortion regret. It begins by examining the 19th-century physician's campaign to criminalize abortion and traces the contours of the women-protective abortion regret narrative through to the 21st century. Based on interviews, textual analysis of primary sources, and a content analysis of state antiabortion policy from 2010-2015, the authors argue that the contemporary rise of the abortion regret narrative has armed the antiabortion movement with a unifying and compelling strategy to oppose abortion through a woman-centered approach. In addition to covering the historical origins of our nation's criminal abortion laws, the book covers topics that include the origins and growth of crisis pregnancy centers, including recent efforts provide perinatal hospice services; an analysis of leading Supreme Court decisions on abortion; the emergence of the "pro-woman/pro-life" antiabortion platform, including its deeply religious roots; the infiltration of this position into the political and legal spheres in the guise of a secular rationale for limiting access to abortion; and an evidence-based rejoinder to the position that abortion harms women.

Where do you turn when you are wrestling with a painful decision? You turn to your spouse, trusted friends and relatives, to professionals, to religious advisers. But sometimes you want accurate information and suggestions all in one place, in a form you can use on your own. The decision to have an abortion is not an easy one, and it is not the right decision for every pregnant woman, even in difficult circumstances. Every situation is different. Women considering abortion range in age from nine to fifty-five years. They are rich and poor; married and unmarried; white, black, brown, yellow, and red; members of every religious group and ethnic origin; heterosexual and homosexual. Some have no one to talk to and others have too many people talking to them. Some are in danger from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Abortion: Facts and Feelings is for women who are considering whether to have an abortion, women who have had an abortion and want to do more thinking about it, and relatives, mates, lovers, friends, and health professionals who want to help the women they care for make the best possible choices for themselves. Partners in relationships, families, and friends, and, of course, pregnant women themselves, deserve to have accurate information about this common, but controversial, procedure -- information they can use to make both personal and policy decisions. This book contains that information. It discusses * The practice of abortion in other times and places, and practical information about how it is practiced now* How to find out about abortion laws where you live, and laws in other places where you might go if necessary* The attitudes of major North American religious groups about abortion, and how to obtain more specific information about the approaches of your religion to your situation* The medical and psychological outcomes of abortion* Alternatives to abortion -- delivering the baby and either caring for it yourself or allowing someone else to provide the parenting* The needs and concerns of women in special circumstances, and of women's loved ones Most important, it will help you think through and carry out your own decision, whatever it is.

The demise of Roe v. Wade dramatically altered abortion access across the United States, igniting a new era of polarization over reproductive rights as roughly half of all states moved to ban or significantly restrict terminating a pregnancy. Yet even before the U.S. Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion on June 24, 2022, people across large swaths of the country were already facing enormous obstacles to ending a pregnancy, including mandatory waiting periods, early gestational limits, and a dearth of abortion providers. Life-Altering: Abortion Stories from the Midwest shares the narratives of women who have terminated pregnancies, despite these barriers, chronicling how laws and court cases can shape the lives and reproductive decisions of individuals. Based on her coverage of reproductive rights for the Chicago Tribune, veteran journalist Angie Leventis Lourgos explores these personal accounts to delve into the most nuanced aspects of abortion, from life-threatening cases to terminations later in gestation to restrictions for minors. The reporting spans the time before Roe and continues through the first year after the landmark Supreme Court case’s stunning reversal, which spurred some of the most stringent abortion laws of the past half-century—as well as new and innovative means of access. From interviews Lourgos conducted with women across the Midwest, Life-Altering examines different facets of abortion from the perspectives of those who ended their pregnancies, illustrating how court cases, state legislation, and religious beliefs can affect the lives and reproductive choices of ordinary people. By looking at myriad factors that influence the decision whether or not to abort a pregnancy— be they socio-economic, religious, legal, or medical—the accounts collected in this volume challenge the conventional labels of “pro-life” and “pro-choice .”

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.

Chronicling the years between Roe v. Wade (1973) and William L. Weaver v. Reproductive Health Service (which brought the issue before an anti-Wade court in 1989), Gorney draws on 500 interviews to look at the passions that propel individuals on both sides of the abortion wars.

Most books about abortion focus on the decision-making process. Experiencing Abortion instead focuses on women's post-abortion feelings and experiences through interviews with women with similar emotions or concerns but with a different race/ethnicity, age, religious belief, and number of abortions. In doing so, it offers other women who have had abortions a place to turn to for support, understanding, and a sense of community during a time when they often experience feelings of alienation, guilt, shame, and loss.