Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control, 1961-1973

Focusing on one Massachusetts community, David Cline uses the personal stories of those who sought abortions and of birth control and the health care professionals, clergy members, and feminist activists who helped them to reexamine the contentious history of reproductive rights in America in the last thirty years. His work brings together interviews with a variety of individuals--college chaplain moved to activism after one of his students died from a botched backalley abortion and another hung herself because of an unwanted pregnancy; members of women's collectives who ferried women to abortion clinics across state lines in a kind of modern Underground Railroad; a waitress who performed over 1,500 illegal abortions in her bathtub; and the women themselves who risked their lives. This fascinating collection is a much-needed contribution to recent scholarship on the reproductive rights movement as well as being an important new work of community oral history.