Before Roe v. Wade, somewhere between one and two million illegal abortions were performed every year in the United States. Illegal abortion affected millions of women and their families, yet their stories remain hidden. In Creating Choice , citizens of one community in Western Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley break that silence.

"David Cline has assembled an amazingly rich repository of testimonies chronicling a community's efforts to facilitate reproductive autonomy at a time when the state prohibited such activities. This work is a major contribution to the project of preserving and disseminating the histories of activism, feminism, and reproductive politics in the United States." - Rickie Solinger, author of Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (2005) and other books

"A powerful document of the history of abortion before and after legalization, this book offers a compelling collection of oral history interviews that weave together the story of abortion in an entire community. Creating Choice gives voice to a group of people whose stories are crucial to our understanding of women's history but who have so far not been heard. This collection is not only crucial to students of the history of abortion. It provides an equally rare look into the history of the sexual revolution and the women's health movement on college campuses. Creating Choice is wonderfully accessible, an important collection for anybody trying to understand the history of women and sexuality." - Johanna Schoen, University of Iowa

Autorentext
DAVID P. CLINE is currently a Research Assistant at the Southern Oral History Programme at the Centre for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA. He was an editor of the Alternative Travel Directory (Transitions Abroad Publishing) and his articles and book reviews have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle , Utne Reader , Booklist , Kirkus Reviews and in other national periodicals.

Inhalt
Series Editors Forward Preface by Dr. Joyce Berkman and Dr. Susan Tracy Introduction: The Women: Survivors of Illegal Abortions Elizabeth Myer Robin Dizard Jean Baxter Carol C. Wall Meredith Michaels Susan Tracy Providers of Reproductive Health Care: Doctors, Health Educators, and Illegal Abortionists Dr. Merrit Garland, Jr.. Dr. Sam Topal Dr. Robert Gage . Jane Zapka Lawrence Siddall Lorraine Florio The Clergy and Their Allies: Clergy and Affiliated Lay Abortion Counselors Reverend Richard Unsworth Reverend Samuel M. Johnson Reverend Franklin A. Dorman Rabbi Yechiael Lander Elaine Fraser Ruth Fessenden The Feminists: Feminist Lay Abortion Counselors Amherst Women's Liberation's Abortion and Birth Control Group Springfield Women's Health Counseling The Connectors: Uniting Medical Care, Activism and Feminism Merry Boone Ellen Story Leslie Tarr Laurie Acknowledgements Endnotes Bibliography Index