From: markp@joplin.wri.com (Mark Pundurs)
Subject: Re: A Book and an Offer
Organization: Wolfram Research, Inc.
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 18:08:44 GMT

In <2579@blue.cis.pitt.edu> kmaloy+@pitt.edu (Kate Maloy) writes:

>I am a coauthor (with Maggie Jones Patterson of Duquesne University)
>of a recent book entitled BIRTH OR ABORTION? PRIVATE STRUGGLES IN A
>POLITICAL WORLD, published by Plenum Press.  The book received a very
>positive review in the Washington Post Sunday Book World (front page,
>October 4), and Maggie and I have also done numerous recent interviews
>for newspapers and radio throughout the United States.
>	As the title of the book suggests, BorA is based on interviews
>with women and couples who have faced unplanned or medically threatened
>pregnancies.  Roughly half of those we talked to chose birth, half
>abortion.  We collected about 100 stories in all, 50 of which appear in
>detail in BorA, along with our analyses of the many factors that influenced
>people's decisions.  The stories range over 50 years and many varied
>circumstances.  We talked with single women, married women, couples,
>teenagers, and victims of rape, addiction, abuse, and homelessness.  Our
>intention from the beginning was to hear these stories without judgment
>and to tell them without political motivation.  Our reason for this 
>approach was our notion that the political debate neither represented
>the full reality of this issue nor served those who actually had to
>confront it.
>	In fact, the main thing that emerges from the stories in our
>book is a private reality utterly at odds with the public debate.  We have
>found, for instance, that when women describe their personal experience
>with the need to choose, they virtually never use the language of the
>political debate.  They do not mention rights, and they rarely ponder
>when life begins.  

That's a crying shame.

>Instead, they consult a moral standard that has to do
>with matters of human responsibility, relationship and caretaking.  (Many
>of you will recognize the research of Carol Gilligan, Mary Belenky and
>others in this--and we both cite and confirm their findings.)  Their
>concerns are the same regardless of whether they choose birth or choose
>abortion, and these concerns have to do with the quality of their
>relationship with the man, their ability to love a child, their financial
>and psychological resources, their employment status.  They all regard
>the need to choose between birth and abortion as a complex matter.  They
>do not subscribe to the blacks and whites of the debate.  They also do not
>reflect the anger and judgmental qualities of the debate; rather, they
>tend to respect the choices of others who have been through this, even 
>when their choices differ.
>	We believe these stories and their many insights have profound
>implications for public policy and can even point the way to common ground--
>not for extremists from either side but for the majority of people who
>want women to control their reproductive lives but also rue the very high
>rate of abortion in this country.  Ultimately, we believe that private
>accounts of choice across the decades demonstrate the pointlessness of the
>fighting over this issue.  All indications are that the abortion rate is
>not affected by the law

Were there 1.4 million abortions a year before Roe v Wade?

Mark Pundurs
Xref: sparky talk.abortion:57671 talk.religion.misc:27432 talk.politics.misc:69516 alt.sex:43022 soc.singles:37708 alt.peeves:19515