Customer Reviews

The Choices We Made: Twenty-Five Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a terrific collection of first-person narratives by women who had illegal abortions in the days before Roe V Wade. Some are famous -- Whoopi Goldberg, Linda Ellerbee, Jill Clayburgh, Ursula K LeGuin, Grace Paley. Others are not. But all testify to the fear, desperation and danger that surround abortion when it is forced underground. Harsh religion, sexual ignorance, unsympathetic families, and vanishing boyfriends are recurring themes. Each woman tells her own story--vividly and naturally, without slogans or jargon. Coat hangers and death by sepsis or hemorrhage are not pro-choice propaganda -- they were realities not so long ago. I hope everyone who supports abortion rights will give this book to a friend who thinks maybe restricting abortion would be a good idea. A definite must for your local public library.

I really expected some of these "stories" to be over the top. But the selfish, narcissistic women in this book just make me shudder. Never has any one book used the word "I" more. Very few of these women were unfortunate (?) enough to want for anything except perhaps discipline and morals. This book is absolutely depressing and not worth the paper it is written on.

First, I want to say that I'm disappointed that some ideological blowhards are bringing down the rating of this book, despite probably not even having read the book.

But this book is a perfect example of why abortion needs to remain legal in the United States - and everywhere. 25 women tell stories of getting abortions, either before 1973 and Roe v. Wade, or shortly thereafter, or many years after. It's a progression, and predictably, the earlier stories are particularly horrifying - coat hangers, household cleaning products, deadly herbs, etc. Women have and always will be desperate to control their own reproduction, bodies, and lives, and many many many women will go to desperate measures in order to do that even with the risks are great. Reading the stories, you can feel these women's emotions - their panic, their feeling of being trapped, their harrowing thought process and ultimate decision, and in some cases, the aftermath. There is also one man who tells his story of his mother's botched abortion leading to her death, and how it affected his life. Goes to show how criminalizing abortion not only affects women - it affects the other people in their lives around them, who lose mothers, sisters, daughters, aunts, and friends.

If you are going to read this go in with an open mind and the desire to take a peek into the mind of a woman making an important decision in her life, not with pre-condemnation of these women for doing what they felt was best for themselves and their families.

Its a sad rationalization of a series of horrible decisions. The fact the one writer says that having a child would have been far worse than the pain she experienced having an abortion is saddening. How could she not value another's life. It is a story of selfishness. Those should take a deeper look at what they are doing in supporting the death of a baby. ...
God bless.

Well written book, and some very sad stories indeed, but all to justify to killing of their unborn children. I once my self was pro-choice, but after learning the facts that abortion really does kill another human being I could no longer appeal to these kind of bad argruments, sad though they may be. None of these stories could justify the killing of the unborn. It's sad to see that today we have a "class" of people the "unborn" being considered as trash, blobs of tissue, a product, instead ofwhat they really are "Precious unborn human persons"