Oxford University Press
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  • Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control, 1961–1973
Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control, 1961–1973. By David P. Cline. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. 304 pp. Hardbound, $75.00; Softbound, $25.95.

Creating Choice is an important collection of edited interviews with individuals involved in the movement to secure women’s access to birth control and abortion in western Massachusetts in the decades surrounding the Supreme Court’s pivotal rulings, Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision that legalized contraceptive use by married couples, and Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion rights case. The collection broadens the historical treatment of this movement, introducing activists from grassroots women’s organizations and accentuating the contributions of professionals—clergy, medical practitioners, and health educators—who established networks and services that made free choice possible for some women even before state law extended those rights. As Cline explains, Massachusetts was one of the last states to allow birth control for women regardless of their marital status. The interviews in Cline’s book show the impact of the state’s reluctance to legalize [End Page 110] abortion and contraception and the multifaceted efforts of individuals intent on changing, or working around, legal restrictions.

Cline’s interviews grew out of the Pioneer Valley Women’s History Collaborative (VWHC). Begun in the late 1990s, the VWHC uses oral history and other means to document and preserve a record of feminism in western Massachusetts. Students and community volunteers conduct interviews with members of the area’s feminist community and determine the VWHC research agenda. Cline became involved in the VWHC as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts. The interviews he conducted, along with others from the VWHC collection, make up Creating Choice. The book’s twenty-four interviews have been closely edited, cut, and rearranged to provide tight narratives that flow smoothly without losing each narrator’s distinctive voice. Cline frames the interviews with brief essays providing historical context and biographical introductions for the narrators.

Creating Choice starts appropriately with women’s stories about undergoing illegal abortions and the circumstances that led them to choose this expensive and hard-to-attain procedure. Subsequent chapters focus on reproductive health care providers, including physicians who violated the law to provide contraception and abortion referrals; clergy and counselors who worked together to help women and couples evaluate their options and made referrals to abortion providers outside Massachusetts and, often, outside the country; feminist activists who provided services parallel to clergy with the goal of achieving women’s liberation; and “connectors, ” feminist professional women who worked within reproductive health organizations to expand and consolidate their services. In the translation from oral interview to the printed page, many interviews become surprisingly dispassionate, conveying only a minimal sense of the fear and frustrations that individuals who sought abortions for themselves or for friends and family must have felt. Nor do the interviews dwell on political ideology or collective activism, although clearly these were important to many. The stories are powerful, nonetheless, and narrators stress the personal choices they made, their motivations, and the web of resources they accessed. Indeed, one of the most unusual voices in the collection comes from a Massachusetts woman who performed several thousand abortions in the 1960s. Her interview, as well as many others, describes the widespread complicity that made underground abortions possible in the pre-Roe era, including police who were willing to be bribed to ignore abortionists in their communities and the many people who provided referrals, transportation, and related medical services. Surprisingly, the emotion that interviewees most commonly expressed is relief. Women who recounted experiences trying to prevent pregnancies or procure abortions describe their relief at discovering needed resources, while clergy, counselors, and other service providers mention their relief when changing laws lessened their worries about the reliability and safety of the services they facilitated.

Cline makes a clear effort to link abortion and birth control under the banner of choice, showing how activists and allies viewed both as a response to so-called problem pregnancies and women’s demand for reproductive control. By treating them together, Cline shows how the legalization of birth control and abortion constituted single victories in a longer struggle to ensure access to these treatments, regardless of marital status or economic circumstances. Within the Pioneer Valley, Creating Choice explains, many women could get abortions and contraception well [End Page 111] before they became legal; legalization made these medical services more easily accessible, especially to those without money or personal connections. This fight for choice continued, too, into the 1970s and beyond, as the struggle shifted to secure public funding and improve available services. Thus, the choice that Cline’s interviewees helped create came not with the Supreme Court’s rulings but was secured over a period of time and through a variety of means.

Perhaps the most important contribution made by this collection comes from Cline’s attention to members of the clergy and to medical practitioners and health educators. In contrast to accounts of the reproductive rights movement that focus on feminist activists, Cline makes the work of clergy and health care professionals —mostly men—of central importance. He shows the networks they built, spreading their reach and sharing encouragement and advice with each other. These interviews also reveal the institutional support such professionals received from the medical practices, universities, and parishes where they worked, backing that included money to create programs and hire people, as well as higher-ups’ willingness to ignore clear violations of the law. Most powerfully, the accounts of clergy and physicians emphasize the ethical concerns and the professional commitments that led individuals to circumvent the law in order to make reproductive services available.

By recovering the participation of clergy and medical practitioners in the reproductive choice struggle, Cline reminds readers of the many kinds of people, organizations, and activities that combine to make a social movement. In addition, Cline makes an important contribution to contemporary political debates. He largely avoids expressing his own opinions about reproductive choice. By accumulating the testimony of women and men who remember the many circumstances under which women exercised reproductive choice in the period before contraception and abortion were legally available, however, the book challenges the political formulation that pits abortion as a path for women’s liberation against the life of an unborn child. Treading delicately through this contentious issue, Cline effectively uses first-person accounts, with minimal political commentary from his narrators, to establish the dangerous conditions that many women faced, along with the moral choices made by allies and activists. [End Page 112]

Anne M. Valk
John Nicholas Brown Center, Brown University

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