Abortion after Roe by Johanna Schoen (review)

Historian Johanna Schoen’s book Abortion after Roe begins with the 1973 Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion, and traces subsequent developments. Abortion after Roe tells of people’s attempts to handle the ever increasing politicization and stigmatization of abortion, in a narrative that touches on gender, race, health issues, power, violence, and money.

What happened after the Roe decision? The immediate task was to make abortion available. Abortion clinics opened throughout the United States. Schoen distinguishes between two models of clinics: the medical model, which stresses professionalism and patient safety; and the feminist model, which seeks to challenge male-dominated, hierarchical medical science while striving to make abortion available also to poor women. Abortion could thus be perceived in different ways, ranging from surgical intervention to part of the struggle for women’s health and self-determination.

After Roe, the number of abortions grew dramatically. The new vacuum aspiration method made abortion safe, quick, and simple. Meanwhile, however, controversial issues emerged. One was the legitimacy of medical research on aborted fetuses. Such research, done since the early 1900s on fetal tissues obtained from abortions or miscarriages, had contributed to the discovery of vaccines against polio and rubella. By the late 1960s, such research was under attack. The status of the fetus became a central aspect in social debates on the fetus’s development, abortion time limits, and the disposal of aborted fetuses.

Abortion methods also proved controversial. Schoen shows how the antiabortion movement’s partially successful fight against the use of intact dilation and evacuation, performed in special circumstances, prepared the way for the further problematization of abortion and challenges to abortion rights.

Schoen devotes several chapters to the antiabortion movement. Her main objective, however, is to show this movement’s impact on women seeking abortions, on abortion providers, and on views on abortion as such. Some antiabortion factions, for instance, resorted to physical confrontation of pregnant women, physicians, and abortion clinic personnel. Clinics were vandalized and firebombed; women seeking an abortion were harassed or physically prevented from entering; employees were persecuted and threatened; and a handful physicians were shot and killed.

More moderate activists used other tactics. One developed genre was the fetal narrative—stories describing how a fetus thinks about, senses, and experiences its abortion. In time, another antiabortion genre was developed, which focused on women as “victims” of abortion. In a new type of confessional literature, women told of having undergone an abortion through ignorance, or persuasion, and described how they subsequently suffered from something akin to posttraumatic stress syndrome. Abortion, the argument ran, should be prohibited for the sake of women.

The aggressive attack on abortion rights was, of course, not without effect. It created an atmosphere of fear; many abortion providers quit. The politicization of abortion also created, as Schoen clearly shows, a telling silence. Those doctors who performed abortions found it difficult to voice their feelings and experiences, for the smallest sign of ambivalence or uncertainty was immediately seized upon and bruited about by abortion opponents. During the 1990s, however, abortion providers sought to abandon their defensive position; they themselves initiated dialogue and discussion of difficult questions faced by both abortion clinic personnel and those counseling pregnant women.

Schoen weaves together interviews, local cases, and larger political and medical developments. The result is an illuminating and topical history of abortion in our time. One of Schoen’s strengths is her ability to focus on and closely examine sensitive questions, including the conflict between doctors and feminists concerning the definition of good abortion care, as well as the conflicts that accompanied debates on fetal research and abortion methods. The book is both nuanced and balanced. It is, however, written with an undertone of sorrow. The early 1970s were characterized by optimism and a belief that abortion would become a self-evident part of women’s reproductive life. The opposition to abortion was, however, unexpectedly forceful and well organized, well able to delay the development visualized by abortion...