Taking the reader into the trenches of the battle over abortion rights, the contributors zero in on the key moments and turning points of this ongoing war. Rickie Solinger and Laura Kaplan discuss the covert history of abortion before Roe v. Wade, including the activities of the abortion providers called Jane. Faye Ginsburg examines the recent rise of anti-abortion militancy and its ties to the religious right. Jane Hodgson reflects on her career as a physician and abortion practitioner before abortion was legal, and Alison Jaggar explores the changing theoretical underpinnings of abortion rights activism. Other essays stress the need to redefine the reproductive rights movement so that race and class as well as gender considerations are at its core and raise questions regarding abortion rights for poor women and women of color.

Taken together, the historical and interdisciplinary perspectives collected here yield a complex picture of what has been at stake in abortion politics during the past fifty years. The essays clarify why so many women consider abortion crucial to their lives and why opposition to abortion rights has become so violent today. The essays illuminate a fundamental lesson about the nature of social change in the United States: that judicial decisions that overturn restrictive laws and establish new rights do not settle social policy and, in fact, are likely to spark severe and long-lasting resistance.

1. Introduction : abortion politics and history ; Pregnancy and power before Roe v. Wade, 1950-1970 /Rickie Solinger
2. Beyond safe and legal : the lessons of Jane /Laura Kaplan
3. Women versus Connecticut : conducting a statewide hearing on abortion /Amy Kesselman
4. The rule of law, the rise of violence, and the role of morality : reframing America's abortion debate /Marcy J. Wilder
5. Legal strategies for abortion rights in the twenty-first century /Kathryn Kolbert and Andrea Miller
6. Electoral politics and abortion : narrowing the message / William Saletan
7. Punishing drug addicts who have babies : women of color, equality, and the right of privacy /Dorothy E. Roberts
8. African-American women and abortion /Loretta J. Ross
9. Abortion in the United States- legal but inaccessible /Marlene Gerber Fried
10. Rescuing the nation : Operation Rescue and the rise of anti-abortion militance /Faye Ginsburg
11. Toward coalition : the Reproductive Health Technologies Project /Marie Bass --"We called it kindness" : establishing a feminist abortion practice /Elizabeth Karlin
12. The twentieth-century gender battle : difficulties in perception /Jane E. Hodgson
13. Life on the front lines /Warren M. Hern
14. The crisis in abortion provision and pro-choice medical activism in the 1990s /Carole Joffe, Patricia Anderson, and Jody Steinauer
15. Regendering the U.S. abortion debate /Alison M. Jaggar
16. Psychologies of abortion : implications of a changing context /Sharon Gold-Steinberg and Abigail J. Stewart
17. Disability rights and selective abortion /Marsha Saxton.