The Cost of "Choice": Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion.(Book Review)

Let me be honest. When a book includes thinkers of the caliber of Professors Jean Bethke Elshtain, Mary Ann Glendon, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, to name just three, I'm pretty much already sold. But The Cost of "Choice" not only is replete with the work of brilliant pro-life feminists, it possesses the additional virtue of being brief (a mere 138 pages) yet chock-full of original thinking and dazzlingly well-written essays.

Editor Erika Bachiochi explains that the ace in the hole for abortion advocates is their "success in convincing Americans that abortion is a necessary precondition for women's equality." Or, put another way, that "whatever the status of the unborn, the very well-being of women is dependent on the legal right to abortion." It is that thumb on the scale that this book is intended to dislodge.

As pro-life feminists, the 12 authors make a convincing case that the early feminists were staunchly pro-life, a legacy obliterated by what Prof. Glendon calls that "peculiar form of [1970s] feminism" that has "long since passed" but which still exercises considerable sway.

Glendon puts it this way: "[T]hough hardline feminism has little appeal for today's women, its ideology lives on in law and policy, like rays from a dead star. The cohort of women most captivated by that ideology now holds influential positions, and the organizations that advance the worst ideas of 1970s feminism continue to be handsomely bankrolled by its chief beneficiaries - - the vast, profit-making abortion industry, the sex industry, and the organizations that promote aggressive population control."

According to Prof. Elshstain, the book's contributors "explore what has been nearly taboo in discussion of abortion, namely, any negative effects on women themselves." As summarized by Bachiochi, "These authors argue that over the last three decades, legal abortion has had deleterious effects on women - - socially, medically, psychologically and culturally." They back this bold assertion with a body of history, medical fact, and sociological reality that all but compels women and men of good will to "rethink the once-sacred proposition" that abortion is good for women.

Prof. Elshstain cannily observes that there is an almost predictable cycle to "controversial" Supreme Court decisions.

There is an "immediate hue and cry; then things settle down; eventually the holding is 'normalized' and becomes ...