Abortion in the American Imagination: before life and choice, 1880-1940

The public debate on abortion stretches back much further than Roe v. Wade, to long before the terms pro-choice and pro-life were ever invented. Yet the ways Americans discussed abortion in the early decades of the twentieth century had little in common with our now-entrenched debates about personal responsibility and individual autonomy. Abortion in the American Imagination returns to the moment when American writers first dared to broach the...