Abortion is--and always has been--an arena for contesting power
relations between women and men. When in 1973 the Supreme Court
made the procedure legal throughout the United States, it seemed
that women were at last able to make decisions about their own
bodies. In the four decades that followed, however, abortion became
ever more politicized and stigmatized.
Abortion after Roe
chronicles and analyzes what the new legal status and changing
political environment have meant for abortion providers and their
patients. Johanna Schoen sheds light on the little-studied
experience of performing and receiving abortion care from the
1970s--a period of optimism--to the rise of the antiabortion
movement and the escalation of antiabortion tactics in the 1980s to
the 1990s and beyond, when violent attacks on clinics and abortion
providers led to a new articulation of abortion care as moral work.
As Schoen demonstrates, more than four decades after the
legalization of abortion, the abortion provider community has
powerfully asserted that abortion care is a moral good.