The Human Radiation Experiments Book

I fully expected to give this book five starts because I dearly love this author and think she is a wonderfully fair and compassionate writer. And she was that here, too, often criticizing the pro-life approaches to dealing with abortion. But I think the first negative thing that struck me about this book is that it is so very dated (first written in '94, so she's quoting statistics and studies from the very early '90s and before). Obviously, this is not the book's fault. But still, it makes it a bit more difficult for the book to be a real contributor to the current conversation surrounding abortion (which has become decidedly more celebratory of abortion, instead of the old "it's a necessary evil" which Frederica references a lot and sort of assumes most people hold to).
Also, I have to say that this book needed a better editor. The number of typos drove me absolutely nuts.
And, I REALLY could have done without the martian zookeeper analogy.

All that said, the post-abortive women's stories are just as valid today as they were twenty years ago because they are part of the human experience and their voices should be heard. I found it particularly interesting that almost overwhelmingly, the women Frederica talked to confessed the real reason for the abortion was pressure from family members or a boyfriend. This, to me, is the exact, extreme opposite of what we want if we want to empower women and give them equal rights, etc.

I'm not going to use this review to write my opinion of abortion, though.

Here are a few gems from the book:

"If pregnancy turns a wheel that draws all together, abortion breaks the wheel, spinning the participants out into isolation. It severs at one blow the woman from the child who trusts her, and from the man she wants to trust. As French feminist Simone de Beauvoir wrote, after abortion women 'learn to believe no longer in what men say...the one thing they are sure of is this rifled and bleeding womb, these shreds of crimson life, this child that is not there. It is at her first abortion that a woman begins to "know." For many women the world will never be the same.'"

"Unreckoned with in the contraceptive strategy--indeed, nearly unrecognized in thirty years of sexual revolution--is the distinctive character of women's sexuality. As feminist poet Adreienne Rich writes, 'The so-called sexual revolution of the sixties [was] briefly believed to be congruent with the liberation of women...It did not mean that we were free to discover our own sexuality, but rather that we were expected to behave according to male notions of sexuality.'"

(This idea of behaving "according to male notions of sexuality" is infinitely important. We bow our heads and tuck our tails and do what they want--with contraception, abortion, whatever--to appease, mollify, and not inconvenience men.)

"As the abortion battle progressed, its lines grew clear: women against fetuses in a fight to the death....But in no sane society are women and their unborn children treated as mortal enemies. When they are set against each other, like contestants in a boxing ring, something is wrong with the whole picture....When we institutionalize the violent ripping of a child from her mother's womb, we violate something disturbingly close to the heart of the human story."

"Abortion, like rape and child abuse, should be illegal. But we have a long way to go before Americans are willing to vote for and sustain laws to that effect. For that to happen, we must first demonstrate that it is possible to live without abortion, that we can find ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies or, failing that, to support them."