A Question of Choice.

AuthorEstrin, Michele A.

As a third-year law student in 1967, Sarah Weddington got pregnant. Afraid to disappoint her parents and unprepared to assume the responsibility of raising a child, she traveled with her future husband to "a dirty, dusty Mexican border town to have an abortion, fleeing the law that made abortion illegal in Texas" (P. 11). She followed a stranger down dirt alleys where, before losing consciousness, she prayed, "I hope I don't die" (p. 14). Spared the sickness and death that often accompanied illegal abortions, she "was one of the lucky ones."(1) Five years later, Weddington argued Roe v. Wade(2) before the Supreme Court and secured American women's right to abortion. She has spent the rest of her career trying to preserve that right.

Threatened by legislative proposals, anti-abortion protestors, a conservative judiciary, and twelve years of Republican rule in the White House, women's right to choose has come perilously close to extinction. Such attacks on Roe spurred Weddington to write her story and that of the pro-choice movement. Weddington's A Question of Choice serves as both a potent reminder of pre-Roe days and as a call to action for pro-choice activists today. Her book is neither a feminist indictment of power relations in American society, nor a work of legal theory. Rather, it is primarily a personal, heartfelt account of a lawyer who feels passionately that "[w]ithout the ability to control their reproductive capacity, women [can]not fully control education, employment, family size, or their own physical and psychological well-being" (p. 84).

The first half of the book describes the grassroots feminist movement in Austin, Texas, that culminated in Roe v. Wade, tracing the strategies and stumbling blocks that faced the pro-choice agenda. Despite Weddington's pedestrian prose style, the energy and momentum empowering the feminist movement enliven the pages of her story. The second half of the book outhnes the denouement that followed Roe when interest group momentum shifted to anti-choice forces. A catalogue of the legal and political attacks on Roe, this part of the book lacks the narrative energy of the preceding chapters. Moreover, lawyers may find the case law discussion superficial, as Weddington clearly aims to make it accessible to lay readers. Despite this sometimes tedious litany, Weddington eventually bounces back with a spirited attack on the anti-choice movement and a practical plan for fighting back.

The daughter of a small-town Texas preacher, Weddington played the organ and sang in the church choir, but she knew early on that she did not yearn for a traditional lifestyle. Unlike many women of her generation, she "did not envision marriage and children as [her] primary future" (p. 18). She chafed against many of the restrictions put on young women at the time (pp. 19-20), finding freedom only in riding horses on the Texas plains (p. 18). Rebuffing the dean of her small liberal arts college, who...

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