This paper reviews Pat Grogan and Evelyn Reed's Abortion is a Woman's Right! (1985), analyzing their central argument that abortion is an inalienable civil liberty inseparable from the broader feminist struggle for equality. The review traces the book's historical account of abortion in the United States, from the dangers of pre-Roe v. Wade illegal procedures through the 1973 Supreme Court decision and the 1976 Hyde Amendment. The paper evaluates the authors' use of statistical evidence, their treatment of population-control arguments, and their characterization of the pro-life movement. It also identifies weaknesses in the text, including emotionally charged passages and arguable overreach in connecting abortion restrictions to racism.
This paper demonstrates evaluative summary, a core book-review technique in which the writer reconstructs the source text's central arguments and then applies independent critical judgment to assess their effectiveness. The reviewer distinguishes between moments where the authors persuade through evidence and moments where emotional rhetoric undermines scholarly credibility — a nuanced move that shows analytical maturity.
The paper opens by introducing the book's thesis and its historical stakes, then moves chronologically through the legal history of abortion in the United States. It addresses the population-control argument as an ethical digression before analyzing the Hyde Amendment's practical consequences. The penultimate section offers direct critique of the book's rhetorical choices, and the conclusion synthesizes the abortion debate within the larger framework of feminist theory and patriarchal power structures.
In their book Abortion is a Woman's Right!, Pat Grogan and Evelyn Reed write about why abortion is of such importance both in discussions of the rights of women and in the broader concept of feminism and the place of women throughout society. Before the Roe v. Wade decision made abortion lawful in this country, abortions were illegal in the United States. Anyone who desired or required the procedure for any reason — physical or emotional — would have to turn to back-alley abortionists working with unsafe tools in squalid, unsterile conditions that were breeding grounds for bacteria and infection. Many women died during these procedures or from subsequent infections directly related to the abortions. Others were left permanently sterile or severely debilitated by their experiences.
Grogan and Reed write that: "In 1969, the year before New York State adopted liberalized abortion laws — a step that laid the basis for the later Supreme Court victory — approximately 210,000 women entered city hospitals due to abortion complications."1 Since legalization, there have still been some cases of post-abortion complications, but the number is nowhere near the 200,000-plus of earlier times. Grogan and Reed utilize these traumatic statistics to prove that the legalization of abortion is not only the lesser of two evils (for those who perceive abortion as an evil action), ensuring that women who want abortions will not have to undergo them in unsafe conditions, but also that the right to decide whether to have children is part of a woman's civil liberties.
The major thesis of Abortion is a Woman's Right! is that abortion is an important right of all women and is indicative of the many ways in which men have tried to impose their will on women — even to the point of controlling a woman's own body.
The issue of abortion has a polarizing effect even today. Those who support women's right to choose point to the arguments in this collection as evidence of its importance both as a medical procedure and as a milestone in the feminist movement. People who are pro-life view texts like this — which make ardent claims in favor of choice — with far more skepticism, sometimes dismissing the statistical evidence Grogan and Reed provide. On this subject, no consensus seems likely. Those who argue in favor of choice will rarely see things from the pro-life perspective, and vice versa. One notable asymmetry is that pro-choice advocates have not been responsible for acts of violence against the opposition. Those opposed to abortion have been known to perpetrate acts of extreme violence, including murder, against abortion providers and clinics.
Grogan and Reed equate feminism with being pro-choice, but many feminists challenge this position, noting that early suffragettes such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed abortion. Their reasoning was that it would be hypocritical to fight for the right to have one's own voice and then silence other voices out of convenience.
The book offers a historical account of abortion in the United States both before and after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. "For the first time the right of women to decide whether or not to bear children — not the state, church, husband, father, or priest — was recognized."2 Part of the abortion debate involved the religious implications of ending a pregnancy. The decision of whether to start a family was typically placed in the hands of men, the United States being a patriarchal society. Such laws were remnants of the pre-feminist era when women had few or no legal rights. A wife was legally obligated to follow her husband's directives in most matters; a daughter was similarly expected to obey her father.
From the nation's founding — when a woman's property legally became her husband's upon marriage — American women had no say in what happened to their own bodies. Even in cases where a fetus was expected to have major birth defects, or where continuing the pregnancy posed a danger to the mother's life, she still had no legal standing to decide whether to continue the pregnancy. The women's suffrage movement and subsequent feminist activism gradually challenged these deeply entrenched inequalities, with the Roe v. Wade ruling representing a landmark moment in that struggle.
Pat Grogan and Evelyn Reed's book Abortion is a Woman's Right! makes a strong case for the importance of abortion law in the United States. They trace the contemporary legal situation from its origins in the nineteenth century, through the beginnings of women's suffrage and the battle for equal rights in America. They further argue that equality for women is inseparable from the ability to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy to term. Men who learn they have biologically fathered a child have the option of walking away and abandoning their pregnant partner. A woman does not have that same option of escape. By giving women the right to choose whether to carry a fetus to full term, the government extends to women a form of equality with men.
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