Volume 32, Number 9 · May 30, 1985
Matters of Life and Death
By Jonathan Glover
The Right to Lifers: Who They Are, How They Operate, Where They Get Their Money
by Connie Paige
Summit, 286 pp., $14.95
Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion
by Beverly Wildung Harrison
Beacon Press, 334 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood
by Kristin Luker
University of California Press, 324 pp., $14.95
In August 1982, Hector and Rosalie Jean Zevallos, the owners of a clinic that carried out abortions in Granite City, Illinois, were abducted. They were threatened with death unless they closed down their clinic, and were held for eight days before being released. Connie Paige describes this early episode in the wave of antiabortion violence in her book. She also tells of the partial burning down of a Planned Parenthood clinic, in St. Paul, Minnesota. One director of the clinic needed constant police protection, while others were threatened with the kidnaping or death of their children. A year after the fire, a bomb was thrown through the window of the clinic. And after a similar firebombing of a clinic in Omaha, a letter sent to a local newspaper is said to have ended: 'You'd bomb a concentration camp—why not an abortion clinic?' By comparison, the harassment of Geraldine Ferraro over her views on abortion in last year's election campaign seems almost civilized.
Review, 5405 words
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