A stunning, compassionate history of an overlooked element within the abortion-rights movement in the U.S.
A history of the abortion-rights movement told through the lens of abortion clinic escorts.
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, women’s reproductive rights have been under attack. Much of the battle has occurred legislatively, particularly through bans at the local level. But as Rankin shows, another danger is the contingent of protestors who attempt to halt abortion by physically blocking access to services and whose ultimate goal is to shut down clinics. “If you live in one of the 10 percent of U.S. counties that still has an abortion clinic,” writes the author, who served as an abortion escort for six years in New Jersey, “there is probably a group of picketers outside of it right now.” As early as 1988, when a group called Operation Rescue “conducted 182 blockades” of clinics, a group of abortion-rights activists began to create the first “clinic defense networks,” which ensured that patients could access important health services. This proved to be the vital beginning of the abortion escort movement. In the years that followed, escorts organized against everything from blockades and clinic closures to the murder of providers. When their local clinics were shut, escorts found new, behind-the-scenes ways to support patients needing abortions, including amassing funding for those who couldn’t afford the procedure. Although the introduction of right-wing judges during the Trump administration has rendered abortion’s legality more tenuous than ever, escorts remain active and ready to fight. Rankin’s passion for women’s health blazes on the page, and she is adept at connecting disparate events to create a cohesive historical narrative. At times, the plethora of profiles makes it difficult to keep track of the principals, but this is an important book nonetheless.
A stunning, compassionate history of an overlooked element within the abortion-rights movement in the U.S.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64009-474-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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