Absolute Convictions

My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America

in English, 292 pages,
Macmillan, February 21, 2006
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Eyal Press, the son of an abortion doctor in Buffalo, New York, provides a lucid social history of the city’s abortion wars in an effort to explain the murder of one of his father’s colleagues, Barnett Slepian, who was killed in 1998 by an anti-abortion activist named James Charles Kopp. The story begins three years before Roe v. Wade, when the New York State legislature decriminalized abortion, making the state a haven; in 1971, more than two hundred thousand women sought safe abortions in its hospitals.

Press traces the rise of the evangelical anti-abortion movement in the Rust Belt and, in fresh interviews, gives fair hearing to the activists who spent much of the eighties blockading his father’s medical office. He also examines dispassionately the psychology that drove Kopp to commit murder in the name of unborn life. (Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker)