« Mon expérience avec un homme violent, mes démêlés avec trois cours de justice au Québec et au Canada, mes relations avec les médias, ma découverte de milliers de femmes, d’hommes et d’enfants extraordinaires qui m’ont appuyée au cours des événements, l’amour inconditionnel de ma famille, la confiance en mon avocat et mon expérience de l’avortement entourée d’êtres qui m’ont inspiré le meilleur de la vie sont devenus des expériences riches d’humanité et de générosité. Je n’oublierai jamais mon été 1989. »

A compassionate perspective on late-term abortion that challenges preconceived notions of who gets abortions and why. Within both the anti-abortion and pro-choice movements, third-trimester abortion is often stigmatized and misunderstood. For 20 years, Dr. Shelley Sella saw patients whose diverse backgrounds and circumstances led them to the same difficult decision: to end their pregnancies.

Now, interweaving her own journey as a provider, Dr. Sella invites readers into a typical week at her clinic to demystify the experience. She shares the stories of people like Clarissa, a mother of 2 whose third suffered a massive stroke in utero with no chance of recovery. Mary, a devoted Catholic whose fourth round of IVF offered a late-in-life chance at motherhood, only to be dashed by anomalous test results. Laura, a mother to 4 already whose bruised arms tell a painful story, one she couldn’t bring herself to write a fifth child into.

Beyond Limits is not just a testament to a standard of care grounded in competence, compassion, and sensitivity. It is also a call for a paradigm shift that moves beyond Dobbs, beyond Roe, beyond limits to provide care. And it is a tribute to the real people whose hearts, reasons, and stories are more complex than politicized conversations about abortion lead us to believe.

Although the Dallas Fire Department had saved the clinic, we were shaken and heartsick that our son had just spent Christmas Day at a crime scene. I had performed my first abortion in the year Kyle was born, and though he had long supported our work, he now felt worried for us in ways he’d never expressed. As we stood near the ruins, breathing fresh air in gulps, he said, “Do you have to keep doing this work?” We were both silent for long moments before I simply said, “No. We choose to.”

In this deeply personal account, Dr. Curtis Boyd and Dr. Glenna Halvorson-Boyd reflect on their lives in abortion care. Led by a desire to empower patients, they advance abortion and mental health care further than ever even as they find themselves at the center of a controversial new issue in American life. Sweeping, introspective, and deeply honest, We Choose To is a rare portrait of abortion providers and the world in which they work, where abortion is not a talking point in a culture war but a private, even spiritual, act.

In Boundless, respected writer and physician Christine Henneberg takes on the most polarizing and provocative issue of our time: What does it mean to choose-or choose not-to have a child, and what does it mean when that choice isn’t yours to make? As a young physician in training, Henneberg imagines deliberately shaping her life by her choices. But when she finds herself pregnant and performing late-term abortions, she is forced to reckon with the hardest questions: What is the source of her agency and the root of her ambition? What does it mean to make a “good” choice when so little is under her control? And how can she maintain her boundaries in a world of boundless love-the world of motherhood? Her answers, bravely and beautifully articulated, lie at the heart of this provocative, tender, deeply empathic memoir.

Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the nineties, Erika Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment—a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her friends that she had to leave her school classroom. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she’s still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her.

Sánchez writes about an abortion she had several years ago. The abortion took place during an “incredibly terrible time,” as she suffered from a severe bout of depression, she told MSNBC host Alicia Menendez on her show, “American Voices.” “I am certain the procedure saved my life,” Sánchez said.

In this candid account, Dr Suzanne T. Poppema shares intimate details about her own life and work in an effort to promote better understanding of the reality of abortion and the violent forces that threaten a woman’s right to choose. She offers readers a view from the clinic operating room as well as valuable information on the abortion pill known as RU 486, for which her clinic has served as an FDA test site.

Are you curious about anything related to abortion? Are you sexually active? Do you have a sense of justice? Do you hate being told what you can and cannot do with your body? Then this book is for you.

First of all, let me start this ride (where I don’t know how it’ll end, but I’m excited all the same) by categorically stating that this is NOT fiction… I want to write about the everyday happenings that go on around us and let everyone see that all these ideas every activist stands up for are not, at all, disconnected from our realities. These ideas are not abstract, they’re not some far-away thoughts that happen in never-never lands. These things happen to us at every breathing second of our lives. It doesn’t matter if you’re, not at all, interested in politics, politics is very much interested in you. It shapes your life, it affects it in many ways, much more than you can ever imagine.

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

(This is an English translation of the book L’Evénement, published in 2001)

The incredible story of how a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer won Roe v. Wade, and what it means forty years later.

Sarah Weddington, just 27 years old in 1973, became a key figure in the reproductive rights movement when she took on the case. Here she recounts her remarkable story, from her personal experience with abortion and the workforce discrimination she faced in her early career to the judicial proceedings and long journey she has undertaken in fighting for women’s rights since. Weddington compels “those who are willing to share the responsibility of protecting choice,” to follow her plan of action in supporting the legal rights of women. A Question of Choice is an “eloquent reminder of what Roe truly means—that our most private decisions can be made behind the closed doors of our homes, with our families, and in private conversations with our hearts” (Former President Bill Clinton).

“A Gilded Vagabond” is how Keith Hindell characterises the life of a journalist. “He often stays in the best hotels but often reports on the underbelly of society.” Hindell was not just a journalist. He was a soldier, BBC producer and editor, a mountaineer, author and a leading light in the Pregnancy Advisory Service.

“For more than a decade, America has known Cecile Richards as the fierce and fearless president of Planned Parenthood. Make Trouble offers a window into her life: the early organizing effort that landed her in the principal’s office; the historic campaign of her mother, Ann Richards, for governor of Texas; her courageous leadership on behalf of women; her travels during the 2016 presidential election; and the lessons she’s learned from the outpouring of activism America has seen since. With humor, heart, and hope, Cecile Richards offers practical advice and inspiration for aspiring leaders everywhere.”
—Hillary Rodham Clinton

In this riveting memoir, renowned feminist Judy Rebick tells the story of the eleven personalities she developed in order to help her cope with, and survive, childhood sexual abuse. In Heroes in My Head, Rebick chronicles her struggle with depression in the 1980s, when she became a high-profile spokesperson for the pro-choice movement during the fight to legalize abortion. It was in the 1990s, when she took on her biggest challenge as a public figure by becoming president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, that her memories began to surface and became too persistent to ignore. Rebick reveals her moment of discovery: meeting the eleven personalities; uncovering her repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse; and then communicating with each personality in therapy and on the page in a journal – all of this while she is leading high-profile national struggles against a Conservative government. Heroes in My Head is a fascinating, heartbreaking, but ultimately empowering story. With courage and honesty, Rebick lays bare the public and private battles that have shaped her life.

L’occasion d’un banal examen dans un cabinet médical replonge la narratrice plus de trente ans en arrière, en janvier 1964, au moment de son avortement clandestin. Si le souvenir apparaît lointain, l’événement n’en est pas moins indélébile. A la fois égarée et démunie, pendant deux mois, la jeune femme d’alors a caché sa grossesse, à ses parents comme à ses amis proches, cherché désespérément une “faiseuse d’anges”. C’est à Paris, rue Cardinet, que la narratrice trouvera l’infirmière clandestine qui lui plongera dans le sexe la sonde nécessaire. Et c’est à Rouen, dans sa chambre d’étudiante, banale et dérisoire, en compagnie de sa voisine, qu’elle sera “assise sur le lit, avec le foetus entre les jambes”, véritable “scène de sacrifice”. Pour la narratrice, il s’agit “d’entraîner l’interlocuteur dans la vision effarée du réel”.

In 1971 (two years before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision to legalise abortion in the United States), Hoffman founded Choices, an abortion clinic in New York. As a medical provider, she pioneered ‘patient power’ encouraging women to participate in their own health care decisions. And going against even her own expectations for her life after fifty, she adopted a child and writes about her experience as a mother. Merle Hoffman has been on the front lines of the feminist movement, a fierce warrior in the battle for choice.

When anti-abortion extremist Eric Rudolph bombed a Birmingham abortion clinic in 1998, nurse Emily Lyons sustained extensive injuries, but survived. This is her personal account of the events and her recovery.

From Bruce Steir: I wrote this memoir- “Jailhouse Journal of an OB/GYN” while serving time. It explains the events that led to my being charged with homicide as it explores the collaboration between the anti-abortion network, the Medical Board and the District Attorney’s office. My memoir consists of anecdotal experiences that motivated me to study medicine, encouraged me to become an OB/GYN physician and compelled me to be a full-time abortion provider. The autobiographical adventures travel from college and medical school in Florida to my sleepless internship in New Orleans, through my OB/GYN residency training. It continues with my service in the USAF in France as a medical officer; to Seattle in private practice; then again in the direction of military service as an OB/GYN attached to the Marine Corps and finally as a traveling abortion provider and eventually a convicted felon doing time. My experiences have filled my life with inspiration, love, humor, sadness, joy and much irony. (My memoir does not contain any fiction!)

In This Common Secret, Dr. Susan Wicklund chronicles her emotional and dramatic twenty-year career on the front lines of the abortion war. Growing up in working class, rural Wisconsin, Wicklund had her own painful abortion at a young age. It was not until she became a doctor that she realized how many women shared her ordeal of an unwanted pregnancy—and how hidden this common experience remains. This is the story of Susan’s love for a profession that means listening to women and helping them through one of the most pivotal and controversial events in their lives. Hers is also a calling that means sleeping on planes and commuting between clinics in different states—and that requires her to wear a bulletproof vest and to carry a .38 caliber revolver. This is also the story of the women whom Susan serves, women whose options are increasingly limited.

In this powerful memoir, a fiercely honest and surprisingly funny testament to healing after abortion, a young woman travels across the United States to meet a motley crew of spiritual teachers and a caravan of new friends.

At age nineteen, Kassi Underwood discovered she was pregnant. Broke, unwed, struggling with alcohol, and living a thousand miles away from home, she checked into an abortion clinic. While her abortion sparked her “feminist awakening,” she also felt lost and lawless, drinking to oblivion and talking about her pregnancy with her parents, her friends, strangers-anyone.

Three years later, just when she had settled into a sober life at her dream job, the ex-boyfriend with whom she had become pregnant had a baby with someone else. She shattered. In the depths of a blinding depression, Kassi refused to believe that she would “never get over” her abortion. … Dazzling with warmth and leavened by humor, May Cause Love captures one woman’s journey of self-discovery that enraged her, changed her, and ultimately enlightened her.

In Life’s Work, an outspoken, Christian reproductive justice advocate and abortion provider pulls from his personal and professional journeys as well as the scientific training he received as a doctor to reveal how he came to believe, unequivocally, that helping women in need, without judgment, is precisely the Christian thing to do.

Dr. Willie Parker grew up in the Deep South, lived in a Christian household, and converted to an even more fundamentalist form of Christianity as a young man. But upon reading an interpretation of the Good Samaritan in a sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he realized that in order to be a true Christian, he must show compassion for all women regardless of their needs. In 2009, he stopped practicing obstetrics to focus entirely on providing safe abortions for the women who need help the most—often women in poverty and women of color—and in the hot bed of the pro-choice debate: the South. In Life’s Work, Dr. Willie Parker tells a deeply personal and thought-provoking narrative that illuminates the complex societal, political, religious, and personal realities of abortion in the United States from the unique perspective of someone who performs them and defends the right to do so every day.