Liberty and Sexuality

January 3, 1994
Behind the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v . Wade decision guaranteeing a woman's right to abortion lay 50 years of legal struggle. In this massively detailed, stirring chronicle, Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. ( Bearing the Cross ), shows how the courage and initiative of ordinary women and men made a crucial difference in establishing that right. He begins with Katharine Houghton Hepburn, an outspoken Connecticut activist who opened birth control clinics in the 1930s in defiance of a state law. Following in Hepburn's footsteps, Estelle Griswold, executive director of Connecticut Planned Parenthood, succeeded in having her own criminal conviction reversed by the Supreme Court: the 1965 Griswold v . Connecticut decision, which declared unconstitutional an 1879 statute criminalizing the use or counseling of birth control, paved the way for challenges to anti-abortion statutes across the U.S. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, Garrow profiles key advocates of the liberalization or repeal of anti-abortion laws in the decades preceding Roe . In a cogent final chapter he argues that Roe v . Wade has sustained ``far greater wounds from the friendly fire of professed supporters than from the explicit attacks of candid opponents.'' Activists and students of legal history will be the most likely audience for this tome.