The personal as political.

With Liberty and Justice for All: A Life Spent Protecting the Right to Choose Kate Michelman (Hudson Street Press Penguin Group, 2005, 288pp) 1594630062, $24.95

IN 1969, A YOUNG CATHOLIC housewife in Pennsylvania found herself in a desperate situation. Her husband, a beginning assistant professor, had just walked out on her and their three young daughters after announcing that he was in love with another woman. With no job, no car and almost no savings, she also learned that she was pregnant.

Following several weeks of indecision, including a suicide attempt from which she was saved by a neighbor, the woman decided that could not continue to raise her girls on her own and have another child. Fearful of the risks of a back-alley abortion, she chose to seek a legal "therapeutic" procedure. This required her to demonstrate her mental instability before an all-male hospital review board. After enduring a round of humiliating questions, the answers to which potentially risked her custody of the children--"Do you dress your daughters each morning?" "Are you capable of feeding them?" "What kind of sex life do you and your husband have?"--she was granted the abortion. But at the last moment, the procedure was delayed when she had to leave the hospital to find her husband and secure his written permission. Under the law, a man who had abandoned his wife and children retained the right to determine their fate.

With Liberty and Justice for All opens with this remarkable story. The housewife is the book's author, Kate Michelman, and it was this experience that launched her on a 36-year career to defend women's rights to reproductive choice, including almost 20 years as president of NARAL. AS Michelman makes dear, her story was far from unique. In the pre-Roe v. Wade era, the only alternatives ricing a woman who chose not to continue an unwanted pregnancy were a dangerous back-alley abortion or a humiliating hearing before a male-dominated hospital review board. The consequence was an epidemic of abortion-related deaths and mutilations.

Roe changed all that, but, tragically, as Michelman observes, the "arc of history," is turning in a circle. AS I write, the Senate is weighing the appointment to the Supreme Court of Judge Samuel Alito. This is the same judge who, in an astonishing sole dissent in a federal circuit court ruling, defended a provision of a Pennsylvania abortion law requiring spousal notification. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court upheld the circuit court majority's view, not Alito's, and struck down this provision of the law that would have plunged women back into Kate Michelman's world of 20 years before. Nevertheless, it is emblematic of the dangerous time we are living in that a judge whose thinking embodies a callous regard for the situation of women facing abortion should now stand on the threshold of the Supreme Court.

With Liberty and Justice for All could not be more timely. It brings to our debates an account of abortion history that is at once deeply personal and political. Michelman offers us a front-row seat on many of the key events that mark the years since Roe. They include the successful campaign in 1987 by NARAL and other prochoice groups to block the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court; the struggles in the early 1990s to ensure protections for abortion providers as antichoice demonstrators upped the ante of protest and violence while the first Bush administration turned a blind eye; the heady early days of the Clinton administration when it almost seemed as though the protections of Roe would finally be put beyond assault; the ensuing dark moments in late 1994 when Newt Gingrich led a conservative, antichoice Congress to power and began more than a decade of legislative reversals for almost all the gains reproductive rights made up to that time.

Michelman itemizes the increasingly sophisticated strategies of antichoice activists and her own struggles to maintain unity in a prochoice coalition where individuals like Ralph Nader or some feminist leaders occasionally put personal political agendas before the goal of unified action. There are days of elation, including the two great Washington marches for choice in 1992 and 2004, and moments of despair, as when, after days of post-election agony in 2000, the nation learned that a Supreme Court majority forged by George H.W. Bush had given the presidency to his son. With NARAL an active supporter of the Gore candidacy, Michelman knew that the younger Bush's glad-handing bonhomie and billing as a "compassionate conservative" concealed a record of unrelenting opposition to women's reproductive liberty.

AT TIMES, MICHELMAN'S ENGAGING account of this history appears to lapse into rhetoric. We feel we are reading snippets from speeches she has given to NARAL supporters. But the ideas in these speeches form an important part of her story. They are the thoughts that animated her career and sustained the commitment she has given to this cause. Foremost is her understanding that, while abortion involves profound moral questions, it is always a woman who stands at the center of these questions. It is she who must balance the responsibilities to the developing life within her against her other moral responsibilities--to her other children and to herself. From her own experience, Michelman knows that these decisions are never made lightly. Therefore, the central question, she observes, is "Who decides?" Is it the woman, who will experience the full impact of her decision, or is it doctors, judges or politicians?

Michelman also makes clear that the protection of reproductive choice and liberty is not confined to the issue of abortion alone. It includes programs of comprehensive and age-appropriate sex education for youngsters, access to contraception for sexually active people, pregnant women's access to prenatal care and programs of quality childcare that can allow women freely to make a decision to continue a pregnancy if they wish.

Michelman documents the myriad ways that antichoice politicians, at the same time as they have used state laws to chip away at the protections afford by Roe, have pushed federal initiatives that have hindered access to contraception and to the prenatal and child care that could significantly reduce the incidence of abortion. Not once in this book does Michelman use the term "prolife." Her deep involvement in the politics of women's reproductive health has taught her that there is nothing "pro-life" about the efforts of most antichoice politicians.

Woven through this account of the politics of abortion are fascinating details of Michelman's own life: the revealing moment when she informs her devoutly Catholic parents about her abortion; the terrifying instant, when, in the midst of stern-cell politics, she learns that her daughter has fallen off a horse and faces the same kind of paralysis afflicting Christopher Reeve, a condition that might be aided by stem-cell research; and the culminating moment of her career during the 2004 March for Women's Lives when, on a stage before over a million prochoice supporters, she foregoes the chance to speak and merely expresses her love for all those people over the years who have fought for women's freedom.

Michelman maintains that the surprising success of the 2004 march, especially the involvement of so many younger women, shows that a prochoice position remains as politically significant as ever. But she acknowledges that many younger people have grown up since Roe. Although benefiting from the reproductive rights won by an earlier generation, they have not struggled to win them. As a result, in Michelman's words, "The understanding and passion for the first principles of reproductive freedom are not imbedded in their instincts." This has made too many young people susceptible to the frequently dishonest campaigns that antichoice activists have waged.

Must we suffer the repeal of Roe and a return to the world of back-alley abortions for this indifference to end? Let's hope not. The only way to avoid this terrible alternative is for millions of prochoice people to make their presence known and inform both politicians and judges that it is unacceptable to turn the clock back on Roe. The issue here, as Michelman makes clear, is not just abortion. It is about valuing women's lives and respecting their choices.

In the struggle to maintain and affirm those values, With Liberty and Justice for All is essential reading. It is also a fascinating personal account. Once you pick it up, it is hard to put down. Prochoice organizations would be wise to subsidize its distribution on college campuses across the nation.

RONALD M. GREEN is the Eunice and Julian Cohen Professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values, and the director of the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He is working an a book dealing with the emergence of the religious right as a political force in the US.