THE WORST OF TIMES by Patricia...

THE WORST OF TIMES by Patricia G. Miller (HarperPerennial: $12; 328 pp.). Miller spent more than two years compiling these oral histories about abortion in America between 1929 and 1940, speaking to women who had abortions, children who watched their mothers die from botched operations, doctors who performed the surgery and police officers who arrested them. In grim, intimate accounts, the subjects recall the suffering of desperate women who risked arrest, ostracism and even death. A Pennsylvania coroner who examined the bodies of women who died of septicemia, hemorrhage, peritonitis, etc., concludes, “The deaths stopped overnight in 1973, and I never saw another abortion death in all the 18 years after that until I retired. That ought to tell people something about keeping abortion legal.”