ARTICLES OF FAITH: The Abortion Wars:...

We were college undergraduates, teenagers still, and the world was full of promise. My friend called late one night. “What’s the worst possible thing that could happen?” she asked. I tried to think: a death in the family? It couldn’t be divorce. Her parents had already done that, hadn’t everyone’s? Had they run out of money? Did she wreck her car and kill someone?

When she told me she was pregnant, I was first relieved, then shocked. How could she be so stupid, I wondered, so careless. But this was no occasion for judgment. The question was how to get rid of it. This was long ago, the early 1970s. Thanks to our governor, Ronald Reagan, abortion was sort of legal in California. A pregnancy could be terminated if two doctors believed the pregnant woman was in danger of harming herself. One of my friend’s ex-stepfathers was a psychiatrist. We were certain he could fix things up. We were young, callow and self-absorbed. There was no talk of fetal rights, no discussion of when the moment of life begins. The phrase “single motherhood” did not cross our lips because it did not exist. “Out-of-wedlock” was one pejorative that described that condition. “Knocked up” was another.

By the clear light of day, my friend was unable to persuade anyone, her ex-stepfather included, that the pregnancy would make her jump off a bridge. Soon she was on a plane to Japan. When she returned, she called me, late at night again. She said that after the procedure--another new term, one we would come to utter with powerful ambivalence--she awoke to hear a terrible, symmetrical thumping sound. It was her, she realized, hurling her body first against the wall and then against the rail of her bed. Pain--thump, grief--thump: it was both; it was pain, and it was grief. I told my mother this story some weeks later. She thought for a moment, then told me that among her peers, she was the only one she could think of who had not had an illegal abortion. I challenged her: This was not possible. She replied: My statement stands.

And so we became, my friend, my mother and I, inadvertent infantry women. Months later, the Supreme Court made its extraordinary, historic decision in Roe vs. Wade. We did not know that Jane Roe was a pseudonym. The real Jane, Norma McCorvey, was a lesbian, a drug user and a sometime carnival barker. This was her third pregnancy, but we did not know that either. We also did not know that the decision permitting women to take charge of their own bodies was written by Harry Blackmun, an appointee of Richard Nixon. We were unaware that a young Texas lawyer, Sarah Weddington, had sought out a case that would test the law that sent her out of the country, to Mexico, for her own youthful abortion. In fact, we almost didn’t know about Roe vs. Wade at all, not right away anyway, because Lyndon B. Johnson died the day it came out. And certainly what we didn’t know--couldn’t dream of, couldn’t imagine or envision in our wildest, most proto-conspiratorial crystal balls--was that the war was on.

Now a quarter century has passed. My friend, the one who went to Japan, has a grandchild. No one likes abortion, but Americans consistently state their statistical preference for laws that permit women to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Still, the war rages. To mark the 25th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade this year, three recent books examine the angry, divisive and, in more senses than one, deadly struggle that continues around abortion. All three books are important. All shed new light. All set out to remain balanced. Remarkably, all succeed. What they demonstrate, collectively and individually, is that a judicial decision intended to establish rights came nowhere close to resolving the deep moral angst over this divisive issue.

It is neither a coincidence nor a stroke of common irony that all three books refer to war in their titles. More than this country’s campaign against poverty or its crusade for civil rights, war is the inevitable metaphor when the subject of abortion is so much as whispered. The vernacular of war also applies to this peculiarly public-private predicament: We speak of the troops, the trenches, the battles, the battalions, the bombshells, the bloodshed. It is difficult to think of any other medical procedure that merits these military allusions, and certainly a 25-year war is unprecedented in American history. This is our current civil war. Abortion is by no means legal around the globe, but no other country fosters such constant contention. Taking J. Anthony Lukas’ “Common Ground” as its unabashed model, Cynthia Gorney’s stunning book, “Articles of Faith,” turns a single state, Missouri, into a prism for the grand national fight over abortion. Gorney, a veteran journalist for the Washington Post, is an exquisite storyteller and a meticulous researcher; with more than 500 interviews conducted in preparation for this book, one can only imagine what the “abortion” file drawers look like in her writing room. Rich details from these encounters bolster the complex intractability of a battle claimed equally by politicians, the clergy, feminists and conservatives. By choosing as her central characters a pair of smart, passionate adversaries, Gorney dramatizes the deeply human dichotomy that fuels the fray over abortion.

The saga is nothing if not compelling. Though crammed with data, “Articles of Faith” has the qualities of a good novel. Gorney makes us care more about the characters than their ideological inclinations. Sometimes, you find yourself rooting for someone whose position on abortion you would ordinarily find abhorrent. She gives us glimpses of the anguish of all her key characters, as well as their relentless determination, and as we come to know their impulses, we understand more about the momentum of both sides of the movement. We watch at least one marriage collapse. We see another family tumble into poverty because the nominal breadwinner, the husband, has put all his energy into fighting abortion. “Articles of Faith” is big and thick and intensely evenhanded. Perhaps its only blemish--and hardly a significant one at that--is a tendency toward an excessively emphatic tone.

But in truth, the vigorous pitch is not entirely out of place. Often, it seems that the rancor of this quarter-century conflict is only growing stronger. It is also a curiosity that the antiabortion momentum seems to be growing even as polls continue to demonstrate a strong majority in favor of, at the very least, a woman’s right to terminate first-trimester pregnancies. Often the stridency seems out of proportion to the number of abortion opponents. You wonder, how can so few people make so much noise? How can they have such an impact on policy? How can a minority, for example, demand and obtain a plank in the Republican Party platform, as they did in 1992?

In “Wrath of Angels,” James Risen and Judy L. Thomas do a masterful job of explaining how abortion has served to galvanize the political neurons of evangelical America. Both are experienced and widely respected journalists: Risen, a reporter in the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau, and Thomas, a Kansas City Star reporter. Both have spent years observing the drama, and the determination, of this country’s antiabortion movement. Painstaking research and analysis also distinguish their book. By its conclusion, the psyche of the antiabortion movement has a human--if also intricate and often knotty--dimension. Like Gorney, Risen and Thomas are to be congratulated for maintaining strict equilibrium. Either side in this long, bitter skirmish could read “Wrath of Angels” and find it informative. Students of contemporary American political history could also learn from this book, for as Risen and Thomas so skillfully show, without the antiabortion movement, this country’s religious right could have had no rise.

What’s fascinating, in comparing these books, is how little overlap there is between them. These are not fun books, and you don’t pick them up in hopes of a pleasant distraction or even a quick guided tour of abortion’s best-known war zones. This is why the clarity served up in “Wrath of Angels” is so valuable. Risen and Thomas never show their own ideological cards. They never make the antiabortion wing of the religious right look like senseless fanatics, as this faction is sometimes presented in the mainstream media. “Wrath of Angels” occasionally resorts to cameo profiles of some of its principals. But rather than cheapening the subject, this method provides new images of many important players. I will long remember, for example, Risen and Thomas’ description of Justice Blackmun holed up for two weeks in the medical library of the Mayo Clinic as he researched what became the Roe vs. Wade decision. And until I read “Wrath of Angels,” I never knew Blackmun had received death threats and a 9-millimeter bullet through his living room window because of that decision.

A third volume, “Abortion Wars,” edited by historian Rickie Solinger, contends that rather than being the opening salvo, Roe vs. Wade actually marked the halfway point of a 50-year contest. Solinger’s 22 contributors offer essays that range from the personal to the political--not that there is much of a difference when the subject is abortion. There is a lovely first-person recollection from a physician, Jane Hodgson, who reflects on her work providing abortions in the pre-legal era. Hodgson was sentenced to jail in 1970--just about the time my friend was heading to Japan--for performing an abortion on a woman who had contracted German measles in the fourth week of her pregnancy. Another contributor, Loretta J. Ross, examines the activism of African American women in the abortion rights movement. Because it is an anthology, the writing is erratic, but this comprehensive effort also thrusts the dialogue over abortion into the next century by venturing into such areas as disability rights and selective termination.

It’s probably unfair to compare an anthology with two more literary efforts, but of the three, “Abortion Wars” is the driest. Some of the essays read like tracts, and because it is a compilation of so many contributors, it’s a book you can profitably read without worrying about losing the central strand of the story.

War is always ugly. Even the winners are sometimes losers, given the cost of combat. Resolution is elusive; our views about various conflicts are often subject to reinterpretation. Hundreds upon hundreds of books come out year after year about the Civil War, World War II and Vietnam. In the literature of abortion, these three volumes emerge as a valuable compendium. Admirably, though they deal with the same subject, they present scant redundancy. Rather, each illumines the debate.

The three books also remind us anew of the intransigence of this fight over the right to end unwanted pregnancy and the insistence on protecting fetal rights. By law, Roe vs. Wade should have settled it. But Gorney, Risen and Thomas and Solinger and her contributors make it clear that that decision was, in fact, an unsettlement. Will my college friend’s grandchild confront this matter with any less angst? I doubt it.