Many women explain their various decisions (word choice important) about their reproductive lives in this collection of essays. They are, despite the title, not all about abortion (although I'd wager a guess that the word at least appears in each one), but instead cover a wide range of situations a woman can find herself in (egg donation, miscarriage, international adoption, unwanted pregnancies brought to term, forced adoption, prenatal diagnosis of disease etc). I liked some more than others,

This is an incredible collection of essays, all written by wildly different women with a vast array of experiences and yet there is a single voice that comes out of all the stories. A voice that not just asks but demands choice and help and hope when it comes to women's bodies and their lives. The raw honesty and emotional depth with which each woman tackled her story, her experience, her choices (or lack of) is astounding as is the humor and wit that is constant alongside of the horror and grie...

4.5. A collection of deeply personal essays exploring the "raw edges of human existence." I thought, being published in 2007, these might feel outdated. However, many of these could have been written today. As a woman who has been privileged enough to be able to make my own reproductive choices, it was heartbreaking to discover the personal agony of those who could not. Reading the essays of these women, especially those who chose differently than I would, was incredibly moving and highlighted j...

Great eye opener for anyone who thinks a woman's reproductive choice is abortion, or not abortion. It is a bit more complex than that. The premise of the book is that the only way to begin to understand the complexity of the gray area between the two extremes of thought is to hear women's stories. I really enjoyed it.

Suddenly I am reminded of how much I love to read memoir and personal narrative writing! While very emotional, I enjoy it.Like the title suggests, there is a huge range of stories in this compilation. The first story starts with surrogacy, which even after considering the range of experience this book might cover, I hadn't expected to find- which was naive of me.The stories that pulled most at me were the ones without choice: the stories of 16 year olds who got pregnant in the 60s and were never...

A beautiful collection representing the myriad choices (and in some cases the lack of choices) that women have made concerning their reproduction. If this book doesn't convince you that choice is a fundamental and necessary right, I'm not sure there is any hope for you.

For most of my life, I have been scared of pregnancy. Let me be clear. This was not a remote, passing worry, but a fear that I can only describe as borderline phobic. I was raised by an incredibly strong and loving single mother who engrained in me the idea that education, stability, and personal wellbeing were paramount to everything else. Having children was something to be considered only later in life when all other accomplishments had been achieved and my loving, committed (preferably male)...

Finished Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion. This is a collection of essays edited by Bender and de Gramont. Like most collections of essays, some are spectacular and some are just okay, hence, the 3 out of 5 rating.I believe that this book should be read by anyone who cares about reproductive rights and politics, whether they are "pro-choice" or "pro-life". The most important lessons I learned from these essays are these: "choice...

In A Normal Woman, Kate Malloy shares her excruciating decision to terminate her 18-week pregnancy after tests reveal a fetus with a rare chromosomal abnormality. "It was not an arrogant but an agonizing choice," she writes, "not the right thing to do, but the less wrong." This truism is applied to many of the decisions unveiled in the book Choice, as several of the contributor's solutions are about picking the lesser two evils—giving a child up for adoption/parents refusing to acknowledge it's

I enjoyed this book. Lots of different women in lots of different places in their lives. Women who wanted a baby since they were small. Women who didn't want a baby at all. Women who wanted a baby but not *now*....women who want one but don't have one. Real women, not theoretical ones, with real stories.

I discovered this book while checking out another book from the library. I hoped for balance, but it was very one-sided. It doesn't matter if you're pro-life or pro-choice... the statistics in the book that one in three women will have an abortion, and that 45 million have been performed since Roe vs Wade in 1973... staggering and tragic. Overall, an interesting read.Addendum 3/15: I remembered a couple of other things. It's physician assistant, not physician's assistant. Come on, editors! Get i...

This book was amazing. The part that resonated with me the most was actually the introduction though, particularly this: “when a pregnancy is unplanned, any subsequent choice is bound to be complicated”. While the term 'Choice' generally invokes the idea of one's views on abortion, what Bender and the other authors point out is that whatever a woman decides to do, the choice she makes isn't going to be one that she takes lightly. What is important is that she HAS a choice. This book comes from a...

Been thinking - this is SUCH a good collection of personal essays, just super. BUT, the last essay, an analysis of the reasoning of Roe v. Wade, bugged me a little, and is bugging me more and more as I consider it. I feel that I have a duty, as a pro-choice lawyer-type, to say that Roe v. Wade may have been quite beautifully written, but there are some major logical problems with the case. Thus, it should not be held up as an example of amazing legal logic, and this essay describes it in far too...

I'm pro-life. I'm not anti-abortion or anti-choice as some people like to say. What I'm against is using aborition as a form of birth control. What I'm against is murder because one doesn't want to take responsibility. Do I have the answer for what to do if aborition was made illegal? Surely not. Do you? I wish I did. But I do know, for myself, that the needless murdering of countless babies is insane. My own little survey that I did was a poll. I personally - not through rumors mind you, person...

why the hell am i giving this book four stars when i remember almost nothing about it? i don't know. i know that it's a collection of essays about reproductive choice, & unlike a lot of collections on this topic, it's not just abortion abortion abortion all the time. not that there's anything wrong with a nice abortion anthology. i like reading about abortion. but i picked this book up when i was looking for personal essays about infertility, & luckily, there were some. (not a lot though, as far...

Some of the stories were very difficult to read due to the graphic & honest nature of the book. Some were completely heart-wrenching and some had my stomach in knots. Having gone through a very difficult year of infertility, I related to most of the infertility stories. And now heading down the adoption road and seeing life from a different perspective, I related to the adoption stories as well. The abortion stories were hard to stomach but I'm the type of person who wants to know what it's like...

This was my first read during women's history month, and with the full awareness that we are increasingly edging our way towards a reality in which choice no longer exists. I absolutely think everyone -- and I do mean everyone -- should read this book. Make it mandatory reading in sex education classes as a minimum.It's no secret that I am staunchly and firmly pro-choice. And my life has largely been possible because I've been free to make decisions regarding my own desire to reproduce. Had I no...

A thought-provoking collection of heartfelt essays, all beautifully written. I especially loved the first, written by Jacquelyn Mitchard about their experience of surrogacy.Many of these stories broke my heart, cracking through the shell of my personal prejudices. I had to read the book in small doses, taking time to reflect between stories. It covers a wide range of experiences, including those of women who lost longed-for babies through miscarriage or termination for medical reasons. It goes w...

I read this fresh out of a workshop on writing personal essays, which may have caused me to feel a bit let down by the quality of some of them: telling rather than showing, writing not as tight as it should be in a published piece, etc. My desire to print them out and workshop them aside, this is a broad -- and important -- collection of stories, the impact of which is made stronger by the fact that they're presented together in one collection. They are all so personal, so unique, and so human,

I read this for the newly created Planned Parenthood book club and, honestly, I was expecting a rather generic overview of issues in reproduction, sort of an introductory look. But although a few of the essays read like they could appear in Good Housekeeping magazine, overall I was moved and, in many cases, educated by women's stories of abortion, adoption, infertility, and making choices about if and when to have children.