The Fight for Roe: Where Was I?: The New Yorker When I was at Vassar, it was still a women's college, and the word "choice" still meant something quite different from what it does now. Your choice, in those days, was between risking pregnancy and abstaining (or, as it was called then, "everything but"). We were divided on this: there were "the girls who didn't" and "the girls who did." You know them from the movies. But the fact that, at eighteen or twenty or even twenty-one, we referred to ourselves as girls - the twenty-somethings of my daughter's generation were pointedly, even irritably, "women" in their self-description - says a lot about the then normative view of women as vulnerable and emotionally impulsive people, in need of firm (male) moral guidance and strong (male) authority where their bodies were concerned. But that is another story. From time to time, one of the "girls who did" would take the train from Poughkeepsie to New York, and then another to Philadelphia, where a humane and uncommonly courageous ob-gyn would defy the law in order to end a pregnancy, which, in some cases, had resulted from a semi-conscious encounter with a blind date, facilitated by the seriously - and secretly - spiked beer on tap at every Yale football weekend. The "boys" who had done the spiking - call them the next generation of men in charge of moral guidance - were spared. The blame, and the anguish, fell on the "girls," who cut their classes and went silently to Philadelphia. The doctor was known throughout the seven sister colleges of the Ivy League only as "Philadelphia." His name was a well-kept secret - given that he was risking prison, not to mention the lifetime revocation of his medical license - and I never learned it. The understanding was that if you needed him, and were trustworthy, you would get it from a former patient. There were many. But not that many. It was the cusp of the sexual revolution, and the Pill was approved and about to go on sale, but most of my Vassar classmates believed - what were they thinking? - in what was known in those days as "saving yourself," or, more accurately, "not ruining your reputation." Which is not to say that all of them were happy with that state of affairs; nor were their "fiancés" - the young men who, by proposing marriage, buying a ring, and publicly posting their intentions by way of an engagement announcement in the Times, had entered the "everything-but" boyfriend category. There were still restrictions in many states on the sale of condoms - not, in any case, the sort of thing for which a Vassar girl would shop. Diaphragms were even harder to come by, unless you could persuade a doctor - definitely not your family doctor - that you would be at the altar in a matter of days and were simply running down your checklist - nightgown, peignoir, blue garter, hairdresser, leg wax - for that transformative event called the wedding night. In New York, where I moved for graduate school and found my own doctor, it took me two or three yearly checkups to work up the courage to request the Pill, and never mind that by then I was not only a feminist but happily not a virgin to anyone but my parents. Then came Roe v. Wade, and with it the shock of choice that was really choice: the news that a woman's body could actually belong to her; the adjustment to that; the "Aha!" moment of knowing that it should belong to her. And then the inevitable question: Why did it take so long to win this right, and more to the point - at least for me - where was I when other women were at the barricades fighting for it? The obvious answer is the fragile cocoon of privilege - the directions to Philadelphia; the train fare for Philadelphia; the doctor's bill paid by a parent, faced with the social disgrace of having a daughter back in the house, a daughter who quite visibly "did" - that separated the women I knew from the women at the low end of what we now call the "ninety-nine per cent": the women raped or abused or abandoned or simply ground down by poverty, perhaps unable to feed the children they already had; the women who had recourse only to a coat hanger, or a moment of excruciating pain on the filthy kitchen table of a home-town quack, regularly followed by hemorrhaging, ruined reproductive organs, and, in many cases, death. What were we thinking, or, rather, not thinking? True, many middle-class women were fighting for abortion rights, but most of us were too busy studying, or starting careers and families, to translate conviction into much activity beyond catching the subway to the weekly sessions of our consciousness-raising groups. This is the shameful reality of the struggle to legalize abortion. So much changed with Roe v. Wade. American women have benefitted from safe, legal abortions some fifty million times in the forty years since the Supreme Court decision on January 22, 1973. Many of them were married; a study, in 2008, found that more than sixty per cent were already mothers. By then, "choice" had also come to include the decision to have children as a single parent. Today, most of the women in this country were post-Roe v. Wade babies. They grew up knowing that the struggle was won. It couldn't happen again. But it has. Since the nineteen-seventies, the abortion issue has been used to raise a huge constituency of activists and small donors on the religious right around single issues that would link a heretofore "silent majority" to the G.O.P. and the money interests it represented. The politicians of a radical new right began leading "pro-life" demonstrations, carrying fetishes and images of fetuses. We re-entered the era of a right-to-life that denied the right to a different life to half the population. The bombing of abortion clinics became familiar news. Doctors have been murdered, hellfire sermons preached. The Vatican and the Protestant fundamentalists have made a common cause of misogyny. In November, a reversal of Roe v. Wade, either through the courts or by way of laws that made abortions practically inaccessible, was the centerpiece of the Republicans" platform in nearly every state. The question now is whether a Supreme Court stacked by Republican presidents seizes this anniversary year to join them. It seems unlikely, but, this time, we should all be ready for the fight. Photograph: AP