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Overview
Liberty and Sexuality is a definitive account of the legal and political struggles that created the right to privacy and won constitutional protection for a woman's right to choose abortion.Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established that right, grew out of not only efforts to legalize abortion but also out of earlier battles against statutes that criminalized birth control. When the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, voided such a prohibition as an outrageous intrusion upon marital privacy, it opened a previously unimagined constitutional door: the opportunity to argue that a woman's access to a safe, legal abortion was also a fundamental constitutional right.
Garrow's essential history details both the unheralded contributions of the young lawyers who filed America's first abortion rights cases and also the inside-the-Supreme Court deliberations that produced Roe v. Wade.
In this updated and expanded paperback edition, Garrow also traces the post-Roe evolution of abortion rights battles and the wider struggle for sexual privacy up through the 25th anniversary of Roe in early 1998.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Behind the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing a woman's right to abortion lay 50 years of legal struggle. In this massively detailed, stirring chronicle, Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. (Bearing the Cross), shows how the courage and initiative of ordinary women and men made a crucial difference in establishing that right. He begins with Katharine Houghton Hepburn, an outspoken Connecticut activist who opened birth control clinics in the '30s in defiance of a state law. Following in Hepburn's footsteps, Estelle Griswold, executive director of Connecticut Planned Parenthood, succeeded in having her own criminal conviction reversed by the Supreme Court: the 1965 Griswold v . Connecticut decision, which declared unconstitutional an 1879 statute criminalizing the use or or counseling on birth control, paved the way for challenges to anti-abortion statutes across the U.S. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, Garrow profiles key advocates of the liberalization or repeal of anti-abortion laws in the decades preceding Roe . In a cogent final chapter he argues that Roe v . Wade has sustained ``far greater wounds from the friendly fire of professed supporters than from the explicit attacks of candid opponents.'' Activists and students of legal history will be the most likely audience for this tome.Library Journal
A Pulizer Prize winner for Bearing the Cross, a biography of Martin Luther King Jr., Garrow here recounts the 50-year legal and political battle for privacy in sexual matters. Starting with the efforts to lift restrictions on the use of birth control, Garrow considers the steps that eventually led to the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade.Library Journal
A Pulizer Prize winner for Bearing the Cross, a biography of Martin Luther King Jr., Garrow here recounts the 50-year legal and political battle for privacy in sexual matters. Starting with the efforts to lift restrictions on the use of birth control, Garrow considers the steps that eventually led to the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade.Booknews
Pulitzer-prize winner Garrow (Bearing the Cross) traces the struggle over sexual freedom from cases in the 1920s and 1930s, over the legality of using birth control, to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. He also considers the fate of sexual freedom after Roe v. Wade. A huge book about a huge subject. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)The New Yorker
[A] monumental, indispensable history.Book Details
Published
February 24, 1994
Publisher
New York : Macmillan Pub. Co. ; c1994.
Pages
800
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780025427556