| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. By William Saletan. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 327 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-520-08688-0.)

Abortion has dominated electoral campaigns in the United States for thirty years, swept politicians into and out of office, reshaped political parties, and influenced politics at every level. The political power of abortion and the divisions within the citizenry over its legal status, practice, and meaning make abortion one of the historically significant struggles in American history along with suffrage, slavery, and segregation. William Saletan, political commentator for the online magazine Slate, offers a blow-by-blow account of the internal strategies pursued by national pro-choice organization leaders from the mid-1980s into the first years of the twenty-first century. To beat antiabortion referenda and legislation, pro-choice organizations used conservative rhetorics on behalf of women's reproductive rights. The apparent preservation of Roe v. Wade (1973) was won, Saletan contends, by appealing to swing voters' hostility to government, welfare, and taxes. In the process, the organizations for women's rights have been coopted by conservatism; indeed, President George W. Bush and the pro-life movement gained from this confluence of rhetoric and have successfully used the language of choice, privacy, and family to undermine reproductive rights and advance conservatism. For scholars interested in understanding better how electoral campaigns, pollsters, and strategists work at the turn of the twenty-first century and for those interested in the politics of gender, abortion, and sexuality, this is an important, insightful (and disturbing) book.

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