Part 4: Chapter 14 Summary and Analysis

"Reproductive Rights under the Backlash" completes Faludi's analysis. Feminists outflank the antiabortion "warriors" of Operation Rescue at a Sacramento family-planning clinic. Down the street, their silent, female auxiliary grieves for the lost children. The media frame the struggle as a moral and biological debate over when life begins, but it is fueled by animosity over socio-economic dislocation. Men like John Willke of the National Right to Life Committee view legal abortion as an assault on patriarchal power, a "bitter subtext" in the 1980s. While critics decry the "runaway pace of abortions", the rate has not changed in a hundred years. Roe v. Wade only makes them again legal and safe. By 1980, the sexual "double standard" dies, and by 1987, eighty-seven percent of single women accept bearing and raising children outside wedlock (up from fourteen percent just four years earlier). Nearly...