Telling their stories

the long version

Abortion and the right of a woman to control her fertility cross boundaries of race, ethnicity, and social class. In this revealing and in-depth study, Jean P. Peterman focuses on a group of Puerto Rican women in Chicago whose decisions about abortion highlight the contradiction between the sexually conservative ethnic and religious beliefs of this community and the fact that Latina women (including Puerto Rican women) have abortions at a rate one and a half times as high as non-Latinas. In this book, the stories recounted by these women involve struggles against barriers intrinsic to their social structure, such as poverty, prejudice, and discrimination, that ultimately shape newfound feelings of independence, inner strength, and control over their own fertility and their lives.