Researching Back-Alley Deaths and Writing 'Given No Choice'

by Cody McDevitt , guest blogger The origin of Given No Choice: A History of Abortion Rights was not a book proposal. It was, at first, a failed article. I had set out to write for a local alternative weekly about a coroner who had performed autopsies on women who died during back-alley abortions. The subject had a grim clarity -- the kind of story that resists abstraction because the consequences…