We Choose To

Starred review from July 22, 2024
Married couple Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd (Dancing in Limbo) chronicle their decades-long careers offering abortion care in this fascinating joint memoir. Boyd was a small-town doctor in 1960s East Texas when he began performing illegal abortions for desperate patients in defiance of his strict Christian upbringing; Halvorson-Boyd, meanwhile, was studying psychology and participating in the budding women’s movement. The pair met shortly after Roe v. Wade, when Halvorson-Boyd worked as a surgical assistant at Boyd’s Dallas clinic, and they quickly bonded over their shared dedication to women’s health (“I am not pro-abortion,” Boyd writes, “I am pro-woman”). In alternating first-person sections, the couple traces key moments in their personal and professional lives, including their 1973 establishment of the first legal abortion facility in the American Southwest and the 2009 murder of their colleague, George Tiller, who pioneered late-term abortions. The most stirring sections focus on the women they’ve treated, including a 14-year-old pressured by her mother into seeking an abortion, which the couple refused to perform. With empathy and urgency to spare—the consequences of Roe v. Wade’s 2022 overturning (“This feels like a death,” Halvorson-Boyd recalls saying when the decision came through) are implicit on every page—this offers an invaluably intimate glimpse at a delicate subject. It’s a must-read.