For those of us girls in the 1970s—with our flower-print skirts and endless fights for rights—the marches for legal abortion felt different from all the others. It was us, almost entirely, our male allies pushed to the margins for once. When someone spoke, she testified to tragic stories, hidden stories, yet common to all of us. There was a kind of shock in recognizing how universal these struggles were—but also so much doubt. Which is why Giulia Galeotti's fine book matters: it traces how abortion moved through time from a purely women's matter (like pregnancy and childbirth) into an ethical, political, and cultural fact altogether different. Embryological research in the 1600s and 1700s, and the French Revolution, would plant a new biopolitical investment in births and everything surrounding them. Only from the mid-twentieth century onward did women become the primary focus—thanks to two shifts: "new ways of waging war and finally universal suffrage." The Church too, Galeotti writes, "may be taking an important step" through the cause of Dorothy Day, "a woman whose life was adventurous, uncomfortable, difficult, and startlingly urgent for our time"; if "she is truly canonized, she would be the first saint to have had an abortion": not a doctrinal shift, "but an important recognition of the complexity of women's lives." With clarity, the book retraces what has been painfully done and debated, showing evolution and regression alike, including in custom and conscience. Always with the awareness that "as with all things that summon life and death, the debate around abortion is destined never to fully settle."