In an America where abortion has been legal for over thirty-five years, the procedure can be surprisingly inaccessible: even in cases of rape, imminent threat to the mother’s life, or complicated miscarriage—and even with a willing doctor.

How did the post–Roe v. Wade world come to resemble pre-Roe so closely? While "abortion wars" may immediately bring to mind the very real threat of antiabortion violence, sociologist Carole Joffe shows how a pervasive stigma operates less dramatically but just as effectively to maintain cultural, political, and economic barriers to access.

After thirty years embedded in reproductive-health research, Joffe relays compelling testimony from doctors, health-care workers, and patients as they struggle against these barriers that shame women and marginalize physicians, even within the medical community. Real-life stories include those of poverty-stricken rape victims scrambling—and sometimes failing—to cover the cost of abortions that should be covered by Medicaid; a doctor having to beg her superior for permission to perform in-hospital a medical abortion too dangerous to handle at a clinic; and a woman whose miscarriage is causing septic shock refused care and bundled off to another hospital.

Along with these portraits, however, Dispatches from the Abortion Wars also offers hope for real change, pointing the way to a more compassionate standard of women’s health care—one that responds to the needs of the individual and trusts women to make their own moral choices.