| Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. Although the ruling stood for nearly half a century—until it was overturned, last June—the battle over reproductive rights never abated. In 1978, half a decade after Roe, The New Yorker published a Comment by an anonymous woman who’d had an abortion, “under what must certainly be called the best of circumstances.” The father, she wrote, was loving; there was enough money; she had the support of close friends. Then the telephone rang. “We know that yesterday morning you murdered a six-week-old baby girl, and we’d like to offer you some guidance,” an unfamiliar voice said on the line, claiming a desire to “help.” Frightened and foggy, the writer politely ended the call. Later, after phoning her doctor, she learned that anti-abortion groups sometimes paid nurses for lists of women who had had abortions, “the same way diaper companies used to pay nurses for lists of women who had given birth.” “I try to figure out what would drive a person to make such a phone call,” she writes. “Hatred? Deep principle short-circuited by desperation? Fanaticism?” With abortion now banned in many states, and endangered in others, similar questions are as relevant today as they were two generations ago. | 
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