Abortion politics is a bellwether of women's rights in any country. Melissa Haussman analyzes abortion politics in Canada, Mexico, and the United States using social movement and political mobilization theories to access these three North American states. She finds that rhetoric and reality for girls and women is very different in all three states. In Canada, the national health service covers abortion procedures. However, it is more complicated than that because of funding and access issues. In addition, Canada requires that only medical physicians have the ability to provide abortions, therefore excluding nurse practitioners and other qualified health care workers from providing these services. Mexico has officially criminalized and forbidden all abortions (except for rape survivors, who must petition their local state's attorney general for permission to abort). However, a thriving illegal abortion business exists in Mexico with semiacknowledgment from the state. The official ban on legal abortion is maintained despite the fact that illegal abortions are the third-largest cause of pregnant women's deaths in Mexico. In the United States, abortion is legal but highly restricted. Poor women have limited access to funds for legal abortions in a few states, while many states provide no public funding for abortions. Haussman summarizes these realities on the ground as “a gap formed between legal declarations of rights and the extent of health services provisions” (p. 1).

Particularly valuable in this study is inclusion of the transnational nature of many of the social movements and groups mobilized about abortion politics. Haussman's chapter on how this plays out at United Nations conferences on women's health, population policies, or development issues is very original, timely, and compelling. Transnational advocacy networks work the United Nations preconferences and official conferences to advance their agendas. In addition, the author shows how many national interest groups have transnational affiliations, if not controllers. The issue of the Catholic Church's United Nations status as a “state” is an example of these transnational networks shaping issue agendas and contesting the international status quo in the name of fairness, equality, and representation. The status of the Holy See (the Vatican) in the United Nations allows it to block important aspects of UN health care, rights, development, and population recommendations, as Haussman so deftly shows. Increasing participation of nongovernmental organizations in key UN conferences is also explained and incorporated into the analysis of transnational policy advocacy and abortion politics.

The historical and institutional context of federalism, judicial review, political party cohesion and discipline, and executive powers in all three countries is clearly examined in order to help us understand abortion politics and practices in each country. The openness of each country to influence from social movements and interest groups (civil society access) impacts all of this. In addition, perceptive observations about the impact of money on elections in the United States, as compared to Canadian elections in particular, help flesh out the full nature of the ways in which women's reproductive choices are shaped in each of the three nation states. Haussman finds that variations in constitutional and state institutional forms and in political interpretations of federalism are the main explanatory factors for abortion policy differences in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. However, the study overlays all of these formal and informal institutions with the impact of race and social class on whether or not any girl or woman has safe abortion options in these countries.

“The unfortunate truth of all three countries, based on federal models, is that where a woman lives within them largely determines her access to abortion services,” Haussman explains, adding: “The geographical inequities are often compounded by fiscal ones, so that if a woman must travel to have an abortion and does not have the money, she faces an insurmountable barrier” (p. 3). Devolution of abortion policy to the 50 states, beginning in the 1980s and escalating ever since means that abortion laws, funding, and access vary state to state in the United States. Indeed, she notes, 11 states are on record as ready to recriminalize abortion if the 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision is overturned.

Tolerance or denial of sub rosa access to abortions in the histories of these countries and in their present policies exacerbates the inequalities of race and social class. Haussman's study is an important comparative addition to Mark A. Graber, Rethinking Abortion: Equal Choice, the Constitution, and Reproductive Politics (1996), Laura Kaplan, Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service (1995), and my own book on the politics of reproduction and the dual systems for those with money and those without (Laura R. Woliver, The Political Geographies of Pregnancy, 2002).

Abortion Politics in North America weaves all these factors into larger theories of social movement behavior and interest mobilization. Haussman cogently explains how social movement learning occurs when one side adjusts its issue framing, political rhetoric, and evocative symbols in response to the other side's critiques and political successes. The growing influence of transnational advocacy networks within shifting political-opportunity structures bounded by each nation's practice of federalism, political party discipline, judicial review, and openness to civil society actors across the spectrum of abortion politics makes this an important study of movements, civil society, governmental institutions, religion, gender, and politics. The study is an excellent comparative analysis of abortion politics and women's relative political status, which also helps advance social movement theories. The overarching influence of social class is smoothly woven into the analysis throughout. The author concludes that “under these three divergent constitutional and health-care frameworks, women who have the advantages of time, money, providers, and geographical location are still ‘okay’ under the current framework, while those lacking one or more of these crucial resources will either opt for an unsafe abortion, running a one-in-three risk of dying, as in Mexico, or perhaps opting out of having an abortion altogether” (p. 185). The result is a sobering reminder of how tenuous and contingent is women's access to safe reproductive choices.