Description

---

The demise of Roe v. Wade dramatically altered abortion access across the United States, igniting a new era of polarization over reproductive rights as roughly half of all states moved to ban or significantly restrict terminating a pregnancy. Yet even before the U.S. Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion on June 24, 2022, people across large swaths of the country were already facing enormous obstacles to ending a pregnancy, including mandatory waiting periods, early gestational limits, and a dearth of abortion providers. Life-Altering: Abortion Stories from the Midwest shares the narratives of women who have terminated pregnancies, despite these barriers, chronicling how laws and court cases can shape the lives and reproductive decisions of individuals.

Based on her coverage of reproductive rights for the Chicago Tribune, veteran journalist Angie Leventis Lourgos explores these personal accounts to delve into the most nuanced aspects of abortion, from life-threatening cases to terminations later in gestation to restrictions for minors. The reporting spans the time before Roe and continues through the first year after the landmark Supreme Court case’s stunning reversal, which spurred some of the most stringent abortion laws of the past half-century—as well as new and innovative means of access.

From interviews Lourgos conducted with women across the Midwest, Life-Altering examines different facets of abortion from the perspectives of those who ended their pregnancies, illustrating how court cases, state legislation, and religious beliefs can affect the lives and reproductive choices of ordinary people. By looking at myriad factors that influence the decision whether or not to abort a pregnancy— be they socio-economic, religious, legal, or medical—the accounts collected in this volume challenge the conventional labels of “pro-life” and “pro-choice .”
 

About the Author

---

Angie Leventis Lourgos has been a staff writer at the Chicago Tribune since 2009. A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate, Lourgos was previously a staff writer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington. Her writing has won two Peter Lisagor awards from the Chicago Headline Club, one Sarah Brown Boyden award from the Chicago Journalists Association, and several Illinois Press Association awards. Lourgos lives in the Chicago area with her husband and their two children.


 

Praise For…

---

“Angie Leventis Lourgos interweaves the stories of women who sought abortions with the political, moral, and religious contexts of their decisions. Throughout the fifteen chapters, Lourgos explores issues including medication abortions, the realities of traveling across state lines for procedure access, religious trauma, and the heartbreaking decision to terminate wanted pregnancies. Throughout all of the chapters, Lourgos keeps these women’s humanity at the forefront, even as she engages with those who would condemn them for their actions.”—Evan Elizabeth Hart, Missouri Western State University

"Smart reporting. Clear writing. Insight. Compassion. Angie Leventis Lourgos brings all those qualities to this wide variety of stories about women who have sought abortions. Her accounts of these women—and the systems that shape their options and feelings—will endure as an important record of a pivotal moment in American history."—Mary Schmich, Pulitzer Prize winner, former columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and author of Even the Terrible Things Seem Beautiful to Me Now: The Best of Mary Schmich