Abortion and the right of a woman to control her fertility cross boundaries of race, ethnicity, and social class. In this revealing and in-depth study, Jean P. Peterman focuses on a group of Puerto Rican women in Chicago whose decisions about abortion highlight the contradictions between the sexually conservative ethnic and religious beliefs of this community and the fact that Latina women (including Puerto Rican women) have abortions at a rate one and a half times as high as non-Latinas. For more than half the women Peterman interviewed, their decision to have an abortion allowed them to...