"When 'The Cider House Rules' was published, some of my younger friends and fellow feminists thought it was quaint that I’d written a historical novel about abortion."

"They meant: now that abortion rights were secure, now that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. At the time, I tried to say this nicely: 'If you think Roe v. Wade is safe, you’re one of the reasons it isn’t.' Not surprisingly, my older women friends — women who were old enough to have had sex before 1973 — knew better than to imagine that Roe v. Wade would ever be safe. Men and women have to keep making the case for women’s reproductive rights; women have been making the case for years, but more men need to speak up. Of an unmarried woman or girl who got pregnant, people of my grandparents’ generation used to say: 'She is paying the piper.' Meaning, she deserves what she gets — namely, to give birth to a child. That cruelty is the abiding impetus behind the dishonestly named right-to-life movement. Pro-life always was (and remains) a marketing term. Whatever the anti-abortion crusaders call themselves, they don’t care what happens to an unwanted child — not after the child is born — and they’ve never cared about the mother."

From "The Long, Cruel History of the Anti-Abortion Crusade/Abortion opponents don’t care what happens to an unwanted child, and they’ve never cared about the mother" by the novelist John Irving (NYT).