“The public image of an abortionist was of an evil, leering, drunken, perverted butcher at worst, and a cold, mysterious, money-hungry Park Avenue price-gouger at best. And then there was Dr. Spencer with his clinic on the main street of a small American town, who believed in abortions, and who was kind”

“You care, I'm told (although I no longer believe it). I've even heard you called a saint... But saints have imaginations vivid enough to know how to spend $374 million in a dire emergency.”

Plus: 'A Diary of Living With AIDS' and 'Remembering Robert — Seven Writers Commemorate a Colleague and Friend'

“Let me tell you about the first time I got high. It was 1966, and I was a young reporter… There, sitting on the floor, were Cree­dence Clearwater Revival and Big Brother and the Holding Company. A huge spliff was passed around… ‘We shouldn’t be doing interviews,’ I shouted. ‘We should be friends.’ ”

"On a freezing Friday night I visit Kings County Hospital. Depression hits as soon as I walk through the front doors"

"Memorials. A new way to be unhappy in a group. I visit a friend who can no longer speak. A few days later he's dead. If you ask after people you haven't seen for a while, be prepared"

Before Roe, terminating a pregnancy meant confronting a nightmare of quacks and butchers, knitting needles and wire coat hangers. The exceptions were people like Dr. X, “the stars of the underground abortion circuit.”

‘Two years ago, abortion was almost always discussed in feminist terms — as a political issue affecting the condition of women. Since then, the grounds of the debate have shifted drastically.’

‘I have chosen to fight, to raise a big and hideous and ungovernable howl for the girl I was and the girls who have yet to be’

The deaths of Prince, Tom Petty, Heath Ledger, and Michelle McNamara haven’t galvanized attention to the prescription drug crisis