Looking back, looking around, looking forward: A woman’s right to choose

The right of North American women to choose abortion as a reproductive option was dealt a grave blow on October 23, 1998 when Dr Barnett Slepian, an obstetrician/gynecologist from Buffalo, New York became the seventh casualty of anti-abortion violence since 1993. Slepian, long a target of antiabortion protestors, was shot by a sniper through the kitchen window of his home. The shooting followed a warning by a Canadian-American task force investigating four earlier attacks in the border region on three Canadian doctors and one American doctor from Rochester, New York (Berger 1998).