Reading and Homework for January 22

Your reading assignment for Monday is Frederica Matthewes-Green’s “The Bitter Price of Choice” (follow the link to read it online). After you have read through her essay, answer the following questions about it.

1. What is the context of this essay? Who wrote it for whom, and why?
   
2. What does Matthewes-Green mean when she refers to “a Trojan Horse”? What is a Trojan Horse and what does she think it has to do with legalized abortion?
3. In what ways does Blackmun mean that “women have ordered their lives around” abortion?
4. What is Matthewes-Green referring to when she quotes, “our bodies, ourselves”?
5. What point is Matthewes-Green making when she refers to the plot of an Italian opera?
6. What does the title refer to? What, according to the writer, is “the bitter price of choice”?

These are comprehension questions designed to ensure that you understand the reading fully and are prepared to write about it in class on Monday. I will not be collecting these questions, and you should not answer these questions as a blog post (thought you are welcome to respond generally to the reading in a blog post if you wish, so long as you do so politely).

While Wikipedia is not generally a reliable source for scholarly inquiry, you may want to consult it or another encyclopedia to get some background information to help you answer these questions.

Please remember to print out a copy of the reading so that you can refer to it in class on Monday.