SORRENTINO

PROVIDENCE — For years, Mary Ann Sorrentino was the human face in Rhode Island of one of the nation’s most contentious issues: legal abortion.

As the director of the Rhode Island chapter of Planned Parenthood, Sorrentino battled at the State House and the ballot box and ran gauntlet after gauntlet of anti-abortion demonstrators to keep abortion legal in the state and provide the service to women who choose to terminate their pregnancies.

Now, Sorrentino has written a book about her experiences and the continuing battle: The A Word: Abortion: Real Women, Tough Choices, Personal Freedom.

Sorrentino, 63, of Cranston, is well known as a former talk-show host and syndicated columnist, but she says her real passion is campaigning for women’s rights and keeping abortion legal.

“It is my life’s work,” Sorrentino said last week in an interview over coffee.

Her book is not an academic tome. Rather she has written a lively, anecdote-driven and eloquent tribute to the cause she believes in.

Here’s an excerpt from her first chapter, in which she describes the women she dealt with at Planned Parenthood:

“Whether the patients were super achievers from the business world, students at a local college or university, homemakers, or single mothers on public assistance, on this day they were truly on the same plane. All the economic social, religious and generational differences between them fell away and they became simply, ‘the abortion patient.’

“The abortion experience not only equalizes those who go through it, it allows others, not present, to share in the possibility of being, or having been, in the shoes of that day’s patients.

“Every day across America, women like these lie down on a stretcher, look up at a ceiling, and wait for the medical team to end their pregnancies. Every day this happens to people you know and love. So when you speak of abortion, remember them and bring to mind that woman or women, in your own circle who once existed where these women are now.”

Sorrentino has been speaking at colleges in an attempt to educate a new generation of women. She worries that the two generations of women who have come of age since the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade which legalized abortion have come to take the freedom to terminate a pregnancy for granted.

“We want young people to have a fire in their belly about this right … which is under assault from the religious right, from [President] Bush, from the Catholic Church,” said Sorrentino. “The niche of this book is college campuses because it is written for these women. I want to light a fire under their butts so we don’t all of a sudden have a South Dakota situation going on in Rhode Island.”

Sorrentino is the leadoff speaker tomorrow at the 2007 Dana Shugar Spring Colloquium Series, sponsored by the University of Rhode Island Women’s Studies Program. Her speech is scheduled for 5 p.m. in the Galanti Lounge of the URI library.

Sorrentino is as animated as ever; age has done little to slow her staccato speaking style or her activism. She conjures up images of her Italian-American upbringing in Providence’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood in one breath, and in the next is discussing speech patterns reminiscent of writer George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language.”

The anti-abortion movement has, Sorrentino says, gotten very smart of late, especially in the way it has controlled the language of the debate. “Partial birth abortion, that’s a brilliant term but it has no medical meaning and it certainly more attention-grabbing than late-term abortion. ... ‘Right to life’ is a very powerful term, while ‘pro-choice’ sounds defensive.

“The anti-abortion movement is brilliant and very committed. These people aren’t going anywhere,” said Sorrentino.

She became known nationally during the 1980s when she was excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church. While she doesn’t like to revisit that issue, she acknowledges that it left a wound. When asked why she didn’t switch to another Christian church that allows its adherents to have abortions, Sorrentino said, “I’m an ethnic Italian Catholic, that is who I am.”

The burgeoning sexual-abstinence movement — endorsed by the Bush administration and conservative Christians — especially rattles Sorrentino. “I have a granddaughter and I hope she never smokes a joint and finds someone to love, doesn’t have sex before marriage and gets married to a wonderful man who loves her and has children.

“But I’m 63 years old and I know what’s out there in terms of peer pressure and values. We’ve had 2,000 years of experience with abstinence, and speeches by Jerry Falwell, the Pope and George Bush are no match for the racing hormones of a 15-year-old with a snort of crystal meth or a slug of vodka.”

“I’ve been around long enough to know that the world is not how I’d like it to be,” Sorrentino said. “I’m still going to be passing out condoms because that is the way the world is.”

The politics of abortion, Sorrentino argues, is too important to be left to political figures and elected officials. “The path to political glory is paved with photo opportunities,” she writes. “We see candidates kissing babies, embracing old ladies at bingo games, handing out scholarship checks … nowhere in the campaign manuals on ‘How to Guarantee Victory at the Polls’ does one expect to see advice urging potential winners to spend their days escorting abortion patients into clinics surrounded by opponents of those services.”

The other programs in the URI colloquium, all at 5 p.m. in the Dana Shugar Library, URI Women’s Center, include:

•Feb. 13 : “DES and Diflucan; Pharmaceutical marketing choices — Why women should take heed.” Lecture by Jody Lisberger, lecturer in the URI Women’s Studies Program.

•Feb. 27: “Sex Trafficking: Policy and Debates.” Lecture by Donna Hughes, professor in the URI Women’s Study Program and writer and researcher on women’s rights issues.

•March 6: “The Old Folks at Home: Domesticity and Race in 19th Century Sheet Music.” Lecture by Stephanie Dunson, assistant director of graduate studies and assistant professor of English.

•March 13: “Song and Activism” Lecture and performance by the Raging Grannies, a group of women who write protest songs.

•April 4: “Reading from Still River.” Dawn Paul, an alumna of the URI Women’s Studies Program, will read from her recently published novel, Still River.

•April 10: “Native American Women.” Lecture by Naomi Caldwell, an assistant professor in the URI graduate school of Library and Information Studies.

smackay@projo.com