This work offers guidelines for reaching what the author calls a "negotiated peace" on the abortion issue. He aims to defuse the extremism of both the pro-life and the pro-choice advocates and to allow for the right to privacy of individuals, to ease relations between men and women and to heal the rift between the search for individual freedom and the yearning for community and tradition. America will be forced to take into account the complex factors of sex and power, historical and cultural change, advances in medicine, political leverage and competing social values in its pursuit of a consensus on this issue.