On its face,  The Icon and the Idealist  is not a book about abortion. Thanks to advances in technology and medical knowledge, Americans have become accustomed to an ideological separation between contraception and termination, sensible planning and irresponsible destruction. What Stephanie Gorton’s exhaustive history of the fight to legalize birth control makes clear, however, is that we maintain that separation at our peril. The fights share a history and a rhetoric: “dichotomies of choice