It was springtime in the Age of Clinton. The first spring, that is, in the first Congress, with a Democratic majority in both houses, and a Democratic president in the White House, the first alignment of this constellation since 1980. But that earlier Democratic president was Jimmy Carter, who professed to regard abortion as a regrettable thing, not to be promoted. He would do nothing as president to put the weight of the federal government in opposition to abortion, but neither would he do anything much to promote it. After the years of Reagan and Bush, the Democrats were once again in control of the Congress in 1993, but this time there was a president sprung from the generation of the baby boomers. He, too, professed in public to regard abortion as a regrettable thing – his hope, he said, was to make abortion “safe, legal – and rare.” But the first two items revealed the most important part of his state of mind: that he regarded abortion as an eminently legitimate choice, and with those premises in place the last point in his trinity was quickly rendered a deception. For Bill Clinton would do nothing to make abortion “rare.” In fact, quite the opposite: from the first moments of his presidency – in fact, even before he was sworn in as president – the documents were prepared for the first moves of his presidency, and in those moves he would rescind the executive orders of the Reagan and Bush presidencies that bore on abortion.