Before Roe v. Wade, somewhere between one and two million illegal abortions were performed every year in the United States. Illegal abortion affected millions of women and their families, yet their stories remain hidden. In Creating Choice, citizens of one community in Western Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley break that silence. Doctors, clergy, and members of feminist women's collectives in the Pioneer Valley provided access to birth control (illegal in the state for single women until 1972) and abortions. Their work was done in defiance of the law, sometimes in secret, but often surprisingly openly. These activists felt they had no choice but to defy the laws and often met with support from surprising places, like university administrators, church officials, and the local police department. In Creating Choice, you'll meet a college chaplain moved to break the law after one of his students died of a back alley abortion and another hung herself; you'll meet a waitress who performed over 1,500 illegal abortions in her pink bathtub; and you'll meet the women themselves who risked their very lives.

The purpose of this paper is to clearly demonstrate the urgent need for dedicated airborne communications expertise throughout the Air Force Special Operations Forces (AFSOF) enterprise and to propose a comprehensive solution to that need. This need is driven by an enduring Irregular Warfare-focused (IW) strategic environment and an increasingly net-centric operational environment that sustain pressing airborne communications standardization, integration, and interoperability requirements. This paper's primary argument is that the Airborne Mission Systems Specialist (AMSS, aka "Radio Operator") skillset is a critical component for sustained AFSOF success in these strategic and operational environments, and thus AFSOC must reorganize its AMSS cadre into centrally controlled pools to provide standardized net-centric communications integration and interoperability capability to all of its maneuver elements and staff agencies worldwide. The wide-ranging strategic impact of re-defining the AMSS' role in AFSOC is universally decreased risk of mission failure, particularly on short-notice, "no-fail" national-level IW taskings.