Abortion and the Law in the US

Decades after the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, abortion remains a polarizing topic on America's political landscape. Blending history, culture, and law, Before Roe v. Wade explores the roots of that conflict, reconstructing the rise of the pro-choice and pro-life movements and recovering the voices that helped shape the climate that sparked the Supreme Court's 1973 decision. This perspective on the abortion debate is as relevant as ever with the prospect of imminent changes on the Supreme Court.

A landmark literary anthology of poems, stories, and essays, Choice Words collects essential voices that renew our courage in the struggle to defend reproductive rights. Twenty years in the making, the book spans continents and centuries. This collection magnifies the voices of people reclaiming the sole authorship of their abortion experiences. These essays, poems, and prose are a testament to the profound political power of defying shame.

Dangerous Pregnancies tells the largely forgotten story of the German measles epidemic of the early 1960s and how it created national anxiety about dying, disabled, and "dangerous" babies. This epidemic would ultimately transform abortion politics, produce new science, and help build two of the most enduring social movements of the late twentieth century--the reproductive rights and the disability rights movements. At most a minor rash and fever for women, German measles (also known as rubella), if contracted during pregnancy, could result in miscarriages, infant deaths, and serious birth defects in the newborn. Award-winning writer Leslie J. Reagan chronicles for the first time the discoveries and dilemmas of this disease in a book full of intimate stories--including riveting courtroom testimony, secret investigations of women and doctors for abortion, and startling media portraits of children with disabilities. In exploring a disease that changed America, Dangerous Pregnancies powerfully illuminates social movements that still shape individual lives, pregnancy, medicine, law, and politics.

More than thirty-five years after women won the right to legal abortion, most people do not realize how inaccessible it has become. In these pages, reproductive-health researcher Carole Joffe shows how a pervasive stigma-cultivated by the religious right-operates to maintain barriers to access by shaming women and marginalizing abortion providers. Through compelling testimony from doctors, health-care workers, and patients, Joffe reports the lived experiences behind the polemics, while also offering hope for a more compassionate standard of women’s health care.

Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, our current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where we face our economic realities as social safety nets get cut and wages decline. Briggs brilliantly outlines how politicians' racist accounts of reproduction--stories of Black "welfare queens" and Latina "breeding machines"--were the leading wedge in the government and business disinvestment in families. With decreasing wages, rising McJobs, and no resources for family care, our households have grown ever more precarious over the past forty years in sharply race-and class-stratified ways. This crisis, argues Briggs, fuels all others--from immigration to gay marriage, anti-feminism to the rise of the Tea Party.

A sweeping chronicle of women's battles for reproductive freedom throughout American history, Pregnancy and Power explores the many forces--social, racial, economic, and political--that have shaped women's reproductive lives in the United States. Leading historian Rickie Solinger argues that a woman's control over her body involves much more than the right to choose an abortion. Reproductive politics were at play when slaveholders devised breeding schemes, when the U.S. government took Indian children from their families in the nineteenth century, and when doctors pressed Latina women to be sterilized in the 1970s. Tracing the diverse plot lines of women's reproductive lives throughout American history, Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the effort to control sex and pregnancy in America over time. Solinger asks which women have how many children under what circumstances, and shows how reproductive experiences have been encouraged or coerced, rewarded or punished, honored or exploited over the last 250 years. Viewed in this way, the debate over reproductive rights raises questions about access to sex education and prenatal care, about housing laws, about access to citizenship, and about which women lose children to adoption and foster care.

The Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. Yet while the medical procedure is legal - and safe - many women across the country do not have the ability to exercise this reproductive right. Melody Rose examines abortion as a social regulatory policy, thoughtfully and thoroughly chronicling the erosion of abortion rights and availability since Roe. Paying respect to all views of this controversial topic in her engaging new book, Rose explores the success of the right-to-life movement in accumulating local and national policies that restrict access to abortion while enhancing fetal protections. In addition to a basic and brief primer on the practice and history of abortion, Rose considers the roles played by the courts, political parties, and interest groups in constructing barriers to abortion. With an examination of public opinion poll data and a look at both state and national statutory prohibitions on abortion, Rose also shows how powerful language wars have resulted in material policy alterations.

Using controversy over abortion as a lens through which to compare the political process and role of the media in these two very different democracies, this book examines the contest over meaning that is being waged by social movements, political parties, churches and other social actors. Abortion is a critical battleground for debates over social values in both countries, but the constitutional premises on which arguments rest differ, as do the strategies that movements and parties adopt and the opportunities for influence that are open to them. By examining how these debates are conducted and by whom in light of the normative claims made by democratic theorists, the book also offers a means of judging how well either country lives up to the ideals of democratic debate in practice.