Every woman and girl should have the right to make decisions about her own body and health. Yet millions are denied this right, often forced to seek unsafe abortion care. The consequences are devastating: maternal mortality, preventable injuries and countless futures cut short. This study uncovers the barriers women face, amplifies victim-survivors’ voices and provides evidence to inform policies and interventions that make safe, accessible care a reality.

The study was done by Rutgers and CERRHUD in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo and Cameroon.

A defiant, funny, and unflinching dive into the millennia-long story of abortion—a practice as old as humanity and as contested as ever. From medieval Europe to Ming Dynasty China, from women enslaved in the American South to German nuns smuggling herbs, abortion has always been here. And so have the people who provided it.

Rooted in global history, folklore, and fierce scholarship, Quasebarth’s book is as joyful as it is furious. She opens with a bang and doesn’t let up, threading together ancient remedies (like crocodile dung pessaries), feminist saints, lost abortifacients, and the enduring power of reproductive autonomy. This is not just a book about abortion—it’s a call to remember, reclaim, and reframe. For students, activists, and anyone with a uterus (or who knows someone with one), this book is both an accessible introduction and a vital tool in the fight for reproductive justice. Abortion is care. Abortion is power. Abortion is joy.

Canada, 1967, l’avortement est un crime passible d’emprisonnement. Chaque année, des centaines de femmes meurent, ou restent mutilées aux mains de charlatans. Le silence se fissure. Le mouvement féministe émerge, réclamant le droit à l’avortement sécuritaire et légal. À Montréal, Henry Morgentaler entend son appel. Ce médecin, militant humaniste et survivant de la Shoah, choisit de défier la loi et commence à pratiquer des avortements dans des conditions médicales rigoureuses. Il est arrêté. S’ouvrent alors 15 années de lutte juridique, de procès spectaculaires et de mobilisation sociale. Soutenu par les militantes, confronté à l’État et à la prison, Morgentaler deviendra malgré lui une figure centrale d’un combat historique, celui de rendre aux femmes le droit fondamental de disposer de leur corps.

In many countries, barriers to abortion access—legal, cultural, or practical—have been dismantled in places as diverse as Mexico, Kenya, Thailand, and Ireland. Yet, in a few countries—the United States and Poland to name two—obstacles to abortion abound. Why? Why do some countries find abortion access a publicly polarizing issue and others a relatively uncontroversial health and family decision? Why has abortion access been a rallying point for progressive political organizing and, in others, the site of democratic backsliding?

In Accessing Abortion, expert academics and lawyers look to countries that have passed permissive abortion laws to make visible how legislation both settled and stirred conflict in politically-divided environments. By comparing the process of enacting laws in these countries, the volume spotlights current social mobilization for and against abortion rights. At the same time, the volume assesses how these varied and comparative national developments unfolded in an international and transnational context where the floor of what countries can do is set by international human rights norms. Ultimately, this collection aims to show how law and public policy functions to facilitate both permissive and restrictive abortion law reform, and how that reform then changes the delivery of abortion services. Providing a sustained comparative analysis of the costs and benefits of legislating and/or judicializing abortion rights across the globe, Accessing Abortion assesses what is missing from contemporary conversations on reproductive justice.

The belief that granting women reproductive freedom poses a threat to “traditional” values is a dangerous myth that has long prospered in American politics, providing justification for increasing control over women’s bodies and lives. How did such damaging ideas arise?

In Reproductive Wrongs, acclaimed translator and cultural historian Sarah Ruden exposes how ideologies that oppress women and families in the service of power took hold. Ruden traces a sweeping history through her trenchant analysis of seven pieces of literature that, she argues, marked key inflection points across two thousand years. From propagandistic poetry written by Ovid in the early Roman Empire to the biography of an evangelical American “abortion survivor,” Ruden lays bare how doctrines of control over women were invented and propagated.

In recent years, the repeal of Roe vs Wade in the United States and a number of high-profile cases in the UK have ignited intense public debates surrounding the sensitive issue of abortion. While the Pro-Life movement, often driven by religious convictions from Roman Catholic and conservative perspectives, has made its stance clear, other Christian arguments in favour of abortion have been notably less pronounced, frequently emphasizing exceptional circumstances. Emma Percy steps into this important conversation, offering a thought-provoking pastoral theology that takes a deeply empathetic approach to pregnancy and motherhood. In How Do We Talk About Abortion? she delves into the complex motivations behind women’s decisions to terminate pregnancies, treating this topic with the gravity it deserves.

Avec le colloque «Le droit des femmes à disposer de leur corps» – organisé le 27 septembre 2014 à l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris -, la Coordination des associations pour le droit à l’avortement et à la contraception (Cadac) poursuit son travail de restitution des réflexions et des mobilisations qui permettent aux femmes d’avancer dans les rapports d’égalité femmes/hommes.

Les difficultés rencontrées à faire progresser les droits des femmes dans le contexte de la «crise d’austérité» interrogent les choix économiques, sociétaux et politiques actuels.

Alors que l’avancée des droits des femmes fait progresser l’ensemble de la société, il est important de percevoir combien le patriarcat reste dominant dans la société française.

Dans les années 1960-1970, l’état français encourage l’avortement et la contraception dans les départements d’outre-mer alors même qu’il les interdit et les criminalise en France métropolitaine. Comment expliquer de telles disparités ?

Partant du cas emblématique de La Réunion où, en juin 1970, des milliers d’avortements et de stérilisations sans consentement pratiqués par des médecins blancs sont rendus publics, Françoise Vergès retrace la politique de gestion du ventre des femmes, stigmatisées en raison de la couleur de leur peau.

Une jeune fille de 16 ans, Marie-Claire C…, se fait avorter avec la complicité de sa mère.
Employée de métro à 1 500 F par mois de salaire, mère célibataire de trois filles qu’elle élève d’une manière exemplaire, Mme Chevalier est jugée devant le tribunal de Bobigny.
«Procès d’un autre âge», disent les savants et les femmes cités par la défense comme témoins à la barre.
L’association «Choisir» transforme le procès de ces femmes en acte d’accusation contre la loi de 1920 qui réprime l’avortement et, dans les faits, ne touche que les pauvres.
En quelques semaines, l’affaire de Bobigny crée un mouvement d’opinion irréversible. Les femmes doivent avoir le droit de choisir de donner la vie, la plus fondamentale de leurs libertés.

Un discours pour la mémoire. Un discours pour l’histoire des femmes.
Le 26 novembre 1974, la voix assurée de Simone Veil résonne dans l’hémicycle. Elle présente à l’Assemblée nationale son projet de loi en faveur de l’avortement. Une majorité de députés y sont opposés. Les débats seront longs, houleux, teintés d’une grande violence, mais l’éloquence magistrale de la ministre finira par emporter l’adhésion. Un discours historique qui a marqué un tournant pour les droits des femmes..

Cet ouvrage nous plonge dans l’histoire des revendications pour le droit de maîtriser sa fécondité. Une histoire peu. voire mal transmise à celles et ceux qui sont nées après la loi Veil. Il est aussi et avant tout un bilan, utile pour faire face aujourd’hui aux attaques contre la possibilité d’avorter dans de bonnes conditions sanitaires et sans trafic financier. Parce que c’est bien sur les conditions d’avortement que porte le débat : que l’Interruption Volontaire de Grossesse soit légale ou non, les femmes avortent. Mais si l’avortement est criminalisé d’une façon ou d’une autre. les femmes sont condamnées à le vivre comme quelque chose de difficile et de dangereux. Nous avons ancré notre histoire à Grenoble. afin de montrer comment un mouvement social qui a lutté pour cette liberté fondamentale s’est développé localement et nationalement. En prenant connaissance des revendications de cette période. nous posons la question : laisserons-nous encore les pouvoirs législatifs. religieux et médicaux dire ce que nous devons faire de nos corps et de notre fécondité ?

日本において、「産むこと／産まないこと」をめぐる「性と生殖の自己決定権（リプロダクティブ・ライツ）」は、どう法律・政治過程と関わり合ってきたのか――リプロダクティブ・ライツを否認する条項の存在、避妊ピルや中絶薬の普及の遅れなどが政治的課題として意識され、生殖補助医療への法的対応も迫られている今、あらためて、「個人的なこと」が「政治的なこと」であることを明らかにする。

性と生殖の権利の意義と歴史、国内外の制度の理解を通して、これからの未来を考える

In Japan, how have “reproductive rights”—the right to decide on sex and reproduction, encompassing “bearing children/not bearing children”—interacted with legal and political processes? At a time when the existence of clauses denying reproductive rights, the delayed availability of contraceptive pills and abortion medications are recognized as political issues, and legal responses to assisted reproductive technologies are urgently needed, we must reaffirm that the “personal” is inherently “political.”

女たちが女たちを助けようと立ち上がった違法の地下組織「ジェーン」。安全な中絶手術を求め駆け込んだ女性たちの数は推定1万1000人。激動の歴史を赤裸々に描いた衝撃的なノンフィクション。

1960年代から、1973年に最初の合法的な中絶クリニックが開設されるまで米シカゴで活動した地下組織＜ジェーン＞。当初はカウンセリングと中絶施術者の紹介を行っていたが、自分たちで中絶手術の技術を学び、推定1万2000人の女性に安全な中絶手術を提供した。多くの人々を救うと同時に、女性の権利に関する社会的な議論を呼び起こした。

Jane: the underground network of women who rose up to help other women. An estimated 11,000 women sought safe abortion procedures through them. A shocking nonfiction account that lays bare this turbulent history. From the 1960s until the first legal abortion clinic opened in 1973, the underground organization Jane operated in Chicago. Initially providing counseling and referrals to abortion providers, they later learned abortion techniques themselves, performing safe abortions for an estimated 12,000 women. While saving countless lives, they ignited a societal debate about women’s rights.

妊娠・出産したいか、したくないか。いつ産むか、何人産むか──。そのほか、中絶、避妊、月経、更年期に伴う心身の負担など、生殖関連の出来事全般に関し、当事者がどのような選択をしても不利益なく生きることのできる権利を「リプロの権利」という。1990年代、女性にとって特に重要な権利として国際的に定義・周知されたこの人権について、日本でほぼ知られていないのはなぜなのか。中絶問題研究の第一人者が国内外での議論の軌跡をたどり解説する。少子化対策と称し「出産すること」への圧力が強まる今、必読の書。

Whether to have a pregnancy or childbirth, or not. When to give birth, how many children to have—and beyond that, abortion, contraception, menstruation, the physical and mental burdens of menopause, and all other reproductive events. The right for individuals to live without disadvantage, regardless of the choices they make concerning these matters, is called “reproductive rights.” Why is this human right, defined and widely recognized internationally in the 1990s as particularly crucial for women, virtually unknown in Japan? A leading scholar on abortion issues traces and explains the trajectory of debates both domestically and internationally. Essential reading at a time when pressure to “give birth” intensifies under the guise of countering Japan’s declining birthrate.

The A Word provides a feminist perspective on the history of abortion, working to end the taboos that surround this procedure–and the word itself.

The A Word champions the women advocating for free and legal access to the seventy-three million abortions performed around the world every year, more than half of which require women to resort to underground procedures that put their lives at risk. This global history defines the term and the practice of abortion as it exists today and tells the stories of women all over the world engaged in the fight to take back control of their bodies.

From the Indigenous use of abortive plants before colonization to the complicated legacy of Margaret Sanger, to modern advocates like Maria Antonieta Alcalde Castro, Wendy Davis, and Simone Veil, the book shines a light on pivotal moments and figures of the abortion struggle and asks: Why do poor women fare worse when trying to access abortion? How was abortion criminalized? Who profits from its illegality?

In Sub-Saharan Africa, digital innovation and emerging technologies are reshaping the landscape of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). As digital solutions gain ground, they offer hope for improved access to services, enhanced health outcomes, and community empowerment. However, these advancements also present privacy, regulation, and equity concerns, particularly where healthcare access is uneven and digital literacy varies widely.

This book explores the intersection of digital innovation and SRHR within the African context. Edited by renowned experts, this work explores how digital tools can improve the accessibility, quality, and reach of SRHR services, while also addressing legal, ethical, and human rights considerations. Authors highlight both the promise and pitfalls of digital health solutions, offering insights into how policies can be shaped to protect rights and promote the responsible use of technology

À toutes celles qui sont mortes dans la clandestinité d’avoir refusé de mener à terme une grossesse qu’elles ne désiraient pas.

Elles ont 18, 24 ou 51 ans. Elles sont enceintes de trois semaines, un mois et demi ; parfois beaucoup plus. Souvent, elles sont déjà mères. De deux, trois, quatre, cinq ou six enfants. Elles ne peuvent plus « joindre les deux bouts ». Sont « capables du pire ». Elles ne veulent pas « engager la vie d’un petit être non désiré ». Elles souhaitent avorter. Alors, « l’espoir au cœur », elles écrivent à un médecin célèbre. À une époque où avorter est illégal, elles savent à quoi elles s’exposent mais elles sont déterminées.

Ces lettres pour un avortement illégal sont issues des archives de Choisir la cause des femmes. Témoignages historiques exceptionnels, elles tracent le portrait social et humain de celles qui étaient pénalisées pour avortement en France dans les années 1970. Ces voix nous ramènent à l’origine de nos luttes. Elles nous font connaître notre histoire pour pouvoir mieux l’écrire aujourd’hui et donnent de la force pour construire une Europe féministe, queer, intersectionnelle et antifasciste.

In many countries, abortion is a contentious public opinion issue. In nations like the United States, advocates on both sides of the debate have actively worked to amplify their voices and change legislation. In other parts of the world, such as China, abortion is not a major discussion topic because many residents may see it as a relatively settled issue. Legal developments often move in accordance with changes in public opinion, but not always. What explains differences in public opinion about abortion around the globe?

Fetal Positions explores this question using large-scale surveys from most of the world’s population, interviews with experts from two case study countries, the US and China, and an analysis of newspaper articles from over forty countries. The book examines the factors influencing cross-national abortion rates and individual abortion decisions, investigates the relationship between attitudes and laws, and explores how personal and national characteristics shape views on abortion.

En 1969, une vaste réforme du Code criminel ouvre la porte à la décriminalisation partielle de l’avortement au Canada et rend possibles certaines interventions pour des raisons thérapeutiques. Au Québec, c’est l’occasion pour le mouvement féministe de se mobiliser et de demander l’accessibilité complète et universelle des services et le retrait de la tutelle médicale. Certaines militantes mettent sur pied un vaste réseau de services d’avortement, actif jusqu’à l’arrêt Morgentaler de 1988.

Les militantes ont défié les lois, joué au chat et à la souris avec la police, traversé la frontière états-unienne et mobilisé leur savoir-faire pour offrir des avortements sécuritaires. C’est cette histoire de l’ombre que raconte ici Marie-Laurence Raby. Une aventure souvent occultée dans l’histoire par le travail des hommes médecins.

Attitudes about abortion cycle between long periods of widespread tolerance, to repression, and back again. What accounts for these pendulum swings? From ancient Greece to the modern West, historian of medicine Mary Fissell argues, abortion repression springs up in response to men’s anxieties about women’s increasing independence. In Pushback, Fissell shows that, across centuries and continents, abortion has always been commonplace, and persecuting women for ending pregnancies has been about controlling their behavior. As Protestantism de-emphasized celibacy, new abortion restrictions policed unmarried women’s sex lives. Nineteenth-century men unsettled by first-wave feminism hoped to establish medicine as a male profession, and so advocated for abortion bans to undercut women’s new roles as physicians. Fissell presents this history through the hidden stories of women committed to reproductive self-determination: holy women of the early Catholic Church whose ability to end pregnancies was considered miraculous, midwives accused of witchcraft or criminal conspiracy, and everyday women whose pregnancies threatened their livelihoods–and their lives. Pushback is essential reading for understanding the complex history of abortion and making sense of recent crackdowns on reproductive rights.

This book provides an argument against a right to conscientious objection by health care professionals. In increasingly multicultural societies inspired by pluralism, and given the range of controversial medical procedures that are or will be legal in many countries, claims about health care professionals’ right to abide by their own moral or religious views in the exercise of their profession become more frequent. This book explains why arguments for pluralism, tolerance, and diversity that support a right to freedom of conscience in society at large do not support the same right within the health care profession, or indeed any profession governed by internal norms of professionalism that someone freely decides to enter.

(FREE to download at Order link above, or order from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Conscientious-Objection-Health-Care/dp/0197786537/ref=sr_1_1)

Pills & Protest: Abortion Access in Ireland tells the story of how feminist activists strategically used abortion pills to help people while abortion was illegal and to influence the legal and medical changes to come. Drawing on three years of interviews with activists, doctors, and politicians in Ireland, Brenna McCaffrey illuminates the story of how the abortion pill transitioned from a controversial object to a legally recognized medical solution.

The result is an energizing story – one of creative protest, passion, and activism in pursuit of reproductive freedom. Pills and Protest demonstrates how understanding medication abortion is essential to understanding reproductive healthcare in Ireland – and globally – today.

A comprehensive analysis of the practice of abortion in various primitive societies. The book explores the cultural, social, and psychological factors that influence the decision to terminate a pregnancy in these societies. Devereux examines the attitudes towards abortion in societies such as the Navajo, the Hopi, and the Zuni, among others. He also discusses the role of traditional healers and midwives in performing abortions, as well as the methods used for the procedure. The book provides a fascinating insight into the complex and often contradictory attitudes towards abortion in these societies, and sheds light on the ways in which cultural and social norms shape reproductive practices.

The book was first published in 1955.

In this volume, a variety of scholars and activists discuss fundamental issues of international law and explore them from a feminist, queer, or gender and human rights perspective. The essays promote a rich discussion on critical issues such as those related to intersectional discrimination, violence against women and LGBTIQ+ people, sexual and reproductive rights, and the challenges of protecting human rights in situations of armed conflict and crisis contexts.

In this definitive, eye-opening history, award-winning author Rebecca Grant charts the reproductive freedom movement from the days before Roe through the seismic impact of Dobbs. The stories in Access span four continents, tracing strategies across generations and borders. Grant centers those activists who have been engaged in direct action to help people get the abortions they need. Their efforts involve no small measure of daring-do, spy craft, sea adventures, close calls, undercover operations, smuggling, sequins, legal dramas, victories, defeats, and above all, a deeply held conviction that all the risks are worth it for the cause.

In Access, we meet a cast of brave, bold, and unforgettable women: the founders of the Jane Collective, a group of anonymous providers working clandestinely between Chicago apartments to perform abortions in the pre-Roe years; the originators and leaders of the abortion fund movement; Verónica Cruz Sánchez, a Mexican activist who works to support self-managed abortion with pills and fights to free women targeted by the criminalization of abortion; and Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch doctor who realizes that there is one place abortion bans cannot reach: international waters.

Canada is the only country with complete decriminalization of abortion: no gestational duration limitations, no parental consent obligations, and no waiting periods. In recent years, other countries (New Zealand, Colombia, Uruguay, Mexico) have made strides toward this, while the United States has notoriously lost ground. Amidst the tumult, nurse and scholar Martha Paynter uses historical context and contemporary issues to explain why experts advocate against laws governing abortion. Despite decriminalization, Canadian federal and provincial legislation and regulations about health funding, delivery, and human rights all shape how abortion care is delivered. Barriers persist in uneven access, unclear information, and belief-based denial of care. In accessible plain language from the expansive perspective of a clinician, researcher and activist, Paynter describes abortion policy, practice and experience and discusses how to resolve challenges that continue more than three decades after Canada became the world’s most legally progressive jurisdiction for abortion.

Reproductive injustice is an urgent global problem. We are faced with the increased criminalization of abortion, higher maternal and neonatal mortality rates for people of color, and more and more research addressing the structural nature of obstetric violence. In this collection of essays, the cause of reproductive injustice is understood as the institutionalized isolation of (potentially) pregnant people, making them vulnerable for bio- and necropolitical disciplination and control.

The central thesis of this book is that reproductive justice must be achieved through a radical reappropriation of relationality in reproductive care to safeguard the access to knowledge and care needed for safe bodily self-determination. Through empirical research as well as decolonial, feminist, midwifery, and Black theory, reproductive justice is reimagined as abolitionist care, grounded in the abolition of authoritative obstetric institutions, state control of reproduction, and restrictive abortion laws in favor of community practices that are truly relational.

In the twentieth century, the idea that people should consciously plan (and limit) the size of their families became a global cause. Historical accounts of the global family planning movement have largely focused on the most prominent activists and those at the helm of international organizations, philanthropic foundations, and government programs. In The Gospel of Family Planning, however, historian Nicole C. Bourbonnais shifts our attention to frontline workers—doctors, social workers, nurses, fieldworkers, consultants, church groups, and volunteers—who, she compellingly shows, played a central (if complicated) role in preaching contraception around the world.

Through a mix of collective biography and microhistory, Bourbonnais visits clinics, doorsteps, and bedrooms, revealing the everyday, ground-level workings of grassroots family planning campaigns, state population control programs, and the movements for reproductive rights and justice that arose to contest them.

(Free book – download at link.)
Despite notable legal and policy advancements in post-colonial Africa, unsafe abortion remains a pressing public health concern. This book offers a vital and timely examination of this ongoing challenge. The collection of essays moves beyond a mere analysis of legal texts, unpacking the deep-rooted barriers that continue to limit access to safe abortion services in Africa. The authors critically assess the real-world impact of current reforms, highlighting their shortcomings in providing accessible, rights-based care. They offer concrete strategies aimed at strengthening legal and policy frameworks to promote reproductive autonomy, improve reproductive health outcomes, and advance gender equality for women and girls confronting unwanted pregnancies.

Through a compelling exploration of how restrictive laws push countless women towards unsafe procedures – often with fatal or debilitating consequences – the volume underscores that meaningful reform demands more than legislative change. It calls for addressing the broader social, economic, and cultural determinants that restrict access to abortion care. By advocating for the implementation of progressive instruments such as the African Women’s Protocol, this book stands as a powerful call to action for African policymakers and stakeholders to facilitate access to safe abortion care services. It urges the adoption of comprehensive and transformative measures that can truly secure women’s rights to safe abortion and prevent needless suffering and death.

An exposé of how far-right extremists across Europe use attacks on abortion to introduce broader fascist politics–and their connections to the American far right, from a leading investigative journalist.

Think today’s anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today’s anti-abortion movement is largely financed and planned by far-right extremists. Many of them are avowedly fascist and white supremacist, afraid of a “great replacement” of the world’s white population by other races, who are working hard to reshape governments and policies across Europe, North America and around the world. Much of this far-right organizing and funding network, however, has been overlooked by today’s feminist and left movements.

Behind every “landmark case” is a woman with a story.

“Who was the woman trying to convince a jury in a tiny courthouse in Nova Scotia that it was self-defense when she killed her partner; and who was the young woman walking into the palais de justice in small-town Quebec arguing that it was her choice, not his, to have an abortion? What was it that pushed these women on, even when the lawyers said it was hopeless?”

From the award-winning author of The Abortion Caravan and More Than a Footnote, Karin Wells once again pulls us into the lives—and this time, the legal trials—of a group of women integral to the advancement of women’s rights in Canada. Eliza Campbell, Chantale Daigle, Jeannette Corbiere Lavell—these Women Who Woke Up the Law often had no idea what they were facing in the courts, or the price they would have to pay. Some never saw justice themselves, but they left a legal legacy. Their bold determination is something we need now more than ever to guard the hard-won gains in women’s rights.

From classical Greece to Roe v. Wade, a long-overdue history of abortion. An ancient entertainer unable to work while pregnant; a medieval holy woman performing a ‘miraculous termination’; a Reformation-era abortion provider prosecuted as a witch; a Victorian midwife saving her patients from the workhouse. Women have always sought to end pregnancies, and long succeeded. This book tells their stories.

From enslaved and Indigenous herbal knowledge on Europe’s colonial plantations to Planned Parenthood’s unlikely alliance with postwar churches, Mary Fissell reveals abortion’s long politics, tracing how Western societies have policed the practice–or chosen not to. For long periods in our past, abortion was widely tolerated by authorities and ordinary people, and far from straightforward in Christian morality: it was not a crime in Britain until 1803, nor a religious issue in America until the twentieth century. Whether in France, Scotland, Germany or Italy, abortion controls have always sprung from wider panics around social change–whether times of war, revolution and economic upheaval, or patriarchal anxiety about women’s growing independence. As restrictions tighten once more, this vividly illuminating history reminds us that such repression never endures.

Reproductive rights are fundamental for the life, freedom, health, and safety of over half the world’s population. Yet reproductive freedoms are under attack worldwide, even where women have achieved political rights and workplace participation. According to the World Health Organization, about a third of pregnancies end in abortion–but about half of abortions are unsafe, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths each year. Why are abortion rights backsliding, even in developed democracies? Why do some modern societies progress toward reproductive freedoms, while others regress or stagnate? And what can the struggle for reproductive rights teach us about broader movements for human rights and gender justice?

In Abortion Rights Backlash, Alison Brysk shows how threats to reproductive rights stem from a gendered political struggle over declining democracy, national identity, and widening inequality due to globalization. Formerly dominant groups facing social and economic crisis promote reactionary nationalist ideologies built around patriarchy, race, and religion as they seek to control population politics. Brysk demonstrates that this is a global phenomenon, comparing the diverging experiences of the politics of abortion in Ireland, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States (California vs. Texas). Timely and pathbreaking in its global perspective and feminist analysis, Abortion Rights Backlash transforms our understanding of human rights, the future of democracy, and the struggle for gender justice worldwide.

世界の標準と日本の現実——知らなかった「中絶薬」のすべてがここに！

中絶薬について、日本ではまだ十分な情報が一般に知られていません。本書は、中絶薬の仕組み、国際的な動向、日本の現状、そして実際の使用に関する知識 を網羅的に解説する、日本初の包括的ガイドです。

(English: The world’s standard and Japan’s reality – everything you didn’t know about abortion pills! Not enough information about abortion pills is yet available to the general public in Japan. This is the first comprehensive guide to abortion pills in Japan, providing a comprehensive overview of how they work, international trends, the current situation in Japan and knowledge about their actual use.)

From International Campaign for Safe Abortion: “This book, in Japanese only, addresses a critical void in Japan’s reproductive healthcare landscape. Currently, there is a severe lack of accurate, scientific information about abortion pills (mifepristone and misoprostol) available in Japanese. More concerning is the spread of scientifically unfounded claims about the safety of abortion pills by some medical professionals and government officials. Even pharmaceutical companies appear to be providing different information in Japan compared to other countries, possibly in deference to local medical and governmental preferences.”

Chaque jour, David Elia reçoit et examine des femmes. Il écoute, il devine les non-dits, il est technicien mais aussi psy. « Mon » gynéco, disent les femmes… Elles changent d’amant, de mari et dans la plupart des cas restent fidèles à ce médecin qu’elles se sont choisi. Elles lui confient tout ce qu’elles n’osent pas toujours dire à leur compagnon. Pour la première fois, un gynécologue accepte de parler sincèrement de l’exercice quotidien de sa profession. David Elia, partant de son propre itinéraire, répond à toutes les questions que l’on est amené à se poser sur cette connivence si particulière qui s’établit entre le gynécologue et sa patiente : il témoigne ainsi de l’évolution de dix-huit années de mentalités féminines.

Where did defenders of Roe v. Wade go wrong? Why did they lose the moral high ground? What does it take to defend abortion rights in the United States?

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade because it claimed that “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” But if the intellectual tradition the American founders drew on was the doctrine of individual rights, then it is relevant that this doctrine has logical implications that even they might not have grasped. In that respect, the original philosophy of the founders supports an absolute individual right to abortion. To defend abortion as an inviolable right, it has to be understood as a claim of uncompromising justice. The hard-hitting essays in this book make that case.

91 Days offers a thorough exploration of abortion through an interdisciplinary lens and is, most importantly, written in Kurdish. The book spans 14 chapters, each examining a different facet of abortion: from historical, philosophical, and political perspectives to medical, psychological, and legal insights, along with real-life narratives and artistic reflections. This comprehensive approach aims to foster a nuanced dialogue about abortion in society. (From: https://kurdistanchronicle.com/babat/3475)

First published in 1973, this is an essential work on the corruption of the medical establishment and its historic roots in witch hunts. In this new edition, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have written an entirely new chapter that delves into the current fascination with and controversies about witches, exposing fears and fantasies. They build on their classic exposé of the demonisation of women healers and the political and economic monopolisation of medicine, bringing it up to date with today’s changing attitudes to these issues.

Hablemos del Aborto (Let’s Talk About Abortion Spanish Language Edition) is a groundbreaking, nonjudgmental, and gender-inclusive resource designed to help parents, caretakers, and providers compassionately discuss abortion with children ages 6 to 12. Authored and illustrated by experienced abortion doulas and vetted by early childhood educators, this book is crafted with the intention of fostering intentional, compassionate, and nonjudgmental conversations about abortion care.

In a landscape where no other children’s books discuss this topic, Hablemos del Aborto fills a crucial gap. It provides a medically accurate, gender-inclusive, and nonjudgmental resource that acknowledges the diverse and complex nature of abortion care. The book’s text is carefully constructed without gender-specific language or one specific character, recognizing that each abortion experience is unique and personal. This book serves as a starting point for discussion, offering parents, educators and caretakers a thoughtful and sensitive tool to approach discussions about abortion.

Let’s Talk About Abortion is a groundbreaking, nonjudgmental, and gender-inclusive resource designed to help parents, caretakers, and providers compassionately discuss abortion with children ages 6 to 12. Authored and illustrated by experienced abortion doulas and vetted by early childhood educators, this book is crafted with the intention of fostering intentional, compassionate, and nonjudgmental conversations about abortion care.

In a landscape where no other children’s books discuss this topic, Let’s Talk About Abortion fills a crucial gap. It provides a medically accurate, gender-inclusive, and nonjudgmental resource that acknowledges the diverse and complex nature of abortion care. The book’s text is carefully constructed without gender-specific language or one specific character, recognizing that each abortion experience is unique and personal. This book serves as a starting point for discussion, offering parents, educators and caretakers a thoughtful and sensitive tool to approach discussions about abortion.

Je suis la preuve qu’un avortement peut provoquer l’indifférence ou une déflagration.Je suis la preuve qu’un même corps peut vivre deux fois ce même événement en mobilisant de façon totalement différente la tête qui le surplombe ou les émotions qui l’animent.Je suis la preuve qu’il peut occuper vingt ans ou les seules semaines nécessaires à son accomplissement.Qu’il peut être l’unique issue ou simplement permettre d’attendre un meilleur moment.Alors, j’ai été lasse des discours péremptoires et fermés sur les raisons pour lesquelles les femmes devraient y avoir recours et sur ce qu’elles devraient ou non ressentir à son occasion. J’ai été lasse et j’ai eu envie d’écouter certaines d’entre elles raconter ce qu’elles avaient vécu en refusant d’admettre que d’autres parlent pour elles.Ma préoccupation n’était pas le droit à l’avortement mais le droit à la parole de celles qui l’ont expérimenté. S. V. Un livre vibrant et incarné, dans lequel l’autrice brisele silence autour de l’IVG.

Towards Reproductive Justice frames the right to terminate a pregnancy as a human rights issue and considers Australian laws and policies that have significantly advanced reproductive rights. These include legal measures to mitigate the impact of conscientious objection, and the introduction of safe access zones around abortion clinics. It also notes the wave of decriminalisation that has swept across Australia and the importance of removing abortion from the criminal law framework. At the same time, this book illuminates the enduring barriers to abortion access, acknowledging the remaining steps on the path to achieving full reproductive justice. Among these are the attitudes of some health professionals and health facilities, financial and geographic barriers to access, deficiencies in medical training, and persisting legal obstacles. Recent legal and policy developments are also examined, both those which contribute to the advancement of reproductive rights in Australia and those which detract from this crucial goal.

Barbara Baird tells the history of the provision of abortion care in Australia since 1990. Against the backdrop of a reticent public sector Baird describes a system of predominantly private provision, which has imposed barriers to access on women already marginalised by poverty, rural and remote residency, lack of Medicare entitlement, racism and other factors. Tracing changes in the private sector, the long struggle to make medical abortion available and the nationwide decriminalisation of abortion since 2002, Baird introduces readers to the large cast of ‘champions’ and everyday healthcare workers and activists who have persisted in their commitment to make abortion care available when governments and the medical profession have so often failed.

Drawing on oral history interviews conducted nationwide with abortion-providing doctors, nurses, counsellors and managers, women’s health workers, academics and community activists, Baird brings a critical feminist analysis to create a sophisticated historical narrative of abortion provision over the last thirty years.

A principled and pioneering campaigner, Dorothy Thurtle was a lifelong worker for freedom, equality, and opportunity. She was a fervent champion of women’s rights. Thurtle was motivated by a strong sense of injustice, and a firm belief that there should not be one rule for the rich and another for the poor – especially when it came to birth control and access to abortion. In this, she held firmly to her principles, including as part of the Birkett committee on abortion 1937-9 (in Britain). When this committee, having heard evidence from a range of medical professionals, campaigning groups, and individuals, recommended no major change to the existing abortion laws, Dorothy Thurtle issued her own minority report. She recommended the legalisation of abortion under various circumstances (including in cases of rape or incest), and showed particular sensitivity to the needs and realities of working class women. Although unsuccessful in the 1930s, she continued her activism for decades more, and lived to see the introduction of the 1967 Abortion Act.

Carolyn McLeod responds to a growing worldwide trend of health care professionals conscientiously refusing to provide abortions and similar reproductive health services in countries where these services are legal and professionally accepted. She argues that conscientious objectors in health care should have to prioritize the interests of patients in receiving care over their own interest in acting on their conscience. McLeod defends this ‘prioritizing approach’ to conscientious objection over the more popular ‘compromise approach’ in bioethics-without downplaying the importance of health care professionals having a conscience or the moral complexity of their conscientious refusals.

Her central argument for the prioritizing approach is that health care professionals who are charged with gatekeeping access to services such as abortions are fiduciaries for their patients and for the public they are licensed to serve. As such, they have a duty of loyalty to these beneficiaries and must give primacy to their interests in gaining access to care. McLeod provides insights into ethical issues extending beyond the question of conscientious refusal, including the value of conscience and the fundamental moral nature of the relationships health care professionals have with current and prospective patients.

In this book, faith leaders, scholars and activists from around the globe provide their perspective on faith and abortion. They reflect on examples of faith organisations which have provided leadership on the issue as well as examining religious approaches from Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and interfaith perspectives. Challenging the assumption that all people of faith are anti-abortion, this book provides a counterpoint to right-wing faith perspectives and outlines how faith communities reimagine abortion as an issue of social, pastoral and theological concern.

Providing perspectives from the global North and South, it includes settings where abortion is legal, and where it is restricted, and settings where abortion stigma is ever-present to settings where abortion is normalised. It also demonstrates the complex connections between faith and abortion, how women and pregnant people are positioned in society and how morality is claimed and challenged.

In 2015, Juno Carey left her job as a midwife, burnt out, frustrated and looking for a better way to deliver care to women. And then she found work that she loves, that brings her satisfaction and the knowledge of helping women, directly and fundamentally, every day.

Working in an abortion clinic is not easy, but it is a necessary kindness: Juno’s work changes and even saves lives. In this book she shares the stories of the patients she helps there, young and old, single and married, vulnerable and stoical. She cares for women who are already mothers, women who have had to travel to the UK to get help and those who face unimaginable trauma.

Urgent, illuminating and deeply human, A Necessary Kindness reveals the misunderstood world of abortion clinics, and deals with a complex issue – around which there is still too much taboo and too little understanding – with gentle compassion and bold conviction. These are the stories we need to share, the conversations we need to be having and the rights we need to protect.

In this book, Wolfgang P. Müller tells the story of how abortion came to be criminalized in the West. As he shows, criminalization as a distinct phenomenon and abortion as a self-standing criminal category developed in tandem with each other, first being formulated coherently in the twelfth century at schools of law and theology in Bologna and Paris. Over the ensuing centuries, medieval prosecutors struggled to widen the range of criminal cases involving women accused of ending their unwanted pregnancies. In the process, punishment for abortion went from the realm of carefully crafted rhetoric by ecclesiastical authorities to eventual implementation in practice by clerical and lay judges across Latin Christendom. Informed by legal history, moral theology, literature, and the history of medicine, Müller’s book is written with the concerns of modern readers in mind, thus bridging the gap that might otherwise divide modern and medieval sensibilities.

Accessing abortion services in rural areas under conditions of liberal abortion legislation is neither straightforward nor simple. As the South African example shows, the liberalization of abortion legislation was the first step in granting pregnant persons access to abortion care. Despite this and some progress in implementation, many challenges persist resulting in a lack of services, especially in areas where distances and transport costs are a factor.

Drawing on the findings of a study conducted in three rural districts of the Eastern Cape, the authors highlight the complexities involved in understanding problematic or unwanted pregnancies and abortion services within these communities; the reported barriers to, and facilitators of, access to abortion services among rural populations; and preferences for types of abortion services.

The biography of one of the most famous abortionists of the nineteenth century–and a story that has unmistakable parallels to the current war on reproductive rights For fifty years in the mid-nineteenth century, “Madame Restell,” the nom du guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. It was the abortions that made her famous. “Restellism” became the term her detractors used to indict her. Restell began practicing when abortion was largely unregulated in most of the United States, including New York. Vilifying her became one strategy for controlling women and criminalizing abortion and birth control. But as a sense of disquiet arose about single women flocking to the city for work; greater sexual freedoms; a changing view of the roles of motherhood and childhood; and an unease about fewer children being born to white, married, middle-class women, Restell came to stand for everything that threatened the status quo. From 1829 onward, restrictions on abortion began to put Restell in legal jeopardy. For much of this period she prevailed–until she didn’t. A story that is all too relevant to the current attempts to criminalize abortion in our own age, The Trials of Madame Restell paints an unforgettable picture of the changing society of nineteenth-century New York and brings Restell to the attention of a whole new generation of women whose fundamental rights are under siege.

In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Italians maintained a fundamental ambivalence about abortion. Italians from all levels of society sought, had, and participated in abortions. Early modern Italy was not an absolute anti-abortion culture, an exemplary Catholic society centered on the “traditional family.” Rather, Christopoulos shows, Italians held many views on abortion, and their responses to its practice varied.

In Policing Pregnant Bodies: From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America, historian Kathleen M. Crowther discusses the deeply rooted medical and philosophical ideas that continue to reverberate in the politics of women’s health and reproductive autonomy. From the idea that a detectable heartbeat is a sign of moral personhood to why infant and maternal mortality rates in the United States have risen as abortion restrictions have gained strength, this is a historically informed discussion of the politics of women’s reproductive rights.

How feminists across Latin America, Africa, and Europe are making self-managed abortion available to all–and the strong transnational feminist movement they have built along the way

Drawing on years of research with activists around the world, sociologist Naomi Braine describes the strategies, politics, and tactics of direct action feminists bringing abortion pills, information, and support to people seeking to end unwanted pregnancies. From combatting the legal strictures of Bolsonaro’s Brazil, to navigating the NGO-dominated landscape of Kenya and Nigeria, feminist activists are making safe, accessible abortion care available against the odds.

Resistant Reproductions, the first book-length study of both pregnancy and abortion in British culture, examines pregnancy narratives, including abortion narratives, in British fiction and film from 1907 to 1967. Fiction became a way for writers to explore what new possibilities of reproductive control would mean for the individual. Yet there was also much anxiety about who would have control: individuals, or the state? While exploring intimate personal experiences of pregnancy and abortion, Resistant Reproductions also asks how literary narratives used reproductive plots to address political issues of gender, class, and eugenics.

Mexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash.

In this book, Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City’s public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women’s citizenship in liberal societies.

In Tissue, Madison Griffiths turns her keen eye to the topic of abortion in a meditative and personal look at a procedure that is common yet vilified, championed yet sometimes grieved. Tissue looks at the feelings of guilt around choice, exploring the language we use, or don’t, and how the silence shapes the way we think and feel about the act. Abortion has many facets. Tissue lays each of them bare, meticulously unravelling how the world-at-large responds to abortion, inviting us into the messy and complex realities imbedded in such a politicised act of agency. At a time when women around the world are losing their right to access safe abortion, this book is needed more than ever.

An unprecedented, up-close look into the global self-managed abortion movement. Abortion pills have made safe medication abortion possible for millions of people around the world, even in the most restrictive circumstances. In this timely book, Sydney Calkin illustrates the profound, transformative promise of these pills—which are safe, effective, and responsible for a sharp decline in maternal mortality. Abortion Pills Go Global demonstrates that the widespread practice of self-managed medication abortion makes it more difficult for countries to enforce oppressive abortion laws and less willing to do so.

Taking a bold and unique geographic approach, this book follows these pills as they are manufactured and transported by feminist activists from India to Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland, and the United States. Calkin shows that the growing availability of abortion pills in places with restrictive laws means more people have access to self-managed healthcare. Abortion Pills Go Global looks ahead to see how the broader politics of abortion could shift in response to this global movement—one that looks not to laws for protection but to on-the-ground feminist mobilizations across borders.

The Road to Repeal opens in 1970 when the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement burst onto the streets and screens of a society bewildered by women demanding equal status in the home and in the workplace. It tracks the bitter backlash to their successes that culminated in the Eighth Amendment’s fixture in the Irish Constitution in 1983.

Over five decades, Road to Repeal describes and depicts individual tragedy, referendums, court cases, the actions of a misogynist Church and State. It shines a light on the journey of thousands of women and girls who braved stigma and hardship, often travelling alone and anonymously for medical treatment they were denied in Ireland. Road to Repeal closes with the visually dazzling Together For Yes campaign whose determination and grit finally got rid of the Eighth Amendment, Article 40.3.3 on May 25th, 2018.

मुंबई: जेव्हा कोविडने जग बंद करण्यास भाग पाडले, तेव्हा प्रख्यात स्त्रीरोगतज्ज्ञ आणि न्यायिक कार्यकर्त्याच्या पत्नी डॉ स्मिता दातार यांनी आपल्या पतीच्या 14 वर्षांच्या धर्मयुद्धाबद्दल लिहिण्यासाठी हातात वेळ घालवला – एक धर्मयुद्ध ज्याने केंद्रीय मंत्रिमंडळाला पुरातन काळातील सुधारणा करण्यास भाग पाडले. 2020 मध्ये कायदा. गर्भपाताची वरची मर्यादा 20 आठवड्यांवरून 24 आठवड्यांपर्यंत वाढवण्याचे धोरण ठरविणाऱ्या डॉ. निखिल दातार यांची कहाणी आता 24 डिसेंबर रोजी प्रसिद्ध झालेल्या ‘फक्त तिचीसाथी’ (फक्त तिच्यासाठी) या मराठी पुस्तकात गुंतलेली आहे. मुंबई मध्ये.

Mumbai: When Covid forced the world to shut down, Dr Smita Datar, the wife of a renowned gynaecologist and judicial activist used the time in hand to write about her husband’s 14-year crusade—a crusade that pushed the Union cabinet to upgrade an archaic law in 2020. The story of Dr Nikhil Datar, who got policymakers to raise the upper limit for abortions from 20 weeks to 24 weeks, is now encapsulated in a Marathi book, Fakt Tichyasaathi (Only For Her), which was released on Dec 24 in Mumbai.
(From: https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-news/pandemic-pushes-wife-to-write-book-on-crusading-doc-who-fought-to-raise-abortion-limit-101671905399843.html)

Yamila tuvo un aborto espontáneo en el baño de su casa. Fue condenada a nueve años de prisión. Paloma, violada en un barrio de San Fernando, tuvo a su bebé en el baño de la casa de sus tíos y lo creyó muerto. La condenaron a seis años y ocho meses de prisión. Gimena está presa en una cárcel de Salta, cumpliendo diez años después de haber dado a luz en una letrina. Eliana está detenida en San Juan, con una condena de prisión perpetua tras haber quedado embarazada producto de una violación y haber tenido el parto en el fondo de su casa. Inés fue condenada a ocho años por un hecho similar. También Rosalía, que hoy cumple prisión domiciliaria. Patricia, condenada por el “homicidio” de su bebé prematuro, murió en la cárcel.

Este libro toma los casos de estas siete mujeres para sacar a la luz una realidad silenciada: en la Argentina también hay mujeres perseguidas penalmente y privadas de su libertad tras haber atravesado abortos espontáneos, partos prematuros o en los que los bebés nacieron sin vida. No es algo que sucede solo en otros países. Y a pocas personas les importa. Mientras la pelea por la legalización del aborto continúa, es hora de que estas historias, y tantas como ellas que permanecen invisibles, sean una causa más en las agendas feministas y de la sociedad toda, para que nunca más un embarazo, su interrupción o un parto sean considerados un delito.

Historia de una desobediencia. Aborto y feminismo “escapa (por suerte) a las tipificaciones disciplinarias y por ende resiste una lectura convencional”, como bien señala el prólogo de este libro. Es una rigurosa constelación de genealogías y cartografías de las luchas por el derecho al aborto en Argentina, desde los años setenta hasta la actualidad. Por lo que se torna un material de lectura obligada tanto para el activismo callejero como para las especialistas varias. “Ningún libro da cuenta de todo”, dice Mabel Bellucci; no obstante, realiza un notable esfuerzo por plasmar a lo largo de sus páginas una pluralidad de voces y de recorridos transitados alrededor del “único lugar donde convergen todas las tendencias del feminismo”: el aborto. Historia que es desobediente hasta en los modos en que se escribe. Historia que se entrecruza con otras historias y que a la vez de ser un punto de llegada necesario, se constituye como punto de partida para repensar los modos en los que se inscriben las pugnas por el aborto legal en el presente. Esto es algo que indaga y propone el libro: la potencia subversiva de los abortos que nos hacemos –y que por lo demás siempre nos hicimos– y la eficacia y resistencia política de hablar de y sobre ellos. Teorizar la práctica es una de sus premisas. En ese sentido, su recorrido se entreteje en un diálogo fructífero, no siempre exento de tensiones, una lectura en la que la intervención política y la producción intelectual se encuentran íntima y necesariamente vinculadas. En ese entramado se evidencian los cruces entre diferentes grupos de afinidades. Se torna así un proyecto colectivo que es producto de esa urdimbre de cercanías político-afectivas. Si hubo un tiempo para el susurro fecundo, hoy es tiempo a viva voz. Historia de una desobediencia. Aborto y feminismo es una de las bocas abiertas en ese grito compartido en un devenir minoritario de transmisión de legados.

The history of abortion decriminalization and critical advocacy efforts to improve access in Canada deserve to be better known. Ordinary people persevered to make Canada the most progressive country in the world with respect to abortion care. But while abortion access is poorly understood, so too are the persistent threats to reproductive justice in this country: sexual violence, gun violence, homophobia and transphobia, criminalization of sex work, reproductive oppression of Indigenous women and girls, privatization of fertility health services, and the racism and colonialism of policing and the prison system. This beautifully illustrated book tells the empowering true stories behind the struggles for reproductive justice in Canada, celebrating past wins and revealing how prison abolitionism is key to the path forward.

Drawing from extensive ethnographic research on abortion debates in public spaces, this book explores the beliefs, motivations and practices of UK anti-abortion activists. Whilst they represent a tiny minority, there is recent evidence of an increase in activism outside UK abortion clinics; faith-based groups regularly organise ‘vigils’ seeking to deter service users from entering clinics. In response to this, pro-choice groups launched a campaign for buffer-zones around clinics. Although there is overwhelming public support for abortion, it remains an area of public contestation that touches on ideas about bodily autonomy, religious freedom and reproductive rights. Despite being active in the UK since before the 1967 Abortion Act, anti-abortion activism has received little attention.

Taking a lived religion approach that draws on extensive ethnographic research on abortion debates in public spaces, Anti-Abortion Activism in the UK explores the sacred and profane commitments of anti-abortion activists and counter-demonstrations outside clinics, examining the contestations over space.

Abortion and Democracy offers critical analyses of abortion politics in Latin America’s Southern Cone, with lessons and insights of wider significance. Drawing on the region’s recent history of military dictatorship and democratic transition, this edited volume explores how abortion rights demands fit with current democratic agendas.

With a focus on Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, the book’s contributors delve into the complex reality of abortion through the examination of the discourses, strategies, successes, and challenges of abortion rights movements. Assembling a multiplicity of voices and experiences, the contributions illuminate key dimensions of abortion rights struggles: health aspects, litigation efforts, legislative debates, party politics, digital strategies, grassroots mobilization, coalition-building, affective and artistic components, and movement-countermovement dynamics. The book takes an approach that is sensitive to social inequalities and to the transnational aspects of abortion rights struggles in each country.

Foreign assistance by the United States is tangled with domestic politics, and perhaps this is most clear in relation to funding for health and family planning. The long arm of U.S. domestic politics has reached the intimate lives of women all over the world because it has threatened major cuts in funding to healthcare organizations in developing countries if they perform or promote abortions. This “global gag rule,” so-called because to even mention abortion endangers funding, has been a hallmark of Republican administrations since it was first enacted by President Ronald Reagan. When Donald Trump reinstated and expanded the policy, there was popular uproar and a firestorm of debate. Proponents of the policy emphasize the importance of reducing the number of abortions globally and claim that the gag rule will be effective in achieving this goal.

In this innovative book, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers argues that the gag rule has failed to achieve its goal of reducing abortions. Rather, the restrictive legislation is associated with higher abortion rates, and because the reduction in funding is indiscriminate, negative repercussions occur across a range of health outcomes for women, children, and men. While the rhetoric in media discourse has been extreme, Rodgers provides systematic analysis of how the global gag rule affects women’s reproductive health across developing regions, grounded in a conceptual framework that models the complex factors that influence women’s decision making about fertility. She also traces the background to American policy, the evolution of international family planning programs, the links between contraceptive access and fertility rates, and the relationship between restrictive abortion laws and abortion rates.

There is a commonly accepted story about the rise of the Religious Right in the United States. It goes like this: with righteous fury, American evangelicals entered the political arena as a unified front to fight the legality of abortion after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

The problem is this story simply isn’t true. Largely ambivalent about abortion until the late 1970s, evangelical leaders were first mobilized not by Roe v. Wade but by Green v. Connally, a lesser-known court decision in 1971 that threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions—of which there were several in the world of Christian education at the time. When the most notorious of these schools, Bob Jones University, had its tax-exempt status revoked in 1976, evangelicalism was galvanized as a political force and brought into the fold of the Republican Party. Only later, when a more palatable issue was needed to cover for what was becoming an increasingly unpopular position following the civil rights era, was the moral crusade against abortion made the central issue of the movement now known as the Religious Right.

The Liminal Chrysalis: Imagining Reproduction and Parenting Futures Beyond the Binary is an edited collection that works to identify and deconstruct many of the countless binaries that operate within the realms of parenting and reproduction. Weaving poetry, speculative fiction, and autobiography, with interviews, critical analysis and research, the authors take as their starting place that there is magical potential and possibility in the ambiguous, disorienting spaces of the in-between and the beyond. The collection challenges the constructedness of binaries connected to sex, gender, sexuality, and parenting roles, as well as the cis-, hetero-, repro-, trans- and amatonormativities which pervasively circulate and inform how we think about parenting and reproductive life. The collection amplifies the voices of non-binary authors among others, and tells stories of menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, assisted reproductive technologies, fertility preservation, parenthood, and activism in the face of violent binaries and reproductive injustices.

Abortion and Mothering: Research, Stories, and Artistic Expressions of a Common Intersection is a collection of academic research, personal narratives, and art that comments on different perspectives on abortion and mothering. Scholarly research is balanced with voices and experiences from outside of academia, through the inclusion of personal narratives, poetry, and art. The collection is rooted in the idea that there are not ‘women who have abortions’ and ‘women who have babies’, but that they are the same women at different points in their lives. By considering the intersection of abortion and mothering, and the liminal spaces in between, the reader is challenged to explore some of the culturally and socially constructed complexities that surround the decisions that people make about to their reproductive lives.

Challenging conventional wisdom about overpopulation, and uncovering the deeper roots of poverty, environmental degradation, and gender inequalities, the author uses data and vivid case studies to explore how population control programs came to be promoted by powerful governments, foundations, and international agencies as an instrument of Cold War development and security policy. Mainly targeting poor women, these programs were designed to drive down birth rates as rapidly and cheaply as possible, with coercion often a matter of course. In the war on population growth, birth control was deployed as a weapon, rather than a tool of reproductive choice.

Threaded throughout is the story of how international women’s health activists fought to reform population control and promote a new agenda of sexual and reproductive health and rights for all. While their efforts bore fruit, obstacles remain. On one side is the anti-choice movement that wants to deny women access not only to abortion but to most methods of contraception. On the other is a resurgent, well-funded population control lobby that often obscures its motives with the language of women’s empowerment. Despite declining birth rates worldwide—average global family size is now 2.5 children—overpopulation alarm is on the rise, tied now to the threats of climate change and terrorism.

This book examines early medical abortion provided by telemedicine, alongside the access barriers created by laws in the US and UK. It critically appraises a series of developments in this rapidly evolving subject providing an up to date and well-informed analysis.

– Provides a comprehensive review of the evidence demonstrating that telemedical early medical abortion up to 10 weeks’ gestation is safe, effective, and acceptable to patients
– Thoroughly examines safety-based arguments against telemedical early medical abortion and shows that they are empirically unfounded
– Offers a comprehensive examination of the legal and regulatory landscape of abortion care in the United Kingdom and United States to demonstrate how legal and non-legal barriers intersect to make access to abortion difficult for many

This book explores recent developments, constraints and opportunities relating to the advancement of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Africa. Despite many positive developments in sexual and reproductive health in recent years, many Africans still encounter challenges, for instance in poor maternity services, living with HIV, and discrimination on the basis of age, gender, sexual orientation or identity.

Covering topics such as abortion, gender identity, adolescent sexuality and homosexuality, the chapters in this book discuss the impact of culture, morality and social beliefs on the enjoyment of sexual and reproductive health and rights across the continent, particularly in relation to vulnerable and marginalised groups. The book also explores the role of litigation, national human rights institutions and regional human rights bodies in advancing the realisation of sexual and reproductive health and rights in the region. Throughout, the contributions highlight the relevance of a rights-based framework in addressing topical and contentious issues on sexual and reproductive health and rights within Sub-Saharan Africa. This book will be of interest to researchers of sexuality, civil rights and health in Africa.

How feminism transformed the healthcare system in Canada. Personal and Political details the innovative, courageous, and creative activism of the “second wave” women’s health movement in Canada between 1960 and 2010. This activism (re)claimed women’s bodies, created women-centered spaces and services, and challenged a medically dominated health system.

Feminists challenged diagnoses, treatments, laws, policies, and research, as well as the care women were offered and the way they saw their bodies and themselves. Legions of women, and a few men, made changes ranging from abortion rights to preserving women’s hospitals, to the legalization of midwifery to requiring gendered health research—change that still resonate in the 21st century.

Decades after abortion was legalized and decriminalized in Canada, the US, and the UK, why are we still fighting for reproductive rights? Shattering the myth that the battle for reproductive rights has already been won, Fired Up about Reproductive Rights shows us the many ways our reproductive lives remain subject to state control. From the fight for safe, legal, and accessible abortion services to the fight against coercive sterilization, eugenics, and population control, threats to our reproductive control remain alive and well in our communities.

Engaging with the reproductive justice framework advanced by women of colour, the book presents the fight for reproductive rights as contingent with other social justice issues, and forces us to grapple with the weaknesses of the feminist and reproductive rights movement as it exists. Accessible and engaging, this book gives readers the tools to understand–and fight against–contemporary threats to our reproductive rights.

Dying to Count explores how national and global population politics collide in Senegalese hospitals as health workers treat and document women who present with complications of abortion. Siri Suh’s ethnography illustrates political, economic, professional, and technological factors that jeopardize quality of and access to obstetric care in public hospitals despite national and global commitments to reproductive health.

Helen Hardacre provides new insights into the spiritual and cultural dimensions of abortion debates around the world in this careful examination of mizuko kuyo—a Japanese religious ritual for aborted fetuses. Popularized during the 1970s, when religious entrepreneurs published frightening accounts of fetal wrath and spirit attacks, mizuko kuyo offers ritual atonement for women who, sometimes decades previously, chose to have abortions. As she explores the complex issues that surround this practice, Hardacre takes into account the history of Japanese attitudes toward abortion, the development of abortion rituals, the marketing of religion, and the nature of power relations in intercourse, contraception, and abortion.

Why has postwar Japanese abortion policy been relatively progressive, while contraception policy has been relatively conservative? The Japanese government legalized abortion in 1948 but did not approve the pill until 1999. In this carefully researched study, Tiana Norgren argues that these contradictory policies flowed from very different historical circumstances and interest group configurations. Doctors and family planners used a small window of opportunity during the Occupation to legalize abortion, and afterwards, doctors and women battled religious groups to uphold the law. The pill, on the other hand, first appeared at an inauspicious moment in history. Until circumstances began to change in the mid-1980s, the pharmaceutical industry was the pill’s lone champion: doctors, midwives, family planners, and women all opposed the pill as a potential threat to their livelihoods, abortion rights, and women’s health.

Clearly written and interwoven with often surprising facts about Japanese history and politics, Norgren’s book fills vital gaps in the cross-national literature on the politics of reproduction, a subject that has received more attention in the European and American contexts. Abortion Before Birth Control will be a valuable resource for those interested in abortion and contraception policies, gender studies, modern Japanese history, political science, and public policy. This is a major contribution to the literature on reproductive rights and the role of civil society in a country usually discussed in the context of its industrial might.

Although abortion remains one of the most controversial issues of our age, to date most studies have centered on the debate in Western countries. This book discusses abortion in a non-Western, non-Christian context – in Thailand, where, although abortion is illegal, over 200,000 to 300,000 abortions are performed each year by a variety of methods. The book, based on extensive original research in the field, examines a wide range of issues, including stories of the real-life dilemmas facing women, popular representations of abortion in the media, the history of the debate in Thailand and its links to politics. Overall, the work both highlights the voices of women and their subjective experiences and perceptions of abortion, and in addition places these ‘women’s stories’ in an analysis of broader socio-political gender and the power relations – national and international – that structure sexuality and women’s reproductive health decisions.

This book argues that a conscientiously objecting medical professional should receive an exemption only if the grounds of an objector’s refusal are reasonable. It defends a detailed, contextual account of public reasonability suited for healthcare, which builds from the overarching concept of Rawlsian public reason.

When Henry Morgentaler, Canada’s best-known abortion rights advocate, died in 2013, activists and scholars began to reassess the state of abortion in the country. In this volume, some of Canada’s foremost researchers challenge current thinking about abortion by revealing the discrepancy between what Canadians believe the law to be after the 1988 Morgentaler decision and what people are experiencing on the ground. Showcasing new theoretical frameworks and approaches from law, history, medicine, women’s studies, and political science, these timely essays reveal the diversity of abortion experiences across the country, past and present, and make a case for shifting the debate from abortion rights to reproductive justice.

“There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau told reporters. He was making the case for the most controversial of his proposed reforms to Canada’s Criminal Code, those concerning homosexuality, birth control, and abortion. In No Place for the State, contributors offer complex and often contrasting perspectives as they assess how the 1969 Omnibus Bill helped shape sexual and moral politics in Canada. Fifty years later, the origins and legacies of the bill are equivocal and the state still seems interested in sexual regulation. This incisive study explains why that matters.

Bringing together leading experts to offer a robust, authoritative and concise account of the evidence regarding the likely impact of decriminalization of abortion in the UK, this book will be an essential resource for policy-makers and academics alike.

Many women throughout the world face the challenge of confronting an unexpected or an unwanted pregnancy, yet these experiences are often shrouded in silence. An Open Secret draws on personal interviews and medical records to uncover the history of women’s experiences with unwanted pregnancy and abortion in the South American country of Bolivia. This Andean nation is home to a diverse population of indigenous and mixed-race individuals who practice a range of medical traditions. Centering on the cities of La Paz and El Alto, the book explores how women decided whether to continue or terminate their pregnancies and the medical practices to which women recurred in their search for reproductive health care between the early 1950s and 2010. It demonstrates that, far from constituting private events with little impact on the public sphere, women’s intimate experiences with pregnancy contributed to changing policies and services in reproductive health in Bolivia.

In over forty years in medicine – seven of these as Master of the National Maternity Hospital – obstetrician Peter Boylan was at the births of more than 6,000 babies. He saw women and families at their most vulnerable, their most joyous, and sometimes their most heart-broken.

In the Shadow of the Eighth is the story of how a young doctor without strong views on abortion became convinced that women should be trusted to make the right decisions for their lives – and how he then did everything in his power to bring about a situation where they could.

More than that, it is an engaging account of working in one of medicine’s most satisfying specialties, a revealing behind-the-scenes insight into what it’s like trying to make change happen, and a fascinating portrait of a society in transition. Lively, gripping, sometimes enraging but always compassionate, Peter Boylan’s story is vital and encouraging reading for these turbulent times.

Tracing the evolution of political discourse on abortion from the 1960s to today, this interdisciplinary book argues that in order to understand the changing pluralities of contemporary abortion debate, it is necessary to move beyond an understanding of abortion politics as characterized by pro- choice and pro-life.

GIRE ha trabajado durante más de 25 años por el acceso al aborto legal y seguro y ha acompañado diversos casos de criminalización por aborto. El presente informe busca mostrar los alcances de la penalización del aborto en la vida de las mujeres en México, hayan estado o no directamente involucradas en un proceso penal. Para la elaboración de este documento se realizaron más de 900 solicitudes de acceso a la información pública, mismas que se sistematizaron y analizaron en relación con otras fuentes públicas e información recabada por GIRE en años anteriores. A través de este mecanismo, se recabaron también 56 versiones públicas de sentencias relacionadas con procesos reproductivos.

For over 25 years GIRE has worked to increase access to safe and legal abortion and has accompanied several cases of criminalization of abortion. This report seeks to demonstrate the impact and reach of abortion criminalization in the lives of Mexican women, whether or not they were directly involved in criminal proceedings. For the preparation of this report, more than 900 requests for access to public information were made, which were then systematized and analyzed in relation to other public sources and information collected by GIRE from previous years. Through this mechanism, 56 public judicial sentences related to reproductive processes were collected. In the Spanish version (available at http://criminalizacionporaborto.gire.org.mx) we offer each state’s current penal code articles related to abortion.

The right to abortion is a major concern in most countries, Should it ever be allowed? Should it be allowed only in the first trimester? When does life start? Should I seek an abortion? Does society need more unwanted babies? Does the Bible specifically condemn abortion? What does each child, wanted or unwanted, cost society? These are questions that women and men must ask. Legislators should inquire deeply—as should judges. These and many more questions are discussed—and answers often implied.

“A magnificent and thoughtful examination of the fight for abortion rights in Canada, the United States, and around the world. Through often untold histories, My Body My Choice details tactics activists employed to fight for abortion rights, explains how race and class are barriers to access—historically and today—and the impact youth activists are making today. My Body My Choice also explains the basics of reproductive health in an affirming, non-stigmatizing, and digestible way for young readers. My Body My Choice is the book I wish I had as a teen, before, during, and after my abortion. I know I would have felt less alone and more empowered with it in hand.” (Renee Bracey Sherman, writer, abortion storyteller, and reproductive justice activist 2018-11-13)

Leading pro-choice campaigner Judith Orr argues that it’s time women had the right to control their fertility without the practical, legal and ideological barriers they have faced for generations. Donald Trump’s presidency threatens abortion rights within the US and his global gag affects women worldwide today – 47,000 women die annually from illegal abortions. In Britain, anti-abortion campaigners attack women’s rights under existing law. Elsewhere, women cross borders or buy pills online. In the US, Ireland, Poland and Latin America restrictions on abortion have provoked mass resistance,

Combining analysis of statistics, popular culture and social attitudes with powerful first-hand accounts of women’s experiences and a history of women’s attempts to control their bodies, the author shows that despite the 1967 Abortion Act full reproductive rights in Britain are yet to be won. The book also highlights current debates over decriminalisation and argues for abortion provision fit for the 21st century.

As a biological, cultural, and social entity, the human fetus is a multifaceted subject which calls for equally diverse perspectives to fully understand. Anthropology of the Fetus seeks to achieve this by bringing together specialists in biological anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. Contributors draw on research in prehistoric, historic, and contemporary sites in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America to explore the biological and cultural phenomenon of the fetus, raising methodological and theoretical concerns with the ultimate goal of developing a holistic anthropology of the fetus.

Current debates about birth control can be surprisingly volatile, especially given the near-universal use of contraception among American and British women. Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control offers a new perspective on these debates by demonstrating that the political positions surrounding birth control have roots in literary concerns, specifically those of modernist writers. Whereas most scholarship treats modernism and birth control activism as parallel, but ultimately separate, movements, Conceived in Modernism shows that they were deeply intertwined. This book argues not only that literary concerns exerted a lasting influence on the way activists framed the emerging politics of contraception, but that birth control activism helped shape some of modernism’s most innovative concepts. By revealing the presence of literary aesthetics in the discourse surrounding birth control, Conceived in Modernism helps us see this discourse as a variable facet rather than a permanent bulwark of reproductive rights debates.

This book reframes the Irish abortion narrative within the history of women’s reproductive health and explores the similarities and differences that shaped the history of abortion within the two states on the island of Ireland. Since the legalisation of abortion in Britain in 1967, an estimated 200,000 women have travelled from Ireland to England for an abortion. However, this abortion trail is at least a century old and began with women migrating to Britain to flee moral intolerance in Ireland towards unmarried mothers and their offspring. This study highlights how attitudes to unmarried motherhood reflected a broader cultural acceptance that morality should trump concerns regarding maternal health. This rationale bled into social and political responses to birth control and abortion and was underpinned by an acknowledgement that in prioritising morality some women would die.

‘On Abortion’ is the first part of Laia Abril’s new long-term project, ‘A History of Misogyny’. The work was first exhibited at Les Rencontres in Arles in 2016 and awarded the Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro and the Fotopress Grant. Abril documents and conceptualises the dangers and damage caused by women’s lack of legal, safe and free access to abortion. She draws on the past to highlight the long, continuing erosion of women’s reproductive rights through to the present-day, weaving together questions of ethics and morality, to reveal a staggering series of social triggers, stigmas, and taboos around abortion that have been largely invisible until now.

Abortion across Borders focuses on travel across domestic and international boundaries to terminate a pregnancy. Christabelle Sethna and Gayle Davis have gathered a cadre of authors to examine how restrictive policies force women to move both within and across national borders in order to reach abortion providers, often at great expense, over long distances and with significant safety risks. Taking historical and contemporary perspectives, contributors examine the situation in regions that include Texas, Prince Edward Island, Ireland, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Eastern Europe. Throughout, they take a feminist intersectional approach to transnational travel and access to abortion services that is sensitive to inequalities of gender, race, and class in reproductive health care.

What are the contemporary issues in abortion politics globally? What factors explain variations in access to abortion between and within different countries? This text provides a transnationally-focused,interdisciplinary analysis of trends in abortion politics using case studies from around the global north and south. It considers how societal influences, such a religion, nationalism and culture, impact abortion law and access. It explores the impact of international human rights norms, the increasing displacement of people due to conflict and crisis and the role of activists on law reform and access. The book concludes by considering the future of abortion politics through the more holistic lens of reproductive justice.

The Big Evasion is a thoughtful, objective account of the people and events that have brought the abortion debate to a white heat in Canada. Anne Collins recounts the drama of clinic openings, actual abortions, public raids, and court battles; the historical, international, legal, and political background to the issue; and the 15 years of lobbying by both sides to change the law.

The most controversial medical discovery of our time–the French “unpregnancy” pill–as described by the scientist who created it. RU-486, a drug designed to prevent gestation of the fertilized egg, has sparked an emotional debate that has spilled from the ranks of science into politics, religion, feminism, and ethics. 48 photos and drawings. The developer of RU-486 describes how the drug’s action against pregnancy works, traces its turbulent history, and answers antiabortion rhetoric with reason and compassion.

This book provides a critical feminist analysis of the impact drug law and policy have on women in the U.S. compared with women in Britain and Canada. In order to illuminate the connections between the regulation of illegal drug use in Western liberal states and non-Western states, the drug war’s impact on women and indigenous peoples in Colombia is also addressed. The book includes a chapter on the “Medical, Legal, and Moral Regulation of Women” that looks at pregnancy and drug use, including the criminalization of pregnancy.

Award-winning journalist Jon Wells reveals the life story and charts the three-year international manhunt for one of the FBI’s most wanted killers, James Charles Kopp Part detective story, part noir psychological thriller, Sniper tells the disturbing and compelling story of how anti-abortion radical James Kopp hunted down physicians in Canada and the US who were performing abortion services. Wells visits Kopp’s home town in California and follows his trail across Canada and Europe, taking readers inside the mind of Kopp, the son of a US marine, who believed he was on a righteous mission to save fetuses. The book also details how American and Canadian police and the FBI collaborated to bring the elusive Kopp down in France, following the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian, an obstetrician, in Buffalo, New York.

In striking down Canada’s abortion law as unfair to women, the Supreme Court dealt head on with the difficult issues the Morgentaler court challenge raised: a woman’s right to control her own body, and the state’s right to interfere with that role.

Concise, readable, and passionate, the Supreme Court’s verdict is indispensable as this country decides whether to recriminalize abortion. Shelagh Day’s Commentary, and Stan Persky’s Introduction, provide much-needed analysis and background to the Supreme Cort decision, and its place in the continuing struggle for a woman’s right to control her own body and her own fate.

The Chilean abortion law prohibits all abortions and is one of the most restrictive in the world. Chilean women are being prosecuted for obtaining or inducing their own abortions and are, in some cases, being sent to prison. This analysis documents a pattern of human rights abuses against these women. The restrictive abortion law violates women’s reproductive rights, including their right to health, their right to liberty and security, as well as potentially their right to life. In addition to the rights violated by the prohibition itself, the methods by which women are reported to the police and the criminal process that women, the abortion providers and their “accomplices” undergo, violate numerous other human rights. This book makes recommendations to the Chilean government to undertake a series of legal and policy changes, such as ensuring improved access to reproductive health services and instituting an exception for therapeutic abortion.

Haussman seeks the primary explanation for differing levels of abortion access in Canada, the United States, and Mexico in the variations in constitutional forms and political interpretations of federalism across the three political systems. She argues that when the federal systems of the United States and Canada have the political will to mandate conditions of access, national access to abortion tends to be equalized, and when they retreat from engaging the issue geographical inequities emerge. On the other hand, Mexico’s political opportunity structure regarding abortion access stands as a sort of mirror image to the above story, given that abortion is officially illegal at the federal level.

From the Introduction: This book is about abortion, how it affects women’s lives and how women subsequently cope. While we focus on psychological reactions of women who have had abortions, at the same time, it is assumed that these reactions can be understood only within the broad social context within which they are found. Accordingly, our framework is a social-psychological one in which an attempt will be made to understand the social context surrounding the abortion experience and how it influences a woman’s reactions to abortion.

This compelling book uses 103 illustrations to argue that modes of visualizing science have profoundly determined “fetal politics” and the contemporary abortion debates. With its close interplay of visual and verbal texts, it traces both the history of fetal images from the sixteenth century onward (including the classic Life magazine photographs of Lennart Nilsson in 1965) and the consequences of how obstetrical and embryological knowledge was represented over time in Europe – to both specialists and the public – as medical knowledge came to be produced and understood through anatomical observation.

This book places the right to reproductive choice within a framework of international law in order to demonstrate that international human rights law belongs to people. The author convinces the reader that, under existing instruments of international law, states have entered into very specific obligations to protect the right to reproductive choice as a human right, which, if effectively implemented, paves the way for full, healthy, and productive lives for women and men.

Is a fertilized egg a human being? Should abortion be available on demand? Does legalized abortion signal the rise or fall of our society?

Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a passionate crusader for abortion on demand, believes that the first step to developing informed opinions is information. People must have the facts before they can make enlightened and conscientious decisions. In Abortion and Contraception, Dr. Morgentaler discusses the practical, legal, religious, and moral questions abortion raises.

Accessing abortion services is challenging in many countries around the world. Barriers result from poor access to healthcare, geographic location, legal restrictions, abortion stigma, and moral conservatism. Repeated studies indicate that restricting access to abortion does not prevent it happening, but rather displaces it elsewhere and often results in unsafe abortion contributing to maternal mortality. Those living on islands face particular challenges presented by their geographic isolation including travelling to other jurisdictions, which is financially and emotionally burdensome. This book shines a light on two islands–Ireland (north and south) and Prince Edward Island, Canada–and considers for each island why and how abortion remains restricted, the nature of the discourse of abortion on the island, the impact that restrictions have had, ongoing efforts to improve access, and recent activist successes.

(Reprinted 2011 by Wipf and Stock)
“Decades after its initial publication, Beverly Wildung Harrison’s sex-positive, justice and social welfare affirming study of abortion remains a unique and trailblazing contribution to the field of Christian ethics. From the treatment of women’s procreation in the history of Western Christianity to the rhetoric of 1970s abortion politics, she offers meticulous critiques and constructive feminist Christian ideas sorely needed in today’s debates about abortion rights.” – Traci C. West.

Abortion politics are contentious and divisive in many parts of the world, but nowhere more so than in Ireland. Abortion and Nation examines the connection between abortion politics and hegemonic struggles over national identity and the nation-state in the Irish Republic. Situating the abortion question in the global context of human rights politics, as well as international social movements, Lisa Smyth analyses the formation and transformation of abortion politics in Ireland from the early 1980s to the present day. She considers whether or not the shifting connections between morality, rights and nationhood promise a new era of gender equality in the context of nation-state citizenship. The book provides a new sociological framework through which the significance of conflict over abortion and reproductive freedom is connected to conflict over national identity. It also offers a distinctive in-depth consideration of the connection between gender and nationhood, particularly in terms of its impact on women’s status as citizens; within the nation-state; within the European Union; and as members of a global civil society.

On a cold and inhospitable night in December 1991, a 42-year-old married man forced himself on a 14-year-old girl and planted the seed that was to become the most controversial foetus in the whole of Irish history. The extraordinary case in the Irish High Court and the injunction to stop the distraught girl having an abortion became a cause célèbre for radicals, doctors and politicians.

But what was the anguished truth behind this tragic human story? How did one girl affect the course of Irish history, unwittingly precipitate a referendum and change the law?

Only Wendy Holden, the journalist and author with unrivalled access to the chief protagonists, can tell the whole story. Uniquely compelling, at times shocking, at times heartbreaking, Unlawful Carnal Knowledge is an important and utterly riveting book.

Chapter contents:
1. The 1967 Abortion Act
2. The consequences of the 1967 Abortion act
3. The Abortion Amendment Bill
4. The magic figure
5. The reformers’ views
6. The anti-abortionist backlash
7. The limits of reformism
8. The politics of population control
9. The control of morality
10. The right to choose.

Whatever reproductive choices women make – whether they opt to end a pregnancy through abortion or continue to term and give birth – they are considered to be at risk of suffering serious mental health problems. According to opponents of abortion in the United States, potential injury to women is a major reason why people should consider abortion a problem. On the other hand, becoming a mother can also be considered a big risk.

This fine, well-balanced book is about how people represent the results of reproductive choices. It examines how and why pregnancy and its various outcomes have come to be discussed this way. The author’s interest in the medicalization of reproduction – its representation as a mental health problem – first arose in relation to abortion. There is a very clear contrast between the construction of women who have abortions, implied by moralized argument against abortion, and the construction that results when the case against abortion focuses on its effects on women’s mental health. Lee argues that claims that connect abortion with mental illness have been limited in their influence, but this is not to suggest that they have not become a focus for discussion and have had no impact. The limits to such claims about abortion do not, by any means, suggest limits to the process of the medicalization of pregnancy more broadly, that is, a process of demedicalization.

This book is a comprehensive analysis on the greater demand for religions exemptions to government mandates. Traditional religious conscientious objection cases, such as refusal to salute the flag or to serve in the military during war, had a diffused effect throughout society. In sharp contrast, these authors argue that today’s most notorious objections impinge on the rights of others, targeting practices like abortion, LGTBQ adoption, and same-sex marriage. The dramatic expansion of conscientious objection claims have revolutionized the battle between religious traditionalists and secular civil libertarians, raising novel political, legal, constitutional and philosophical challenges. Highlighting the intersection between conscientious objections, religious liberty, and the equality of women and sexual minorities, this volume showcases this political debate and the principal jurisprudence from different parts of the world and emphasizes the little known international social movements that compete globally to alter the debate’s terms.

Considering evidence culled from 82 countries, this study sheds light on the dangers faced by women in poor countries who seek abortions. Citing the tens of thousands of maternal deaths around the world on an annual basis, this resource provides a detailed analysis of the dangerous of abortion in poor nations through numerous case studies and examples, and presents a case for changes in policy and education.

Recent years have revealed the different experiences of abortion in the UK and the USA. The United States has a higher abortion rate accompanied by a higher political profile for the issue. In fact, one of George W. Bush’s first acts in 2001 was to ban American funding for overseas organizations carrying out abortions. The USA has also experienced a higher degree of abortion-related violence, with several people linked to abortion services being targeted and even killed. Compelling and enlightening in its approach, this invigorating volume compares the two countries’ abortion laws and outlines the distinctions. The usually conservative American society has a much more liberal abortion law than the United Kingdom, whose female citizens can obtain an abortion relatively easily although in fact they do not have the right to choose. This stimulating volume examines the comparative positions taken by each country and makes important suggestions for the future.

Women’s needs are placed at the centre of this collection. The contributors discuss the extent to which the contemporary legal framework on abortion matches the needs of women faced with unwanted pregnancy. The book contains sections on Britain, including an account of the campaign to legalize abortion, written by those centrally involved with that campaign; international comparisons of abortion law, with chapters on France, the United States, Ireland and Poland; and chapters covering contemporary debates, including men’s rights in abortion and abortion for foetal abnormality.

This new book provides a clear and accessible analysis of the various ways in which human reproduction is regulated. A comprehensive exposition of the law relating to birth control, abortion, pregnancy, childbirth, surrogacy and assisted conception is accompanied by an exploration of some of the complex ethical dilemmas that emerge when one of the most intimate areas of human life is subjected to regulatory control. Throughout the book, two principal themes recur. First, particular emphasis is placed upon the special difficulties that arise in regulating new technological intervention in all aspects of the reproductive process. Second, the concept of reproductive autonomy is both interrogated and defended. This book offers a readable and engaging account of the complex relationships between law, technology and reproduction. It will be useful for lecturers and students taking medical law or ethics courses. It should also be of interest to anyone with a more general interest in women’s bodies and the law, or with the profound regulatory consequences of new technologies.

This work is a collection of reproductive discourses, which exist as one of the many sites or technologies through which gender is constructed. The primary narrative focuses on gender and the author argues that within reproductive discourses and practice there are strong narratives of gender – narratives that may be read as representing a “social relation”. The secondary narrative concerns medical power and the relationship between these two narratives. It begins in part one with an analysis of the 19th-centry campaign to criminalize abortion, locating the campaign within the context of the occupational assertion of medicine, its transition from occupation to profession. To highlight the role of gender within these discourses, medical opposition to abortion is juxtaposed with medical opposition to female higher education. The discursive patterns regarding gender highlighted in part one are reconsidered in part two in considering elements of the English abortion debate in the latter half of the 20th century. The author considers the female subject positions constructed within the Parliamentary debates around the Abortion Act of 1967, the Alton Bill 1987, and section 37 of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act 1990. Part three extends the analysis of industrial foetal protection policies. The development of corporate policies and legislation broadcast is aimed at the exclusion of women from toxic workplaces on the basis of perceived foetal vulnerability is open to analysis.

Who really controls access to abortion services in Britain, supposedly one of the most liberal western countries on this issue? Recognizing that abortion has slipped off the mainstream political (and specifically feminist) agenda, at least in the UK, Sheldon argues that the ‘medicalization’ of abortion law has rendered women powerless over their own bodies. She acknowledges that repoliticising abortion may mean that feminists face a backlash, but maintains that failure to act could close down vital avenues of choice and control when pressures to eliminate abortion are becoming stronger in some areas of society.

When it comes to the subject of abortion, today’s liberal rhetoric has produced an atmosphere common-sense that is simultaneously pro-choice and yet, anti-abortion, a contradiction that often overlooks what the choice to have an abortion entails and how this decision is experienced by women. While progressives verbally support the notion of choice, the idea that abortion could or should be a positive experience for women is rarely discussed in our socio-political landscape. In this careful and intelligent work, Erica Millar shows how the emotions of abortion have been constructed in sharp contrast to the ideals we have created of motherhood as the unassailable symbol for women’s happiness. Through an analysis of the cultural and political forces that continue to influence the decisions women make about their pregnancies, forces that are frequently synonymous with the rhetoric of choice, Millar argues for a radical reinterpretation of women’s freedom.

Summaries of 45 cases and legal analyses.
Legal Grounds II is a tool for organizations, individuals, and institutions of learning. Though the study of reproductive and sexual health as a human rights discipline on the African continent is still at a relatively young stage, a number of countries, including Nigeria and South Africa, are developing the discipline in their tertiary institutions. This publication is a compelling resource for students in this field. In addition, it is a contribution towards a knowledge base for jurisprudence that bears directly or indirectly on reproductive and sexual health as human rights, and is conducive towards building and entrenching a human rights culture on the African continent.

The concept of reproductive health promises to play a crucial role in improving health care provision and legal protection for women around the world. This is an authoritative and much-needed introduction to and defence of the concept of reproductive health, which though internationally endorsed, is still contested. The authors are leading authorities on reproductive medicine, women’s health, human rights, medical law, and bioethics. They integrate their disciplines to provide an accessible but comprehensive picture. They analyse 15 cases from different countries and cultures, and explore options for resolution. The aim is to equip readers to fashion solutions in their own health care circumstances, compatibly with ethical, legal and human rights principles.
(Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011)

When journalists, academics, and politicians describe the North American anti-abortion movement, they often describe a campaign that is male-dominated, aggressive, and even violent in its tactics, religious in motivation, anti-women in tone, and fetal-centric in arguments and rhetoric. Are they correct?

In The Changing Voice of the Anti-Abortion Movement, Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon suggest that the reality is far more complicated, particularly in Canada. Today, anti-abortion activism increasingly presents itself as “pro-women”: using female spokespersons, adopting medical and scientific language to claim that abortion harms women, and employing a wide range of more subtle framing and narrative rhetorical tactics that use traditionally progressive themes to present the anti-abortion position as more feminist than pro-choice feminism.

Abortion is illegal in almost every circumstance in Ireland, making it the only democracy in the western world to have such a constitutional ban. Between 1980 and 2015, at least 165,438 Irish women and girls accessed UK abortion services. In 2016, the figure was 3,265. Any woman or girl who procures an abortion, or anyone who assists a woman to procure an abortion in Ireland can be criminalised and imprisoned for up to fourteen years. A woman may not procure an abortion in Ireland if she is pregnant due to incest or rape, or to prevent inevitable miscarriage and fatal foetal abnormality. The movement to repeal the Eighth Amendment and make abortion legal in Ireland has grown massively over the last few years.

This anthology shares the literature, personal stories, opinions, photography, art and design produced by the movement that catalysed 2018’s momentous referendum. Featuring prize-winning novelists, critically acclaimed poets, cutting-edge artists and journalists on the front line, this anthology will be the definitive collection of the art inspired by the most pressing debate in contemporary Ireland, and beyond.

The Abortion Papers provides key reflections and scholarship on the Irish abortion regime generated in the period between the 1992 X case, the death of Savita Halappanavar in 2012 and the subsequent introduction in 2013 of limited abortion legislation.

The ideas generated in the volume come from the different but complementary perspectives of activism and scholarship. The collection includes the voices of Irish women who have had abortions, something largely absent within Ireland’s abortion debate. Taken as a whole the volume offers new conceptual and theoretical insights into the abortion debate by providing an original perspective on the Ireland’s abortion regime.

In February 1992, the Irish High Court placed an injunction on a 14-year-old rape victim, preventing her from travelling to Britain for an abortion. In March, the injunction was dramatically overturned when the Supreme Court ruled that the girl (a minor) could seek an abortion abroad and, further that abortion could be lawful in Ireland in certain limited circumstances. The ‘X case’ led to an intense and divisive debate on abortion which continues to reverberate in Ireland today.

In these essays, all written in the aftermath of the ‘X case’, Irish feminist scholars and activists explore the politics of abortion in Ireland in the light of long struggle for reproductive rights in Ireland.

Irish law currently permits abortion only where the life of the pregnant woman is at risk. Since 1983, the 8th Amendment to the Constitution has recognised the “unborn” as having a right to life equal to that of the “mother”. Now, however, there are signs of change. A constitutional referendum will be held in 2018, after which it will be possible to reimagine, redesign, and reform the law on abortion. Written by experts in the field, this book draws on experience from other countries, as well as experiences of maternal medical care in Ireland, to call for a feminist, woman-centered, and rights-based radical new approach to abortion law in Ireland.

Directly challenging grounds-based abortion law, this accessible guide brings together feminist analysis, comparative research, human rights law, and political awareness to propose a new constitutional and legislative settlement on reproductive autonomy in Ireland. It offers practical proposals for policymakers and advocates, including model legislation, making it an essential campaigning tool leading up to the referendum.

RU486 is the drug prescribed for medical abortion. This book deals clearly with the nature and effects of the drug, its risks and the history of its development and use in Europe, the United States and other overseas countries. It recounts the politics and controversy that surrounded its introduction into Australia. It discusses the drug’s possibilities for use in the future – for medical abortion, but also for contraception and for the treatment of endometriosis, fibroids, and cancers of the breast and brain. RU486 is an important drug; RU486 the book is an important reference source for both women and men.

The feminist position on abortion is little changed from thirty years ago, argues Leslie Cannold. Mired in the rhetoric of “rights,” feminists have failed to appreciate women’s actual experience of abortion and have ceded the debate on the morality of abortion to the anti-choice contingent. In order to counter the current erosion of abortion rights and appeal to women of Generation X, who don’t remember a time when abortion wasn’t safe and legal, feminism must evolve a richer, more nuanced understanding of abortion, she says, one that is premised on the right to choose, yet sensitive to the value of the fetus and the serious responsibilities of motherhood.

A woman’s freedom to choose to have an abortion is a fundamental precondition to having control over her own life. But in Australia (and almost all other countries) women are denied the right to choose by provisions of the criminal code. Only in the ACT have these laws been repealed. Pip Hinman and Claudine Holt argue strongly that women cannot rely on liberal interpretations of these reactionary laws but rather should fight for their complete repeal. They counter many of the most common myths about abortion peddled by the grossly misnamed ‘right-to-life’ forces. The authors contend that only by building a strong mass campaign can women defeat the right-wing anti-choice push and win the basic democratic right to control their own bodies.

Murder on His Mind details the events of 16 July 2001 when security guard Steve Rogers was shot dead inside Melbourne’s Fertility Control Clinic. The Crown Prosecutor described the gunman as having gone to the clinic with ‘murder on his mind’.

Dr Susie Allanson was the Clinic’s psychologist when the murder occurred and provides answers to the questions that fascinated the public about the case at the time and to this day. What really happened on that day? What went on in the mind of the gunman? How did the victims cope? What really goes on in an abortion-providing clinic?

A riveting read for true crime buffs and for those concerned with their own or others’ reactions and recovery to traumatic events, women’s health rights and the usually secretive reproductive crises facing women and their families every day.
(New edition, July 2021)

This multidisciplinary volume investigates different abortion and reproductive practices across time, space, geography, national boundaries, and cultures. The authors specialize in the reproductive politics of Australia, Bolivia, Cameroon, France, ‘German East Africa,’ Ireland, Japan, Sweden, South Africa, the United States, and Zanzibar, with historical focuses on the pre-modern era, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the present day. This timely work complicates the many histories and ongoing politics of abortion by exploring the conditions in which women have been forced to make these life-altering decisions.

Twenty years ago, Dr Bertram Wainer, the abortion reform doctor and campaigner, placed an advertisement in a newspaper asking women who had illegal abortions to come forward to tell their stories. Their personal testimonies and the accounts from doctors and nurses are published for the first time in this collection. Women had to draw on deep reservoirs of courage and determination faced with the fear of illegal abortion. This collection tells of some of those acts of courage and the difficulties society placed in women’s way. Moving and candid, these stories uncover the hidden history of abortion in Australia.

‘It is chastening to read these bald tales, shockingly direct and unvarnished. Each story contains matter enough for a novel. Each one is a window onto a larger life, a broader world: a tantalising view of endlessly unfolding complexities.’-Helen Garner

Seventeen weeks pregnant and facing a miscarriage, Savita Halappanavar and her husband Praveen walked into an Irish maternity ward in October 2012. Unwittingly, the couple also walked into that deeply controversial arena in which Ireland’s legislative position on abortion remained unresolved. A week later, Savita was dead from septicaemia. Reports of her death and of the refusal to allow Savita a termination of her pregnancy sent shockwaves across Ireland and around the world. Once again the subject of abortion was catapulted to the very top of the agenda in Ireland.

In Savita: The Tragedy That Shook A Nation, Kitty Holland reveals the truth behind the headlines and explores many unanswered questions: Who was Savita? How significant was it that she was a non-Irish, non-Catholic woman in search of help on Irish soil? And how did her husband and her community’s reaction to her death shape the parameters of the debate which followed? Holland’s expose also looks at how the tragic circumstances of Savita’s death played a part in compelling the Irish Government to finally legislate on abortion and how activists on each side succeeded or failed in shaping that legislation.

The book has chapters on the effects of the anti-abortion law in Poland, attitudes of medical professionals towards abortion, a survey of health professionals on the law, attitudes of rural women toward reproductive issues, and a research project on abortion and values.

This book aims to show how ten major religious traditions in fact contain strong affirmations of the right to family planning, including contraception and even, when necessary, abortion. Maguire first shows how interrelated overpopulation is with poverty, ethnic injustice, gender injustice, and the maldistribution of economic resources. Often the world’s religions (most notoriously perhaps, Roman Catholicism) are thought to contribute only to the problem, rather than solutions, through their hostility to sex, education and equal rights for women, and birth control. In fact, argues Maguire, the ten scholars who consulted for several years about how these traditions treat issues of contraception and abortion find in them a true religious awe at the sacredness of life, a genuine openness to sexuality as a dimension of the sacred, and “alongside the ‘no choice’ position . . . a ‘pro-choice’ position that is too little known, even by adherents to the religion. That is the key message of this book.”

Seeking to define the ways various cultures view pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion, this multidisciplinary collection of essays seeks to illustrate how these views influence policy decisions and practices regarding abortion around the world. Putting questions of pro-life and pro-choice aside, the contributors provide demographic coverage of the issues involved and contextualize some of the personal realities that underlie the approximately 50 million abortions that are believed to take place yearly worldwide. While the political and social climates in which women seek abortions vary from place to place, many of the chapters try to understand the moral implications that guide the decision to end a pregnancy from the perspective of the those who seek to do so.

Focusing primarily on developing nations, this important contribution to the literature on abortion provides readers with a careful overview of the different meanings attached to abortion depending on the cultural, social, and political climate. Areas covered include Tanzania, Bangladesh, West Africa, Ghana, Romania, Russia, Mexico, and Nigeria. General chapters on induced abortion, demographic research and abortion policy, and social pressures to abort are also included. This unique approach to the study of abortion will contribute to a greater understanding of a prominent social issue.

(Languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese)

Deeply touched by the tragedies of botched abortions that they witnessed as medical students and young physicians in Chile in the 1940s and later around the world, the authors have attempted in their professional lives and now in this book to establish a framework for dialogue to replace the polarization that exists today. Doctors Faundes and Barzelatto use their decades of international work to document the personal experiences of different classes of women in different countries and those countries’ policies and practices. No other book provides such a comprehensive and reasoned examination of the entire topic of abortion, from the medical to the religious and ethical and from the psychological to the legal, in plain language understandable by non-specialists.

The central thesis is that there are too many induced abortions in the world today, that most are preventable and should be prevented–a middle ground that both pro-life and pro-choice advocates can accept. The first part of the book reviews why women have abortions, as well as the magnitude and consequences. The second part examines values. The third part discusses effective interventions. The final part states conclusions about what can be done to reach a necessary social consensus.

From clandestine abortions in the 1940s to the introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s, this comprehensive reference provides a well-rounded review of the legal, medical, and emotional facets of abortions then and now. At the heart of this groundbreaking book are deeply moving personal stories—which encompass suffering and resilience, isolation and community—from women who have experienced an abortion. These accounts are supplemented with the voices of doctors, police, and advocates committed to addressing and improving issues in women’s reproductive health.

It is increasingly implausible to speak of a purely domestic abortion law, as the legal debates around the world draw on precedents and influences of different national and regional contexts. While the United States and Western Europe may have been the vanguard of abortion law reform in the latter half of the twentieth century, Central and South America are proving to be laboratories of thought and innovation in the twenty-first century, as are particular countries in Africa and Asia. Abortion Law in Transnational Perspective offers a fresh look at significant transnational legal developments in recent years, examining key judicial decisions, constitutional texts, and regulatory reforms of abortion law in order to envision ways ahead.

The chapters investigate issues of access, rights, and justice, as well as social constructions of women, sexuality, and pregnancy, through different legal procedures and regimes. They address the promises and risks of using legal procedure to achieve reproductive justice from different national, regional, and international vantage points; how public and courtroom debates are framed within medical, religious, and human rights arguments; the meaning of different narratives that recur in abortion litigation and language; and how respect for women and prenatal life is expressed in various legal regimes.

Unsafe abortion remains one of the most neglected sexual and reproductive health problems according to the World Health Organisation. In recent years it has been estimated that nearly 44 million abortions occur annually leading to around 47,000 deaths. At this rate a woman will die of an unsafe abortion every 11 minutes. Bringing together a wealth of information from around the world, this book argues that the time has come for a great change in legislation, advocating a shift towards the legalization of abortion to improve the health of women in poorer countries. With attention to circumstances in each of the major continental regions, an outline of the global situation is provided to reveal the major trends in the provision and procurement of abortion, as well their effects. The book presents data drawn from over a hundred countries covering over ninety per cent of the world’s population, based on published statistical information, changes to legal frameworks, court cases and the accounts of local commentators and activists.

Abortion Under Apartheid examines the politics of abortion in South Africa during the apartheid era (1948-1990), when termination of pregnancy was criminalized. It analyzes the flourishing clandestine abortion industry, the prosecution of medical and “backstreet” abortionists, and the passage in 1975 of the country’s first statutory law on abortion. Susanne M. Klausen reveals how ideas about sexuality were fundamental to apartheid culture and shows that the authoritarian National Party government – alarmed by the spread of “permissiveness” in white society – attempted to regulate white women’s reproductive sexuality in the interests of maintaining white supremacy.

This thought-provoking book sets out the ethical arguments for a woman’s right to choose. Drawing on the traditions of sociological thinking and moral philosophy, it maintains that there is a strong moral case for recognizing autonomy in personal decision-making about reproductive intentions. More than this, it argues that to prevent a woman from making her own choice to continue or end her pregnancy is to undermine the essence of her humanity. The author, a provider of abortion services in the UK, asserts that true respect for human life and true regard for individual conscience demand that we respect a woman’s right to decide, and that support for a woman’s right to a termination has moral foundations and ethical integrity. This fresh perspective on abortion will interest both pro- and anti-choice individuals and organizations, along with academics in the fields of gender studies, philosophy, ethics and religion.

Until the late 1960s, the authorities on abortion were for the most part men—politicians, clergy, lawyers, physicians, all of whom had an interest in regulating women’s bodies. Even today, when we hear women speak publicly about abortion, the voices are usually those of the leaders of women’s and abortion rights organizations, women who hold political office, and, on occasion, female physicians. We also hear quite frequently from spokeswomen for anti-abortion groups. Rarely, however, do we hear the voices of ordinary women—women whose lives have been in some way touched by abortion. Their thoughts typically owe more to human circumstance than to ideology, and without them, we run the risk of thinking and talking about the issue of abortion only in the abstract.

Without Apology seeks to address this issue by gathering the voices of activists, feminists, and scholars as well as abortion providers and clinic support staff alongside the stories of women whose experience with abortion is more personal. With the particular aim of moving beyond the polarizing rhetoric that has characterized the issue of abortion and reproductive justice for so long, Without Apology is an engrossing and arresting account that will promote both reflection and discussion.

Since World War II, abortion policies have remained remarkably varied across European nations, with struggles over abortion rights at the forefront of national politics. This volume analyses European abortion governance and explores how social movements, political groups, and individuals use protests and resistance to influence abortion policy. Drawing on case studies from Italy, Spain, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the European Union, it analyses the strategies and discourses of groups seeking to liberalise or restrict reproductive rights. It also illuminates the ways that reproductive rights politics intersect with demographic anxieties, as well as the rising nationalisms and xenophobia related to austerity policies, mass migration and the recent terrorist attacks in Europe.

From Viagra to in vitro fertilization, new technologies are rapidly changing the global face of reproductive health. They are far from neutral: religious, cultural, social, and legal contexts condition their global transfer. The way a society interprets and adopts (or rejects) a new technology reveals a great deal about the relationship between bodies and the body politic. Reproductive health technologies are often particularly controversial because of their potential to reconfigure kinship relationships, sexual mores, gender roles, and the way life is conceptualized. This collection of original ethnographic research spans the region from Morocco and Tunisia to Israel and Iran and covers a wide range of technologies, including emergency contraception, medication abortion, gamete donation, hymenoplasty, erectile dysfunction, and gender transformation.

Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty

An astonishing investigation into the outbreak and spread of Zika and the resilience of the Brazilian people in the face of the epidemic.

The Zika virus is devastating lives and communities. Children across the Americas are being born with severe disabilities because of it. Yet during the desolating outbreak, Brazil played host to both the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, leading many to suspect that the true impact of the virus has been subject to a cover-up of international proportions.

Beginning in the northeast, where the devastation has been most felt, professor of bioethics and award-winning documentary filmmaker Debora Diniz travels across Brazil tracing the virus’s origin and spread. Along the journey she meets a host of fearless families, doctors and scientists uncovering the virus’s impact on local communities. In doing so Diniz paints a vivid picture of the Zika epidemic, exposing the Brazilian government’s complicity in allowing the virus to spread while championing the efforts of local doctors and mothers who, working together, are raising awareness of the virus and fighting for the rights of children affected by Zika.

The landmark decision R. v. Morgentaler (1988) struck down Canada’s abortion law and is widely believed to have established a right to abortion. Although the decision removed one legal barrier, its actual impact is much less decisive, and women’s access to abortion in Canada remains uneven and at risk of being curtailed.

In After Morgentaler, Rachael Johnstone examines the state of abortion access in Canada today, maps its historical development since 1988, and argues that substantive access is essential to full citizenship for women. When the Morgentaler decision recast abortion as a health care issue, jurisdiction over the procedure shifted to the provinces, each of which chose to regulate access differently. Johnstone presents three provincial case studies – Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick – to demonstrate the role of both state and non-state actors in shaping access across the country. Informed by the current frameworks employed by reproductive-rights advocates in Canada, this book affirms the need to recognize abortion as an issue fundamentally tied to women’s equality while stressing the continued utility of rights claims as a means to improve access.

Legal Grounds III: Reproductive and Sexual Rights in Sub-Saharan African Courts is the expanded third volume in a series originally conceived by Kibrom Isaak, LL.M., a graduate of the International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Program, who organised and wrote the prototype, and drafted most of the first two volumes.

Reproductive and sexual rights, which are guaranteed in constitutions and in international and regional human rights treaties, have no impact if they are not recognized and enforced by national-level courts. Legal Grounds: Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Sub-Saharan African Courts Volume III continues to provide much-needed information about whether and how national courts of African countries apply constitutional and human rights to protect reproductive and sexual rights. The case summaries, significance sections, and thematic highlights serve as useful resources for those seeking to further develop litigation, advocacy, and capacity building strategies.

With stories from the front lines, legal scholar Michelle Oberman journeys through distinct legal climates to understand precisely why and how the war over abortion is being fought. Drawing on her years of research in El Salvador—one of the few countries to ban abortion without exception—Oberman explores what happens when abortion is a crime. Oberman reveals the practical challenges raised by a thriving black market in abortion drugs, as well as the legal challenges to law enforcement. She describes a system in which doctors and lawyers collaborate in order to identify and prosecute those suspected of abortion-related crimes, and the troubling results of such collaboration: mistaken diagnoses, selective enforcement, and wrongful convictions.

Equipped with this understanding, Oberman turns her attention to the United States, where the battle over abortion is fought almost exclusively in legislatures and courtrooms. In an era in which every election cycle features a pitched battle over abortion’s legality, Oberman uses her research to expose the limited ways in which making abortion a crime matters. Her insight into the practical consequences that will ensue if states are permitted to criminalize abortion calls attention to the naïve and misguided nature of contemporary struggles over abortion’s legality.

In 1969, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau passed a law legalizing abortion in Canada. But making abortion legal did not guarantee women access to these services. In many communities around the country, women have had to travel great distances and at great personal expense to exercise their legal right to an abortion. Others have taken matters into their own hands, often with devastating consequences.

In No Choice, Kate McKenna offers a firsthand account of Prince Edward Island’s refusal to bring abortion services to the Island, and introduces us to the courageous women who struggled for over thirty years to change this. With a very vocal Right to Life movement that used small town gossip, political pressure and the force of the Catholic Church to silence the pro-choice movement, the struggle seemed to be over before it even began. But everything changed in 2016.