A sweeping narrative history of abortion rights in America — from whispered remedies and underground networks to the legal battles, activists, and political forces that shaped modern reproductive freedom.

For more than a century, the fight for abortion access has been told in fragments — court cases, headlines, protests, and political battles that rarely capture the human story underneath. Given No Choice brings those pieces together. Drawing on archival research, rare interviews, oral histories, legislative transcripts, and firsthand accounts, Cody McDevitt weaves an urgent, intimate, and deeply human history of how abortion rights were won, lost, and defended across generations.

From midwives and discreet physicians operating in the shadows, to the women forced into dangerous decisions, to the organizers and attorneys who risked livelihoods to challenge the law, this book lays bare the truth: abortion in America has never been just a medical issue — it has always been a struggle for autonomy, dignity, and power.

When Roe fell, millions were left scrambling for clarity, direction, and hope. Reproductive Justice offers a way forward grounded in dignity, equity, and real freedom.

Beyond Choice is a workbook that helps you move beyond the old, narrow “pro-choice” framework to a more comprehensive understanding of reproductive freedom. This guided workbook shows what Reproductive Justice truly means, how it impacts your daily life, and what you can do right now to create meaningful change.

Written by award-winning physician and Reproductive Justice advocate Dr. DeShawn Taylor, Beyond Choice turns reflection into action. Through practical exercises, case studies, and thoughtful prompts, you’ll explore your beliefs, values, experiences, and power. You’ll see how reproductive freedom intersects with faith, culture, identity, healthcare, and policy – and how your story can become a catalyst for justice.

Despite intense political debate, attitudes on abortion were remarkably stable for decades. However, after the 2022 Dobbs decision, Americans’ opinions began to change. Not Going Back explores the shifts in public opinion on this hot-button issue from the landmark passing of Roe v. Wade in 1973 through the 2024 election and into 2025.

The authors ask, “What role do Americans want their government to play in protecting, regulating, or restricting abortion access?” and, “How will changing attitudes on abortion reshape American politics?” They offer cohesive, theoretically grounded explanations for both the continuity and the change in Americans’ attitudes on this contentious topic. While there has been a striking reversal in the prioritization of abortion as an issue among Democrats and Republicans, the full impact of this shift in thinking will be influenced by future policies, court decisions, and party reactions.

When Roe Fell examines the history, politics, and practical experiences of abortion leading up to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, placing this judicial decision in a longer history of abortion in the United States. Contributors delve into what the end of Roe revealed about abortion seekers, abortion provision, and abortion advocacy, demystifying abortion and abortion research, laying bare common misunderstandings and misinformation, and belying claims that the fall of Roe “changed everything.” Moving beyond legal frameworks, this volume is an opportunity to reorient scholarship and understanding about abortion, recognizing what was already true before Roe was overturned and how losing the protections of Roe forced, enabled, and perhaps even facilitated a new era of abortion.

How did three words come to carry the weight of America’s abortion debates? In Back-Alley Abortion, Emily Winderman examines how this phrase shaped American reproductive politics and health care standards across generations. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book traces the unexpected origins of this rhetoric in urban reform movements, showing how early associations of alleys with sanitation, morality, and criminality created lasting impressions that would later influence abortion discourse.

From nineteenth-century urban reformers to contemporary Supreme Court decisions, this study illuminates how three words came to carry the weight of America’s most contentious health care debate. In our post-Dobbs era, as states grapple with new restrictions on reproductive rights, understanding the complex history and rhetorical power of “back-alley abortion” has never been more crucial. Drawing on rhetorical theory, reproductive justice theory, and the history of medicine, Back-Alley Abortion offers vital insights into how rhetoric shapes our understanding of medical legitimacy, clinical standards, and health care justice in the United States.

This book explores the seismic shift brought about by the 2022 US Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which dramatically changed the constitutional standing of abortion decisions set in place by Roe v. Wade 50 years earlier. The authors describe the history of US Supreme Court’s decision-making around abortion and some of its attendant considerations, including the constitutional right to privacy, moral obligations to protect life, and determinations about when life begins.

This text is designed for undergraduate students across a range of academic disciplines. It lays bare the complicated moral dimensions of the competing arguments about abortion and how these considerations have fared in legal decisions, so students can make sense of them for themselves.

Overturning Roe unleashed a wave of urgent threats to abortion and bodily autonomy, fueled by overt white supremacy, racial and anti-immigrant hatred, and support for traditional gender roles and sexual identities. But the resistance is fierce, led by a new generation of activists of color dedicated to building an inclusive movement. In Abortion and Reproductive Justice, widely recognized movement leaders Marlene Gerber Fried and Loretta J. Ross provide a history of abortion politics through a reproductive justice framework that centers those most vulnerable.

The book emphasizes that the right to have and raise children is as important for reproductive choice as the right not to. This critical approach—originating in Black feminism—provides grounding for radical abortion advocacy. Calling on us to join in, the book highlights abortion stories from individuals and organizations who are putting this analysis into action on the front lines, in the United States and beyond. By linking abortion rights to broader social justice initiatives, including Black Lives Matter, immigrant and refugee rights, disability justice, and LGBTQ+ rights, the authors expand the conversation at a critical moment.

Abortion Is Everything speaks directly to five to eight-year-olds about what abortion is, how it might feel, and why people have abortions. With accessible, inclusive language, Abortion Is Everything frames abortion as the actualization of a uniquely human superpower: our capacity to imagine the future and make choices that lead us towards the life we envision. Abortion is a tool that allows human beings to shape our destinies, and which has shaped the entire world around us.

Decades before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, pregnant people faced arrest and prosecution for supposed crimes against the fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses they gestated. The Pregnancy Police investigates the legal arguments undergirding these prosecutions and sheds much-needed light on the networks of healthcare providers, social workers, and legal personnel participating in this ongoing surveillance and punishment of pregnant people.

Drawing on detailed analyses of legislation, statements from prosecutors and law enforcement, and records from over a thousand arrest cases, Grace E. Howard traces the long history of state attempts to regulate and control people who have the capacity for pregnancy—from the early twentieth century’s white supremacist eugenics to the end of Roe and the ever-increasing criminalization of abortion across the United States.

This book outlines the world of illegal abortion, the relation of abortion to birth control, and opposition to abortion in the United States. Lader’s research shows that abortions provide no physical or psychic damage when done by competent medical physicians in a society where they are approved.

Lader’s book had years of rejections before it was finally published in 1966.

Si elle donne le choix, l’IVG ne reste pas moins un événement traumatique dans une vie de femme. Et d’autant plus douloureux qu’on le garde pour soi, qu’on ne sait pas dire l’ambivalence des sentiments et des représentations qui l’accompagnent. L’angoisse, la culpabilité, la solitude, la souffrance physique, l’impossibilité surtout de pouvoir partager son expérience. Avec ce livre, Aude Mermilliod rompt le silence, mêlant son témoignage de patiente à celui du médecin Martin Winckler. Leur deux parcours se rejoignent et se répondent dans un livre fort, nécessaire et apaisé.

صيف 2022 عندما قامت المحكمة الأمريكية العُليا بإلغاء الحق الدستوريّ في الإجهاض، ويستمر هجوم الجمهوريين على الحق في الإجهاض على مستوى الولايات الأمريكية المختلفة وعلى المستوى الفيدرالي وفي الوقت الذي تتراجع فيه الحماية القانونية والمجتمعية للحق في الإجهاض في بلدان الولايات المتحدة..نيكاراجوا..السلفادور…

مشاركة من عبدالسميع شاهين كل الاقتباسات —

This timely book will help mental health professionals navigate their roles and responsibilities in a highly politically charged situation. Readers will understand the various ways the ruling may impact the clients with whom they work, as considerable research has found that people forced to carry unwanted pregnancies experience adverse financial, social, physical, and mental health effects. The negative effects are more severe for people in marginalized groups, such as persons living in poverty, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and those in medically underserved areas.

Whether you’re planning to have an abortion soon or you had one thirty years ago, whether you’re feeling relief or grief (or both!), and even if you haven’t decided yet and just want to untangle how you feel about it, this book is a safe and supportive resource.

With an emphasis on self-compassion, it collects reflection prompts, affirmations, conversation scripts, logistical info, self-care tips, and much more to validate and support you no matter where you fall in the full spectrum of experiences of people who have abortions. Bolstered by beautiful illustrations and the caring, confident support of author and reproductive rights advocate Becca Rea-Tucker, this book will meet you wherever you are and offer guidance for every step of your journey.

The abortion market was a powerful economic force in American life. Before legalization lowered the cost, one million women each year collectively paid upward of $750 million for abortions. In this illuminating book, Katherine Parkin reveals the strength of a massive consumer market that involved loans, advertising, and travel, as well as the costs associated with the procedure itself.

While we may have imagined that securing an abortion was best understood as a hidden, woman-only experience, The Abortion Market reveals the extent to which businesses and businessmen openly selling abortion access shaped the experience of buying abortions for millions of women.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade will have long-term and indelible consequences on American society. The purpose of this book is to be part of the ongoing conversations.

Perfect or not, Roe was working for America. Consequently, it did not need to be “fixed”. The ignorance of attempting to fix it when the ramifications were unknown, has resulted in chaos, confusion, inconvenience and trauma for women who need abortions. In many cases viability of the embryo dictates an abortion. Also important is the fact that medical decisions were taken out of the hands of physicians. That is a “No, no”!

The book also addresses the issue of poor ethics in the Supreme Court as this was also a factor in overturning Roe, as was arrogance.

Pregnant women’s experiences in prison Four percent of incarcerated women—more than three thousand—are pregnant in US prisons each year, yet little information is known about their pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and motherhood experiences. In Birth Behind Bars, Rebecca M. Rodriguez Carey draws on in-depth interviews with women who were once pregnant in prisons in the heart of the Midwest to provide a rare, intimate portrait into the intersection of motherhood and incarceration. Using a reproductive-justice framework and narrative accounts, Rodriguez Carey shows how the prison system works alongside other carceral systems, such as the medical system and the child welfare system, to regulate and control women. She reveals how their incarceration goes beyond the function of criminal punishment, threatening both maternal and fetal health and the well-being of families. Birth Behind Bars offers an evocative account of how these powerful carceral systems collectively disrupt entire families and communities during pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period, including long after women are released from prison.

The Public Leadership Institute developed this playbook to serve as a practical resource for policymakers, advocates, and community leaders seeking to hold unregulated pregnancy clinics (UPCs)—also known as crisis pregnancy centers—accountable. These facilities often present themselves as legitimate providers of reproductive health care while operating without basic medical standards and oversight, a lack of financial transparency and accountability, inadequate protections for private information, and deceptive practices intended to discourage people from seeking abortion care.

Drawing on expert legal and policy analysis, real-world case studies, and input from advocates and experts, this playbook equips you with the tools needed to regulate UPCs. Inside you’ll find:
– Model legislation that can be adapted to state and local needs
– Strategic messaging guidance to support public engagement
– Policy implementation tools grounded in legal and real-world experience

Get It Out interrogates how little choice people with uteruses ultimately have over their reproductive health.

At least one hysterectomy is performed every minute of the year, making it the most common gynecological surgery worldwide. By the age of sixty-five, one out of five people born with a uterus will have it removed. So, why do we seldom talk about this surgery? Highly performed yet overlooked, examining the paradox of hysterectomy begins to unravel the various problems with how we medically treat uteruses and the people who have them.

Get It Out weaves centuries of medical history with rich qualitative data from 100 women, trans men, and nonbinary people who had, want, or are considering hysterectomy. In compelling detail, Andréa Becker reveals how America’s healthcare system routinely deprives people of the ability to control their own bodies along race and gender lines. When people ask for a hysterectomy, they are often met with pushback: Are you sick enough? Old enough? Have you had enough babies? Will you regret this? How will your future husband feel about this? Yet this pushback is not equally experienced. While some people are barred access, others are ushered toward a hysterectomy. These contradictory recommendations reveal the persistent biases entrenched within healthcare.

How white nationalism and authoritarian populism have taken hold in America under the guise of opposing abortion.

Antiabortion stories, images, and policies have primed Americans to embrace attitudes and politics once deemed extreme. Abroad, US antiabortion tactics, personnel, and funds have contributed to a global rise of the Right.

From the Clinics to the Capitol is a scholar’s story of why and how abortion foes join other militants in waging war against the federal government. Reflecting on her thirty years of analyzing the intersections of race, reproduction, and right-wing movements, Carol Mason examines primary antiabortion sources that influenced political currents of the last fifty years. From Cold War conspiracism and apocalyptic fundamentalism to anti-statist terrorism, Tea Party populism, and MAGA insurrection, opposing abortion has come to imperil democracy worldwide.

This book is the first to analyze Supreme Court decisions related to religious freedom and abortion rights, showing that the Court gives women a religious right to abortions, at least during the first half of pregnancy. The Court considers any sincerely claimed religious belief to be worthy of accommodation if it causes no great harm. Therefore, a woman who claims that having a child would interfere with work dedicated to God’s glory should receive an accommodation that exempts her from state laws restricting abortion, as that is the kind of relief accorded by the Court to others seeking religious exemptions from generally applicable laws and other rules.

The Court cannot claim in this case that abortion causes great harm, because it maintains even in its most recent abortion decision that it is neutral on the question of when the unborn attains a right to life, and loss of the unborn’s life is the central harm claimed by others regarding abortion. The book argues that 21 weeks of gestation is the earliest point at which a right to life can be attributed to the fetus on a scientific basis.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the horrors inflicted by abortion bans began immediately and haven’t stopped. These laws have become a tool for abusers, as pregnant people face legal harassment, reproductive coercion, and life-threatening medical trauma.

Through biting analysis, Kylie Cheung argues that these aren’t unintended consequences, but deliberate acts of state-perpetrated violence inflicted on women and pregnant people, particularly those with the least resources and agency under capitalism and white supremacy.

Capitalism has always consciously decided whose lives are expendable. This book is for everyone coming to terms with this fact in the era of the rollback of our bodily autonomy.

The futures of reproductive justice and LGBTQIA+ liberation are intimately connected. Both movements were born out of the desire to love and build families of our choosing–when and how we decide. Both movements are rooted in broader social justice liberationist traditions that center the needs of Black and brown communities, the LGBTQIA+ community, gender-nonconforming folks, femmes, poor folks, parents, and all those who have been forced to the margins of society.

Taking as its starting point the idea that we all have the human right to bodily autonomy, to sexual health and pleasure, and to exercise these rights with dignity, Queering Reproductive Justice sets out to re-envision the seemingly disparate strands of the reproductive justice and LGBTQIA+ movements and offer an invitation to reimagine these movements as one integrated vision of freedom for the future.

Through the captivating individual voices of the people who lived it, The Movement tells the intimate inside story of what it felt like to be at the forefront of the modern feminist crusade, when women rejected thousands of years of custom and demanded the freedom to be who they wanted and needed to be. This engaging history traces women’s awakening, organizing, and agitating between the years of 1963 and 1973, when a decentralized collection of people and events coalesced to create a spontaneous combustion. From Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, to the underground abortion network the Janes, to Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign and Billie Jean King’s 1973 battle of the sexes, Bingham artfully weaves together the fragments of that explosion person by person, bringing to life the emotions of this personal, cultural, and political revolution. Artists and politicians, athletes and lawyers, Black and white, The Movement brings readers into the rooms where these women insisted on being treated as first class citizens, and in the process, changed the fabric of American life.

In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the landmark decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, eliminating overnight the constitutional right to abortion on which Americans had relied for nearly fifty years. In this book, legal thinkers from across the academic spectrum comment on the Court’s decision in Dobbs, its impact on the legal landscape, and its significance to American culture and history. Though the text of Dobbs serves as a starting point for much of this book’s analysis, these essays also analyze Dobbs as both the conclusion of long-running conservative goals and the potential beginning of a new chapter in the women’s rights movement. The book as a whole explores the diverse ways in which the Dobbs decision might be viewed, examining its merits, its impact, and its future.

This book will help mental health professionals navigate their roles and responsibilities in a highly politically charged situation, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Readers will understand the various ways the ruling may impact the clients with whom they work, as considerable research has found that people forced to carry unwanted pregnancies experience adverse financial, social, physical, and mental health effects. The negative effects are more severe for people in marginalized groups, such as persons living in poverty, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and those in medically underserved areas.

hould mental health professionals set aside their personal thoughts and feelings about abortion to best serve their clients, and is this even possible? What do the ethical codes that mental health professionals abide by suggest for traversing this situation? This engaging text encourages deep personal reflection while broadening professionals’ understanding of the mental health effects of the ruling and providing insight into its ethical and social justice implications.

Journalist Irin Carmon was eight months pregnant when the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, unleashing pain and suffering for those who didn’t want to be pregnant and, shockingly to some, those who did. What was clear to Carmon from her dozen years of reporting—and from what she felt in her bones—was how incomplete the American story of reproduction had been, and how much had been unexpressed, hidden, or taken for granted, and not just by conservative justices or in red states. Whether in cosmopolitan, liberal New York City or rural Alabama, the entire system is broken.

Unbearable tells a deeper story, going beyond the headlines and any one experience or choice, and grounded in history and journalism. It introduces us to five women navigating pregnancy care—from that first positive pregnancy test through joy, loss, and the unforeseen—in a country that is at best indifferent and at worst willfully cruel, and to brave, outnumbered people fighting to make it better. Written with deep empathy and analytical rigor, Unbearable is at once a moving story of interconnection, a harrowing exposé, and assertion of humanity. Above all, it is a powerful call for solidarity, regardless of our circumstances or our decisions.

What’s next for the battle over abortion? Mary Ziegler argues that simply undoing Roe v. Wade has never been the endpoint for the antiabortion movement. Since the 1960s, the larger goal has been to secure recognition of fetuses and embryos as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a step that the modern antiabortion movement argues would make liberal abortion laws unconstitutional.

Personhood chronicles the internal struggles and changing ideas about race, sex, religion, war, corporate rights, and poverty that shaped the personhood struggle over half a century. The book explores how Americans came to take for granted that fetal personhood requires criminalization and suggests that other ways of valuing both fetal life and women’s equality might be possible. Ziegler ultimately shows that the battle for personhood has long been about more than abortion: it has aimed to overhaul the regulation of in vitro fertilization, contraception, and the behavior of pregnant women; change the meaning of equality under the law; and determine how courts decide which fundamental rights Americans enjoy. This book is necessary reading for anyone seeking to understand the era launched by the reversal of Roe.

How hard-working individuals have kept abortion afloat in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s destruction, and the continued help needed if we want to sustain it.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, many feared it meant the end of abortion access in the United States. Yet the courageous work of people on the ground has allowed abortion to survive post-Dobbs in ways that no one predicted. In After Dobbs, law professor David S. Cohen and sociologist Carole Joffe interview 24 people across all different fields in abortion and in different state political environments to uncover how the abortion providing community and its allies prepared for, and then responded to this momentous event. Taking place across three intervals throughout 2022—pre-Dobbs in early 2022, right after Dobbs, and then six months later—these interviews showcase how nimble thinking on the part of providers, growth and new delivery models of abortion pills, and the never-ending work of those who help with abortion travel and funding have ensured most people who want them are still getting abortions, even without Roe.

Revolutionizing Women’s Healthcare is the story of a feminist experiment: the self-help movement. This movement arose out of women’s frustration, anger, and fear for their health. Tired of visiting doctors who saw them as silly little girls, suffering shame when they asked for birth control, seeking abortions in back alleys, and holding little control over their own reproductive lives, women took action. Feminists created “self-help groups” where they examined each other’s bodies and read medical literature. They founded and ran clinics, wrote books, made movies, undertook nationwide tours, and raided and picketed offending medical institutions. Some performed their own abortions. Others swore off pharmaceuticals during menopause. Lesbian women found “at home” ways to get pregnant. Black women used self-help to talk about how systemic racism affected their health. Hannah Dudley-Shotwell engagingly chronicles these stories and more to showcase the creative ways women came together to do for themselves what the mainstream healthcare system refused to do.

A compassionate perspective on late-term abortion that challenges preconceived notions of who gets abortions and why. Within both the anti-abortion and pro-choice movements, third-trimester abortion is often stigmatized and misunderstood. For 20 years, Dr. Shelley Sella saw patients whose diverse backgrounds and circumstances led them to the same difficult decision: to end their pregnancies.

Now, interweaving her own journey as a provider, Dr. Sella invites readers into a typical week at her clinic to demystify the experience. She shares the stories of people like Clarissa, a mother of 2 whose third suffered a massive stroke in utero with no chance of recovery. Mary, a devoted Catholic whose fourth round of IVF offered a late-in-life chance at motherhood, only to be dashed by anomalous test results. Laura, a mother to 4 already whose bruised arms tell a painful story, one she couldn’t bring herself to write a fifth child into.

Beyond Limits is not just a testament to a standard of care grounded in competence, compassion, and sensitivity. It is also a call for a paradigm shift that moves beyond Dobbs, beyond Roe, beyond limits to provide care. And it is a tribute to the real people whose hearts, reasons, and stories are more complex than politicized conversations about abortion lead us to believe.

“Looking through the Speculum is a gripping account of the women’s health movement and the institutions women’s health activists built and ran from the 1970s into the twenty-first century. Houck chronicles how feminist health activists established women’s health clinics to offer an alternative to the patriarchal model of medicine in which male physicians controlled procedures, information, and medications central to women’s intimate lives. Houck takes us inside the clinics to illustrate how feminist activists put into practice ideas about feminist health care and feminist leadership models. Over time, as the patient population became less white, less heterosexual, and less cisgender, clinics had to deliver more expansive services and adjust to new leadership models to appeal to poorer and less privileged women, women of color, and patients seeking trans care. This is a book not only about women’s attempts to take control of their intimate health care needs, but also about struggles for democracy and leadership these changes brought. It is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how political ideals were negotiated and renegotiated as women’s health activists struggled to adjust to the changing needs of their clients and the health care field at large.” — Johanna Schoen, Rutgers University

A provocative exploration of the witches-and witch hunts-in the untold history of abortion, from the days of Socrates through the Salem Witch Trials and the 1980s Satanic Panic, all the way to our fraught post-Roe present, from journalist Sophie Saint Thomas.

For millennia, across cultures and continents, women and people who experience pregnancy, as well as midwives and those who assist them, have been persecuted as witches (whether they actually practiced the craft or not). In this dauntless, voice-driven reassessment of that history, journalist Sophie Saint Thomas follows the tangled threads of witches and reproductive rights through the ages. Through it all, she maintains an intersectional eye toward the communities most affected by reproductive oppression (including Native Americans, enslaved Black women, and trans people) and a scathing exposure of the hypocrisy of anti-choice crusaders (from the eugenicist Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey to the astrology-loving Republican Nancy Reagan). With heart, humor, and deeply researched insights, Reproductive Rites brings a new level of context to the urgency of our present moment as we fight for our rights in a post-Roe v. Wade America.

Written with equal parts candor and lyricism, Pam Houston illuminates the interconnected histories of abortion in the United States and in her own life during the decades when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. Houston guides us through the shifting landscapes of politics, the law, and self-determination in a country where access to medical care and the power to determine your own destiny are increasingly—and once again—dependent on geography and circumstance.

The inspiring, on-the-ground story of the rising grassroots leaders in the abortion rights movement during the pivotal first year after Dobbs.

When the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization- overturning the constitutional right to abortion care-the country was thrown into chaos. Abortion providers and their patients faced sudden closures, new restrictions, and rapidly changing rules as nearly half of the states moved quickly to ban or severely curtail abortion access. Against this backdrop, an army of health care providers, lawyers, activists, and everyday people mobilized to protect what a majority of Americans want: legal abortion.

In You Must Stand Up, Nieman Fellow Amanda Becker provides a real-time portrait of the creative resistance that unfolded in America’s first year without the protections of Roe v. Wade. Amidst daily shifts in health care access, new legal battles coming before partisan courts, and up-for-grabs state constitutions, Becker follows the leaders rising to meet these challenges-doctors and staffers turning to new financial and medical models to remain open and provide abortions, volunteers campaigning against antiabortion ballot initiatives, and medical students fighting to learn to provide what can be lifesaving care.

Although the Dallas Fire Department had saved the clinic, we were shaken and heartsick that our son had just spent Christmas Day at a crime scene. I had performed my first abortion in the year Kyle was born, and though he had long supported our work, he now felt worried for us in ways he’d never expressed. As we stood near the ruins, breathing fresh air in gulps, he said, “Do you have to keep doing this work?” We were both silent for long moments before I simply said, “No. We choose to.”

In this deeply personal account, Dr. Curtis Boyd and Dr. Glenna Halvorson-Boyd reflect on their lives in abortion care. Led by a desire to empower patients, they advance abortion and mental health care further than ever even as they find themselves at the center of a controversial new issue in American life. Sweeping, introspective, and deeply honest, We Choose To is a rare portrait of abortion providers and the world in which they work, where abortion is not a talking point in a culture war but a private, even spiritual, act.

This vivid account by a prominent doctor reports the challenges of offering and receiving abortion services through stories from the front lines, from protecting patients and staff from protesters’ attacks to the dangers to women of restricted access to abortion services, and research in Latin America.

Dr. Hern – an abortion specialist, researcher, scholar, and highly visible public advocate –shows how abortion saves women’s lives given the many risks that arise during pregnancy – remarkably more than most people realize. He points to political and national solutions to reverse a reawakened crisis that now threatens democracy. Throughout the book, Dr. Hern shows how the current emergency was largely created by political actors who have exploited and distorted the abortion issue to increase and consolidate their power.

When House Speaker Paul Ryan urged U.S. women to have more children, and Ross Douthat requested “More babies, please,” they openly expressed what U.S. policymakers have been discussing for decades with greater discretion. Using technical language like “age structure,” “dependency ratio,” and “entitlement crisis,” establishment think tanks are raising the alarm: if U.S. women don’t have more children, we’ll face an aging workforce, slack consumer demand, and a stagnant economy.

Feminists generally believe that a prudish religious bloc is responsible for the fight over reproductive freedom in the U.S., but hidden behind this conventional explanation is a dramatic fight over women’s reproductive labor. On one side, elite policymakers want an expanding workforce reared with a minimum of employer spending and a maximum of unpaid women’s work. On the other side, women are refusing to produce children at levels desired by economic planners. With little access to childcare, family leave, health care, and with insufficient male participation, U.S. women are conducting a spontaneous birth strike. In other countries, panic over low birth rates has led governments to underwrite childbearing with generous universal programs, but in the U.S., women have not yet realized the potential of our bargaining position. When we do, it will lead to new strategies for winning full access to abortion and birth control, and for improving the difficult working conditions U.S. parents now face when raising children.

Drawing on years of research and interviews with over eighty activists, abortion providers, medical researchers, lawyers, and people who have used abortion pills, Baker’s book is the first comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States–why it took so long for the FDA to approve mifepristone, why the agency unnecessarily restricted the medication for decades, why so few doctors offered abortion pills, and how the COVID-19 pandemic and, ironically, the reversal of Roe v. Wade enabled activists to finally wrench mifepristone from the tight control of legal and medical authorities.

Baker argues that resistance to increasing access to abortion pill came not only from the anti-abortion movement and Republican politicians, but resulted from a combination of factors, including FDA conservatism and cautiousness; the market-oriented pharmaceutical, healthcare, and insurance industries; mainstream medicine’s abandonment of abortion care; physician gatekeeping; Democrats’ lukewarm support for abortion; the influence of philanthropy in abortion healthcare and activism; and even the cautious approach of some abortion supporters. To gain access to abortion pills, determined and courageous activists waged a decades-long campaign to establish, expand, and maintain access to abortion pills in the United States. Weaving their voices through her book, Baker recounts both the dramatic and everyday acts of their resistance.

From two top New York Times journalists, the breathtaking untold story of the plan to overturn Roe v. Wade and the consequences for women, abortion, and the future of America.

In June 2022, Americans watched in shock as the Supreme Court reversed one of the nation’s landmark rulings. For nearly a half century, Roe was synonymous with women’s rights and freedoms. Then, suddenly, it was gone. Authors Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer reveal the explosive inside story of how it happened. Their investigation charts the shocking political and religious campaign to take down abortion rights and remake American families, womanhood, and the nation itself. Reeling from Barack Obama’s 2012 landslide presidential victory – and motivated by a spiritual mission – a small but determined network of elite conservative Christian lawyers and powerbrokers worked quietly and methodically to keep their true cause alive: ending abortion rights. Thinking in generational terms, they devised a strategic, top-down takeover at every level of political and legal life, from little-known anti-abortion lobbyists in far flung statehouses to the arbiters of the constitution at the highest court in the land. Broad swaths of liberal America did not register the severity of the threat until it was far too late. At a moment when women had more power than ever before, the feminist movement suffered one of the greatest political defeats in American history.

A galvanizing history of abortion recentering people of color to put forth a timely argument that we must liberate abortion for all. People of color have been having abortions since the dawn of time, yet our access is continuously under attack. In Liberating Abortion, award-winning abortion activist Renee Bracey Sherman and journalist Regina Mahone illustrate the long racist history that brought us to this moment, uncover the hidden figures who set the foundation activists and storytellers are building on today, and explain how abortion has been and remains essential to the health of our communities.

Liberating Abortion will take you back to the basics of sex education, detailing the traditions of abortion over centuries, while examining how society makes us feel about our experiences. You’ll find rigorous research, never-before-heard stories, and eye-opening interviews with over 50 people of color who’ve had abortions, including activists, actresses, television writers, politicians, and the two Black members of Jane, the Chicago feminist service that provided abortions before Roe. With poignant storytelling and precise analysis, Liberating Abortion will change how you think about abortion forever.

On June 24, 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the impact was immediate: by 2024, abortion was virtually unavailable or significantly restricted in 21 states. In Undue Burden, reporter Shefali Luthra traces the unforgettable stories of patients faced with one of the most personal decisions of their lives.

A revelatory portrait of inequality in America, Undue Burden examines abortion not as a footnote or a political pawn, but as a basic human right, something worthy of our collective attention and with immense power to transform our lives, families, and futures.

One out of every six patients in the United States is treated in a Catholic hospital that follows the policies of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. These policies prohibit abortion, sterilization, contraception, some treatments for miscarriage and gender confirmation, and other reproductive care, undermining hard-won patients’ rights to bodily autonomy and informed decision-making. Drawing on rich interviews with patients and providers, this book reveals both how the bishops’ directives operate and how people inside Catholic hospitals navigate the resulting restrictions on medical practice. In doing so, Bishops and Bodies fleshes out a vivid picture of how The Church’s stance on sex, reproduction, and “life” itself manifests in institutions that affect us all.

An engaging exploration into the enduring popularity of Dirty Dancing and its lasting themes of feminism, activism, and reproductive rights.
When Dirty Dancing was released in 1987, it had already been rejected by producers and distributors several times over, and expectations for the summer romance were low. But then the film, written by former dancer Eleanor Bergstein and starring Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze as a couple from two different worlds, exploded. Since then, Dirty Dancing’s popularity has never waned. The truth has always been that Dirty Dancing was never just a teen romance or a dance movie — it also explored abortion rights, class, and political activism, with a smattering of light crime-solving. In The Time of My Life, celebrated music journalist Andrea Warner excavates the layers of Dirty Dancing, from its anachronistic, chart-topping soundtrack, to Baby and Johnny’s chemistry, to Bergstein’s political intentions, to the abortion subplot that is more relevant today than ever. The film’s remarkable longevity would never have been possible if it was just a throwaway summer fling story. It is precisely because of its themes — deeply feminist, sensitively written — that we, over 30 years later, are still holding our breath during that last, exhilarating lift.

In a stirring and succinct examination of post-Roe America, New York Times bestselling author Jessica Valenti shines a light on the conservative assault on women’s freedom, cutting through the misinformation and overwhelm to inform, engage, and enrage.

From the attacks Americans know about to the ones anti-abortion lawmakers and groups are trying to hide, Valenti details the tactics and horrors that she’s been painstakingly tracking in her acclaimed newsletter, Abortion, Every Day. Abortion gives voice to women’s frustration and outrage in a moment when they’re fed up with being talked over and diminished. And in an election year when abortion is dominating the national conversation, Valenti provides the language, facts, and context readers need to feel confident talking about the attacks on their bodies and freedom. Abortion is a handbook for the overwhelming majority of Americans who support abortion rights, whether they’re seasoned activists or those just starting to learn. With the wit, expertise, and blunt moral clarity that’s made her writing popular for decades, Valenti offers an essential manifesto in an urgent moment.

This textbook is a concise, accessible and engaging introduction to what continues to be a contentious and polorizing topic in the United States. Focussing on the current debates and controversies, myths and realities of reproductive justice, this text seeks to examine the historical, social and cultural forces that shape those politics. Making use of an explicitly feminist framework, the textbook analyzes how the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and other markers of difference are implicated in protest and policy. This is a primer for Women’s and Gender Studies students, and for those coming to the topic for the first time.

The question of whether a young woman should be allowed to terminate a pregnancy without her parents’ knowledge has been one of the most contentious issues of the post Roe v. Wade era. Parental involvement laws reach to the core of the parent-teen relationship in the highly contested realm of adolescent sexuality. This is the first book to examine in thorough detail the decision-making experiences of teens considering abortion. Shoshanna Ehrlich evaluates the Supreme Court’s efforts to reconcile the historically based understanding of teens as dependent persons in need of protection with a more contemporary understanding of them as autonomous individuals with adult-like claims to constitutional recognition.

In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe V. Wade and a country divided, a pioneer in the pro-choice movement and women’s healthcare offers an unapologetic and authoritative take on abortion—“the front line and the bottom line of women’s freedom and liberty.” Merle Hoffman has been at the forefront of the reproductive freedom movement since the 1970s. Three years before the Supreme Court legalized abortion through Roe v. Wade, she helped to establish one of the United States’ first abortion centers in Flushing, Queens, and later went on to found Choices, one of the nation’s largest and most comprehensive women’s medical facilities. For the last five decades, Hoffman has been a steadfast warrior and fierce advocate for every woman’s right to choose when and whether or not to be a mother.

Now, amidst the aftermath of the Dobbs Decision, Hoffman has carefully compiled her decades of analysis, research, and experience into a tour de force manifesto that sheds light on the catastrophic repercussions of overturning Roe, and what we as a nation must do moving forward to ensure the safety and freedom of people with uteruses everywhere. In Choices, Hoffman expresses her views on where we are and what lies ahead. She covers topics ranging from: revamping the healthcare system to support women’s rights; combatting rising authoritarianism; the weaponization of religion; fighting the antis; practicing courage; sabotage from within the movement; and activating the next generation in the fight for reproductive justice.

1970, pre-Choice America. After their eighth move in her thirteen short years, the lonely only child of a high-ranking naval officer and a socially ambitious mother, Tracy Mayo longed for a normal adolescence – to have friends, to feel rooted. What she got was a pregnancy at fourteen and exile to a maternity home. There, she bore not only a child but also the weight of the culture’s shame. She was required to surrender her baby boy at birth and pretend it never happened. Twenty-two years later, her longing undiminished, Tracy set out to find him – and perhaps, through her search, to reclaim her self. Are we moving back to a world where women have no agency, stripped of control of their bodies and their futures? More than fifty years after one frightened, grief-stricken young mother was ordered to forget, Tracy’s story is even more important to remember.

This book dispels all the nonsense that’s thrown out in arguments about reproductive health. It’s not designed for academics; it’s designed for the politician who claimed a woman could swallow a camera to check on a pregnancy. Or the auntie who said eating papaya was as effective as oral contraceptives. This is the book that helps regular people sound smarter when they argue their point about birth control, Plan B, and D&Cs. It has pictures, analogies, and extra question boxes that make you think about your own opinions. To be clear, this book is not an argument for, or against, abortion rights. After all, everyone has seen enough of those. Instead, it’s an explanation of what happens in women’s bodies throughout the month (surprise – it’s ovulation and menstruation!), how contraceptives and emergency contraceptives work (not as abortifacients), and what the term abortion actually means in a medical sense. Written by a medical student and former EMT-B, this book will give you all the information you need to truly understand reproductive topics from a practical medical perspective, without boring you to death in the process.

The story of the radical feminist networks who worked outside the law to defend abortion. Starting in the 1970s, small groups of feminist activists met regularly to study anatomy, practice pelvic exams on each other, and learn how to safely perform a procedure known as menstrual extraction, which can end a pregnancy, using equipment that can be easily bought and assembled at home. This “self-help” movement grew into a robust national and international collaboration of activists and health workers determined to ensure access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion, at all costs–to the point of learning how to do the necessary steps themselves. Even after abortion was legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, activists continued meeting, studying, and teaching these skills, reshaping their strategies alongside decades of changing legal, medical, and cultural landscapes such as the legislative war against abortion rights, the AIDS epidemic, and the rise of anti-abortion domestic terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s.

Grounded in interviews with activists sharing details of their work for the first time, Angela Hume reveals three decades of this critical, if under-recognized story of the radical edge of the abortion movement.

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.

Despite the claim by many Christian leaders that the pro-life/antiabortion position is the only faithful response to the debate about reproductive rights, many people of faith find themselves in a murky middle of this supposedly black-and-white issue. Christians who are pro-abortion rights are rarely pro-abortion. However, they view the decision to carry a pregnancy to term as one to be made by the woman, her medical team, her family, or personal counsel rather than by politicians. Pro-Choice and Christian explores the biblical, theological, political, and medical aspects of the debate in order to provide a thoughtful Christian argument for a pro-choice position with regard to abortion issues. Kira Schlesinger considers relevant Scriptures, the politics of abortion in the United States, and the human realities making abortion a vital issue of justice and compassion. By examining choice from a Christian perspective, Schlesinger provides a common vocabulary for discussing faith and reproductive rights.

Abortion remains the most contested political issue in American life. Poll results have remained surprisingly constant over the years, with roughly equal numbers supporting and opposing it. A common perception is that abortion is contrary to Christian teaching and values. While some have challenged that perception, few have attempted a comprehensive critique and constructive counterargument on Christian ethical and theological grounds.Margaret Kamitsuka begins with a careful examination of the church’s biblical and historical record, refuting the assumption that Christianity has always condemned abortion or that it considered personhood as beginning at the moment of conception. She then offers carefully crafted ethical arguments about the pregnant woman’s authority to make reproductive decisions and builds a theological rationale for seeing abortion as something other than a sin.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, advocates of legal abortion mostly used the term rights when describing their agenda. But after Roe v. Wade, their determination to develop a respectable, nonconfrontational movement encouraged many of them to use the word choice–an easier concept for people weary of various rights movements. At first the distinction in language didn’t seem to make much difference-the law seemed to guarantee both. But in the years since, the change has become enormously important.

In Beggars and Choosers, Solinger shows how historical distinctions between women of color and white women, between poor and middle-class women, were used in new ways during the era of “choice.” Politicians and policy makers began to exclude certain women from the class of “deserving mothers” by using the language of choice to create new public policies concerning everything from Medicaid funding for abortions to family tax credits, infertility treatments, international adoption, teen pregnancy, and welfare. Solinger argues that the class-and-race-inflected guarantee of “choice” is a shaky foundation on which to build our notions of reproductive freedom. Her impassioned argument is for reproductive rights as human rights–as a basis for full citizenship status for women.

A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real

Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country’s refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem.

With the recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization revoking abortion protections, we are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. Rooted in a long-term study, Relinquished is an analysis of hundreds of in-depth interviews with American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard.

This anthology argues for an expansion of the single-issue abortion-rights movement into a multi-cultural feminist movement in the United States.

“Madame Restell is a sharp, witty Gilded Age medical history which introduces us to an iconic, yet tragically overlooked, feminist heroine: a glamorous women’s healthcare provider in Manhattan, known to the world as Madame Restell. A celebrity in her day with a flair for high fashion and public, petty beefs, Restell was a self-made woman and single mother who used her wit, her compassion, and her knowledge of family medicine to become one of the most in-demand medical workers in New York. Not only that, she used her vast resources to care for the most vulnerable women of the city: unmarried women in need of abortions, birth control, and other medical assistance.

In defiance of increasing persecution from powerful men, Restell saved the lives of thousands of young women; in fact, in historian Jennifer Wright’s own words, “despite having no formal training and a near-constant steam of women knocking at her door, she never lost a patient.” Restell was a revolutionary who opened the door to the future of reproductive choice for women, and Wright brings Restell and her circle to life in this dazzling, sometimes dark, and thoroughly entertaining tale. In addition to uncovering the forgotten history of Restell herself, the book also doubles as an eye-opening look into the “greatest American scam you’ve never heard about”: the campaign to curtail women’s power by restricting their access to healthcare.

Just as racism is embedded in the legal system, so is misogyny—even after the law proclaims gender equality and criminally punishes violence against women. In After Misogyny, Julie C. Suk shows that misogyny lies not in animus but in the overempowerment of men and the overentitlement of society to women’s unpaid labor and undervalued contributions. This is a book about misogyny without misogynists.

From antidiscrimination law to abortion bans, the law fails women by keeping society’s dependence on women’s sacrifices invisible. Via a tour of constitutional change around the world, After Misogyny shows how to remake constitutional democracy. Women across the globe are going beyond the antidiscrimination paradigm of American legal feminism and fundamentally resetting baseline norms and entitlements. That process, what Suk calls a “constitutionalism of care,” builds the public infrastructure that women’s reproductive work has long made possible for free.

In The Supermajority, Michael Waldman explores the tumultuous 2021-2022 Supreme Court term. He draws deeply on history to examine other times the Court veered from the popular will, provoking controversy and backlash. And he analyzes the most important new rulings and their implications for the law and for American society. Waldman asks: What can we do when the Supreme Court challenges the country? Over three days in June 2022, the conservative supermajority overturned the constitutional right to abortion, possibly opening the door to reconsider other major privacy rights, as Justice Clarence Thomas urged. The Court sharply limited the authority of the EPA, reducing the prospects for combatting climate change. It radically loosened curbs on guns amid an epidemic of mass shootings. It fully embraced legal theories such as “originalism” that will affect thousands of cases throughout the country.

An eye-opening, transformative, and actionable journey through radical and compassionate community abortion care and support work: what it looks like, how each and every one of us can practice and incorporate it into our daily lives, and what we can imagine and build together in a post-Roe v. Wade United States. Abortion touches all of our lives. While statistically nearly everyone knows someone who will receive an abortion in their lifetime, limiting narratives flatten our understanding and assumptions around abortion, while stigma and criminalization stifle discussion. What we lack are the language and tools to provide care and support to all of the members of our communities who receive abortions, before, during, and after them.

Now, Hannah Matthews—abortion care worker, doula, journalist and essayist, and reproductive rights advocate—breathes depth and nuance into the oversimplified narratives surrounding abortion, presenting an accessible guide to the emotional and physical realities of providing and supporting abortion care for our own communities. Featuring stories of real abortion experiences, including Matthews’s own, You or Someone You Love offers a glimpse into the stunningly diverse landscape of abortion care across gender, race, and class lines, while illustrating how we can better support and protect the people who seek abortion in a country that increasingly promotes secrecy and shame.

Abortion is common. It’s everyday. It’s healthcare. Abortion is a moral choice for people who despite the shouting voices around them understand that they have the ability to control their fertility the way people with uteruses have for thousands of years and as they will continue to do for thousands of years to come, no matter the barriers thrown in their path. These people understand that being human means controlling the trajectory of their lives. When faced with a dangerous or unwanted pregnancy, they gather the strength to put away the self-serving opinions of others and listen to their hearts.

Undue Burden argues for these people and for abortion as a moral good using the framework of Reproductive Justice. It lays out why it’s no longer enough for us to say we’re pro-choice, but instead we must proudly proclaim to be pro-abortion. It illustrates how when we force people to continue pregnancies and bring children into the world without providing any of the support systems to help sustain them, we are creating conditions of misery. Through the lens of Reproductive Justice, Undue Burden explains why anti-abortion extremists actually want this misery to exist.

The leading U.S. expert on abortion law charts the many meanings associated with Roe v. Wade during its fifty-year history. What explains the insistent pull of Roe v. Wade? Abortion law expert Mary Ziegler argues that the U.S. Supreme Court decision, which decriminalized abortion in 1973 and was overturned in 2022, had a hold on us that was not simply the result of polarized abortion politics. Rather, Roe took on meanings far beyond its original purpose of protecting the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship. It forced us to confront questions about sexual violence, judicial activism and restraint, racial justice, religious liberty, the role of science in politics, and much more. In this history of what the Supreme Court’s best-known decision has meant, Ziegler identifies the inconsistencies and unsettled issues in our abortion politics. She urges us to rediscover the nuance that has long resided where we would least expect to find it–in the meaning of Roe itself.

An in-depth look at the legacy of Roe v. Wade, and on-the-ground reporting from the front lines of the battle to protect the right to choose. The pieces started to fall In 2019 when a wave of anti-abortion laws went into effect. Georgia, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, while Missouri banned the procedure at eight weeks. Alabama banned all abortions. The die was cast. And on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and, abortion immediately became illegal in 22 states.

No Choice begins by shining a light on the eerie ways in which life before Roe will be mirrored in life after. The wealthy and privileged will still have access, low-income people will suffer disproportionately, and pregnancy will be heavily policed. Then, Andrews takes us to the states and communities that have been hardest-hit by the erosion of abortion rights in this country, and tells the stories of those who are most at risk from this devastating reversal of settled law. There is a glimmer of faint hope, though. As the battle moves to state legislatures around the country, the book profiles the people who are doing groundbreaking, inspiring work to ensure safe, legal access to this fundamental part of health care.

In Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair expands on her viral Twitter thread and offers a provocative reframing of the abortion issue. In a series of 25 brief arguments, she deftly makes the case for moving the abortion debate away from controlling and legislating women’s bodies and instead directs the focus on men’s lack of accountability in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Highly readable, accessible, funny, and unflinching, Blair builds her argument by walking readers through the basics of fertility (men are 50 times more fertile than woman), the unfair burden placed on women when it comes to preventing pregnancy (90% of the birth control market is for women), the wrongheaded stigmas around birth control for men (condoms make sex less pleasurable, vasectomies are scary and emasculating), and the counterintuitive reality that men, who are fertile 100% of the time, take little to no responsibility for preventing pregnancy.

In January of 1970, 300 women plaintiffs with 6 women attorneys pressed a suit in Federal Court challenging the constitutionality of New York State’s abortion laws. Claiming that abortion laws deny a woman’s right to privacy and her right to decide whether or not to bear children, they demanded total repeal of the law rather than liberalization. For the first time in a court proceeding, women testified as to how they were forced to face illegal and unsafe abortions, exorbitant prices and the experience of giving up a child for adoption. Portions of this devastating testimony have been compiled for this book by Diane Schulder and Florynce Kennedy, two attorneys in the suit.

“A powerful document of the history of abortion before and after legalization, this book offers a compelling collection of oral history interviews that weave together the story of abortion in an entire community [in western Massachussetts]. Creating Choice gives voice to a group of people whose stories are crucial to our understanding of women’s history but who have so far not been heard. This collection is not only crucial to students of the history of abortion. It provides an equally rare look into the history of the sexual revolution and the women’s health movement on college campuses. Creating Choice is wonderfully accessible, an important collection for anybody trying to understand the history of women and sexuality.” – Johanna Schoen, University of Iowa

Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the nineties, Erika Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment—a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her friends that she had to leave her school classroom. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she’s still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her.

Sánchez writes about an abortion she had several years ago. The abortion took place during an “incredibly terrible time,” as she suffered from a severe bout of depression, she told MSNBC host Alicia Menendez on her show, “American Voices.” “I am certain the procedure saved my life,” Sánchez said.

By 1850, most contraceptive methods and abortion were illegal in America. But in the late 19th century, American women began demanding the right to prevent or terminate pregnancy. Gordon traces the story of this controversy, and includes new material on recent movements to outlaw abortion.

The modern Republican Party is the party of conservative Christianity and big business—two things so closely identified with the contemporary GOP that we hardly notice the strangeness of the pairing. Legal historian Mary Ziegler traces how the anti-abortion movement helped to forge and later upend this alliance. Beginning with the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Buckley v. Valeo, right‑to‑lifers fought to gain power in the GOP by changing how campaign spending—and the First Amendment—work. The anti-abortion movement helped to revolutionize the rules of money in U.S. politics and persuaded conservative voters to fixate on the federal courts. Ultimately, the campaign finance landscape that abortion foes created fueled the GOP’s embrace of populism and the rise of Donald Trump. Ziegler offers a surprising new view of the slow drift to extremes in American politics—and explains how it had everything to do with the strange intersection of right-to-life politics and campaign spending.

In Reproductive Justice, sociologist Barbara Gurr provides the first book examining Native American women’s reproductive healthcare. Drawing on interviews and focus group data, archival research, and discussions with healthcare professionals, Gurr paints an insightful portrait of the Indian Health Service (IHS)—the federal agency tasked with providing healthcare to Native Americans—shedding much-needed light on Native American efforts to obtain prenatal care, childbirth care, access to contraception and abortion services.

Based on candid, in-depth interviews with women who considered but did not obtain an abortion, No Real Choice punctures the myth that American women have full autonomy over their reproductive choices. Focusing on the experiences of a predominantly Black and low-income group of women, sociologist Katrina Kimport finds that structural, cultural, and experiential factors can make choosing abortion impossible–especially for those who experience racism and class discrimination. From these conversations, we see the obstacles to “choice” these women face, such as bans on public insurance coverage of abortion and rampant antiabortion claims that abortion is harmful. Kimport’s interviews reveal that even as activists fight to preserve Roe v. Wade, class and racial disparities have already curtailed many women’s freedom of choice.

Told with care and sensitivity, No Real Choice gives voice to women whose experiences are often overlooked in debates on abortion, illustrating how real reproductive choice is denied, for whom, and at what cost.

This book tells the movement and litigation stories behind important reproductive rights and justice cases. The twelve chapters span topics including contraception, abortion, pregnancy, and assisted reproductive technologies, telling the stories of these cases using a wide-lens perspective that illuminates the complex ways law is debated and forged–in social movements, in representative government, and in courts.

The changing composition of the Supreme Court, increased executive and legislative action, and shifting political interests have all pushed issues of reproductive rights and justice to the forefront of contemporary discourse. The volume is suited to a wide range of law school courses, including constitutional law, family law, employment law, and reproductive rights and justice; it could also be assigned in undergraduate or graduate courses on history, gender studies, and reproductive rights and justice.

In the opening essays, Kate Greasley and Christopher Kaczor lay out what they take to be the best case for and against abortion rights. In the ensuing dialogue, they engage with each other’s arguments and each responds to criticisms fielded by the other. Their conversational argument explores such fundamental questions as: what gives a person the right to life? Is abortion bad for women? What is the difference between abortion and infanticide? Underpinned by philosophical reasoning and methodology, this book provides opposing and clearly structured perspectives on a highly emotive and controversial issue. The result gives readers a window into how moral philosophers argue about the contentious issue of abortion rights, and an in-depth analysis of the compelling arguments on both sides.

Although Roe v. Wade identified abortion as a constitutional right in1973, it still bears stigma–a proverbial scarlet A. Millions of Americans have participated in or benefited from an abortion, but few want to reveal that they have done so. Approximately one in five pregnancies in the US ends in
abortion. Why is something so common, which has been legal so long, still a source of shame and secrecy? Why is it so regularly debated by politicians, and so seldom divulged from friend to friend? This book explores the personal stigma that prevents many from sharing their abortion experiences with
friends and family in private conversation, and the structural stigma that keeps it that way.

The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion – but the debate was far from over, continuing to be a political battleground to this day. Bringing to light key voices that illuminate the case and its historical context, Before Roe v. Wade looks back and recaptures how the arguments for and against abortion took shape as claims about the meaning of the Constitution – and about how the nation could best honor its commitment to dignity, liberty, equality, and life.

The definitive account of the legal and political struggles that created the right to privacy and won constitutional protection for a woman’s right to choose, “Liberty and Sexuality” details both the unheralded contributions of the young lawyers who filed America’s first abortion rights cases and the inside-the-Supreme Court deliberations that produced “Roe v. Wade”.

Abortion has been legal for nearly fifty years in the United States, but with a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court and an emboldened opposition in the street, the threat to its existence has never been more pressing. Clinic escorts— everyday volunteers—are prepared to stand up and protect abortion access, as they have for decades, even in the face of terrorism and violence. They have lived, and sometimes died, to ensure that abortion remains not only accessible but also a basic human right. Clinic escorts have fought the “abortion wars” on the front lines, and it is clinic escorts who will win it, by replacing hostility with humanity.

Bodies on the Line is a celebration of the crucial, often unsung heroes of abortion access and an inspiring call to defend this basic health care before it’s too late.

The history of how abortion came to be banned and how women lost–for the century between approximately 1870 and 1970–rights previously thought to be natural and inherent over their own bodies is a fascinating and infuriating one.

A Complicated Choice addresses the fact that abortion stigma is ubiquitous, even among those who identify as pro-choice. We have not been supportive of people who have abortions, especially those whose experiences are complicated and involve grief and loss. Bringing the reader along the journeys of those who have had abortions, Rev. Katey Zeh opens up space for the complexities of our reproductive lives, giving voice to the experiences of grief, loss, and healing surrounding abortion experiences. She weaves these personal stories with key insights from the fields of psychology, theology, and public policy to illuminate the systemic injustices that undergird the conditions that shape a person’s decision to end a pregnancy. (Foreword by Alexis McGill Johnson of Planned Parenthood.)

Lader spotlights the struggle for abortion rights, discusses the brutal clinic murders in Pensacola and Boston, and argues that RU 486 could markedly reduce clinical abortions by making the termination of a pregnancy a ‘private matter’.

Details the discovery and development of the controversial drug that ends unwanted pregnancies, examining the politics and ideology that keep it banned from the United States.

An authoritative study by a leader of the campaign to legalize abortion – a blueprint to secure this right of women everywhere.

In From Back Alley to the Border, Alicia Gutierrez-Romine examines the history of criminal abortion in California and the role abortion providers played in exposing and exploiting the faults in California’s anti-abortion statute throughout the twentieth century. Focused on the women who used this underground network and the physicians who facilitated it, Gutierrez-Romine describes the operation of abortion providers from the 1920s through the 1960s, including regular physicians as well as women and African American abortionists, and the investigations and trials that surrounded them.

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.

The incredible story of how a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer won Roe v. Wade, and what it means forty years later.

Sarah Weddington, just 27 years old in 1973, became a key figure in the reproductive rights movement when she took on the case. Here she recounts her remarkable story, from her personal experience with abortion and the workforce discrimination she faced in her early career to the judicial proceedings and long journey she has undertaken in fighting for women’s rights since. Weddington compels “those who are willing to share the responsibility of protecting choice,” to follow her plan of action in supporting the legal rights of women. A Question of Choice is an “eloquent reminder of what Roe truly means—that our most private decisions can be made behind the closed doors of our homes, with our families, and in private conversations with our hearts” (Former President Bill Clinton).

From award-winning author Karen Blumenthal, Jane Against the World is deep and passionate look at the riveting history of the fight for reproductive rights in the United States. Tracing the path to the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade and the continuing battle for women’s rights, Blumenthal examines, in a straightforward tone, the root causes of the current debate around abortion and repercussions that have affected generations of American women. This eye-opening book is the perfect tool to facilitate difficult discussions and awareness of a topic that is rarely touched on in school but affects each and every young person. This journalistic look at the history of abortion and the landmark case of Roe v. Wade is an important and necessary book.

The definitive account of the battle for reproductive freedom and a bold new strategy to safeguard our rights, from two lawyers at the forefront of the movement. While Roe v. Wade is a household name in America, few are aware of the impact of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court’s 1992 ruling that preserved but redefined and substantially limited abortion rights, especially for the most marginalized women. Casey rather than Roe has established the constitutional standards that today govern abortion in the U.S. When pundits talk about the reversal of Roe, they really mean the reversal of Casey.

Legal titans Kathryn Kolbert and Julie F. Kay share the story of one of the most divisive issues in American politics through behind-the-scenes personal narratives of the stunning losses and hard-earned victories in landmark abortion rights cases. They chronicle how a convergence of Supreme Court appointments and the strategies of political movements on both sides of this contentious debate have led us to a make-or-break moment for legal abortion in the United States. Most urgently, they propose a bold new strategy for engaging a fresh generation and broadening the scope of abortion rights supporters.

A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court’s most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart.

Despite her famous pseudonym, “Jane Roe,” no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers―a previously unseen trove―and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America.

A manual of model legislation that mirrors the antiabortion version published by Americans United for Life. The playbook includes bills designed to protect abortion clinics against acts of violence and prevent abortion clinics from having to share medically inaccurate information.

Rosaura “Rosie” Jimenez was the first woman known to have died in the United States due to an illegal abortion after the Hyde Amendment was passed, whic prohibited funding of abortion for poor women on Medicaid. Rosie was unable to afford a legal abortion and died at age 27 in 1977 from an unsafe abortion in McAllen, Texas.

For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. But in her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: America’s Religious Right has evolved into a Christian nationalist movement. It seeks to gain political power and to impose its vision on all of society. It isn’t fighting a culture war, it is waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy.

Stewart shows that the real power of the movement lies in a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations, embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances with likeminded, anti-democratic religious nationalists around the world, including Russia. She follows the money behind the movement and traces much of it to a group of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and family foundations. The Christian nationalist movement is far more organized and better funded than most people realize. It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals. The Power Worshippers is a brilliantly reported book of warning and a wake-up call. Stewart’s probing examination demands that Christian nationalism be taken seriously as a significant threat to the American republic and our democratic freedoms.

This is the definitive guide that addresses every aspect of reproductive health and abortion both in the United States and worldwide. It also addresses changing contraceptive and abortion practices, and what the future likely holds. No other source provides the comprehensive medical, ethical and legal analyses that this book does.

A medically-accurate, non-judgmental, and gender-inclusive resource for young folks about abortion care. In this book, you’ll learn about what an abortion is, some of the reasons people have abortions, and a few of the ways people might feel about their abortions.

Abortion can be a difficult topic to broach among adults, let alone children. As abortion doulas, we know how important it is to ensure that everyone has the resources they need to have intentional, compassionate, and nonjudgmental conversations about abortion care with the young people in their lives. To our knowledge, there are currently no published books in the US that use the word “abortion” for children under the age of 13. Parents, caretakers, and providers need and deserve a nonjudgmental, gender-inclusive, and medically accurate resource to use in discussions with children about abortion.

“Representing Abortion” analyses how artists, writers, performers, and activists make abortion visible, audible, and palpable within contexts dominated by anti-abortion imagery centred on the fetus and the erasure of the pregnant person. This creative work is significant as it challenges the polarisation of conversations about abortion.

This representational work offers nuanced and complex understandings of abortion, personally and politically. Analyses of such representations are urgently needed as access to abortion is diminished and antiabortion representations of the fetus continue to dominate the cultural horizon for thinking about abortion. Expanding the frame of reference for understanding abortion beyond the anti-abortion use of the fetal image, contributors to this collection push beyond narrow abstractions to examine representations of the experience and procedure of abortion within grounded histories, politics, and social contexts.

Eyal Press, the son of an abortion doctor in Buffalo, New York, provides a lucid social history of the city’s abortion wars in an effort to explain the murder of one of his father’s colleagues, Barnett Slepian, who was killed in 1998 by an anti-abortion activist named James Charles Kopp. The story begins three years before Roe v. Wade, when the New York State legislature decriminalized abortion, making the state a haven; in 1971, more than two hundred thousand women sought safe abortions in its hospitals.

Press traces the rise of the evangelical anti-abortion movement in the Rust Belt and, in fresh interviews, gives fair hearing to the activists who spent much of the eighties blockading his father’s medical office. He also examines dispassionately the psychology that drove Kopp to commit murder in the name of unborn life. (Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker)

In many states in the U.S, abortion is accessible in name only due to lack of clinics, expense, waiting periods, and other obstacles. This is the result of a decade-long quest by the right wing to pass legislation restricting abortion throughout the country. The End of Roe V. Wade examines the state by state legal war that has been waged by conservative anti-abortion forces, showing how abortion has essentially been made unavailable in many states, and how each state law is designed to specifically challenge Roe.

An impassioned and irreverent argument for dismantling our cultural narratives around pregnancy. The U.S. has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world, a rate that is increasing, even as infant mortality rates decrease. Meanwhile, the right-wing assault on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy has also escalated. We can already glimpse a reality where embryos and fetuses have more rights than the people gestating them, and even women who aren’t pregnant are seen first and foremost as potential incubators.

In Belabored, journalist Lyz Lenz lays bare the misogynistic logic of U.S. cultural narratives about pregnancy, tracing them back to our murky, potent cultural soup of myths, from the religious to the historical. In the present she details, with her trademark blend of wit, snark, and raw intimacy, how sexist assumptions inform our expectations for pregnant people, whether we’re policing them, asking them to make sacrifices with dubious or disproven benefits, or putting them up on a pedestal in an “Earth mother” role. Throughout, she reflects on her own experiences of being seen as alternately a vessel or a goddess–but hardly ever as herself–while carrying each of her two children. Belabored is an urgent call for us to embrace new narratives around pregnancy and the choice whether or not to have children, emphasizing wholeness and agency, and to reflect those values in our laws, medicine, and interactions with each other.

A powerful, thought-provoking indictment of America’s continuing assault on the reproductive rights of black women ranges from the era of slavery to the welfare reform acts of the 1990s that penalize women on welfare for having babies.

Killing the Black Body remains a rallying cry for education, awareness, and action on extending reproductive justice to all women. It is as crucial as ever, even two decades after its original publication.

How did reproductive justice—defined as the right to have children, to not have children, and to parent—become recognized as a human rights issue? In Reproductive Rights as Human Rights, Zakiya Luna highlights the often-forgotten activism of women of color who are largely responsible for creating what we now know as the modern-day reproductive justice movement. Focusing on SisterSong, an intersectional reproductive justice organization, Luna shows how, and why, women of color mobilized around reproductive rights in the domestic arena. She examines their key role in re-framing reproductive rights as human rights, raising this set of issues as a priority in the United States, a country hostile to the concept of human rights at home. An indispensable read, Reproductive Rights as Human Rights provides a much-needed intersectional perspective on the modern-day reproductive justice movement.

For a long time, when people asked Dr. Meera Shah what she did, she would tell them she was a doctor and leave it at that. But over the last few years, Shah decided it was time to be direct. “I’m an abortion provider,” she will now say. And an interesting thing started to happen each time she met someone new. One by one, people would confide–at BBQs, at jury duty, in the middle of the greeting card aisle at Target– that in fact they’d had an abortion themselves. And the refrain was often the same: You’re the only one I’ve told.

This book collects those stories as they’ve been told to Shah to humanize abortion and to combat myths that persist in the discourse that surrounds it. An intentionally wide range of ages, races, socioeconomic factors and experiences, shows that abortion does not happen in a vacuum–it always occurs in a unique context. Today, abortion has become a core political litmus test for party loyalty. A healthcare issue that’s so precious and foundational to reproductive, social, and economic freedom for millions of people is exploited by politicians who lack understanding or compassion about the context in which abortion occurs. Stories have power to break down stigmas and help us to empathize with those whose experiences are unlike our own. They can also help us find community and a shared sense of camaraderie over experiences just like ours. You’re the Only One I’ve Told will do both.

The Lie that Binds is the indispensable account of how the formerly non-partisan, back-burner issue of abortion rights was reinvented as the sharp point of the spear for a much larger movement bent on maintaining control in a changing world. Written by NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue and Research Director Ellie Langford, The Lie that Binds traces the evolution of some of the most dangerous and least understood forces in U.S. politics, offering an unflinchingly incisive analysis of the conservative political machinery designed to thwart social progress – all built around the foundational lie that their motivations are based in moral convictions about individual pregnancies.

A groundbreaking and illuminating look at the state of abortion access in America and the first long-term study of the consequences—emotional, physical, financial, professional, personal, and psychological—of receiving versus being denied an abortion on women’s lives. What happens when a woman seeking an abortion is turned away? Diana Greene Foster, PhD, decided to find out. Over the course of a ten-year investigation that began in 2007, she and her team followed a thousand women from more than twenty states, some of whom received their abortions, some of whom were turned away.

Greene analyzes the impact on their mental and physical health, their careers, their romantic lives, their professional aspirations, and even their existing and future children—and finds that women who received an abortion were almost always better off than women who were denied one. Interwoven with these findings are ten riveting first-person narratives by women who share their candid stories. As the debate about abortion rights intensifies, The Turnaway Study offers an in-depth examination of the real-world consequences for women of being denied abortions and provides evidence to refute the claim that abortion harms women. With brilliant synthesis and startling statistics—that thousands of American women are unable to access abortions; that 99% of women who receive an abortion do not regret it five years later—The Turnaway Study is a necessary and revelatory look at the impact of abortion access on people’s lives.

Policing the Womb brings to life the chilling ways in which women have become the targets of secretive state surveillance of their pregnancies. Michele Goodwin expands the reproductive health and rights debate beyond abortion to include how legislators increasingly turn to criminalizing women for miscarriages, stillbirths, and threatening the health of their pregnancies. The horrific results include women giving birth while shackled in leg irons, in solitary confinement, and even delivering in prison toilets. In some states, pregnancy has become a bargaining chip with prosecutors offering reduced sentences in exchange for women agreeing to be sterilized. The author shows how prosecutors may abuse laws and infringe women’s rights in the process, sometimes with the complicity of medical providers who disclose private patient information to law enforcement. Often the women most affected are poor and of color. This timely book brings to light how the unrestrained efforts to punish and police women’s bodies have led to the United States being the deadliest country in the developed world to be pregnant.

Obstacle Course tells this story of abortion in America, capturing a disturbing reality of sometimes insurmountable barriers put in front of women trying to exercise their legal rights to medical services. Authors David S. Cohen and Carol Joffe lay bare the excruciating and often life-threatening process of terminating a pregnancy in the United States: the arbitrary waiting periods, forced ultrasounds, dishonest and malicious medical information, exorbitant financial burdens, and public shame.

Based on interviews with abortion providers and allies covering every state across the country, and the stories of patients, Obstacle Course reveals the unstoppable determination required of women in the pursuit of reproductive autonomy as well as the incredible commitment of abortion providers to make this a reality. Without the efforts of an unheralded army of doctors, nurses, social workers, activists, and volunteers, what is a legal right would be meaningless for the almost one million people per year who get abortions. There is a better way—treating abortion like any other form of health care—but the United States is a long way from that ideal.

An indispensable guide to building a fighting feminist movement for reproductive freedom. With an antiabortion majority on the Supreme Court and several states attempting to outlaw abortion altogether, many activists are on the defensive, hoping to hold on to reproductive rights in a few places and cases. This spirited book shows how feminism can start winning again.

Jenny Brown uncovers a century of legal abortion in the United States until 1873, recalls women’s experiences in the illegal days, and shows how the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s really won abortion rights. She draws inspiration and lessons from the radicals of Redstockings, the Army of Three, and the Jane Collective, putting together a road map for today’s organizers from the black feminist argument for reproductive justice, the successful fight to make the morning-after pill available over the counter, and the recent mass movement to repeal Ireland’s abortion ban. Brown argues that politically conservative nonprofits have been setting the agenda, emphasizing rare tragic cases and relying on the rhetoric of choice and privacy. Instead, it is time to return to the fundamental ideas that won legal abortion in the first place: Women publicly telling the full truth of their own experience, demanding repeal of all abortion restrictions, and showing how abortion and birth control are the key demands in the struggle for women’s freedom.

The end of Roe v. Wade is coming. How will you prepare? Handbook for a Post-Roe America is a comprehensive and user-friendly manual for understanding and preparing for the looming changes to reproductive rights law, and getting the healthcare you need–by any means necessary. Activist and writer Robin Marty guides readers through various worst-case scenarios of a post-Roe America, and offers ways to fight back, including: how to acquire financial support, how to use existing networks and create new ones, and how to, when required, work outside existing legal systems. She details how to plan for your own emergencies, how to start organizing now, what to know about self-managed abortion care with pills and/or herbs, and how to avoid surveillance.

The only guidebook of its kind, Handbook for a Post-Roe America includes an extensive, detailed resource guide for all pregnant people (whether cis, trans, or non-binary) of clinics, action groups, abortion funds, and practical support groups in each state, so wherever you live, you can get involved. With a newly right-wing Supreme Court and a Republican Senate, Roe is under threat. Robin Marty observes: “When we say abortion will be illegal in half the states in the nation, we are no longer talking about some hypothetical future–we are talking about just years down the road. We have to act now to secure what access remains, shore up the networks supporting those who need care, and decide what risks we are willing to take to ensure that any person who wants a termination can still end that pregnancy–with or without the government’s permission.”

In this provocative book on the heels of the Planned Parenthood controversy, Sarah Erdreich presents the antidote to the usual abortion debates. Inextricably connected to issues of autonomy, privacy, and sexuality, the abortion debate remains home base for the culture wars in America. Yet, there is more common ground than meets the eye in favor of choice. Generation Roe delves into phenomena such as “abortion-recovery counseling,” “crisis pregnancy centers,” and the infamous anti-choice “black children are an endangered species” billboards. It tells the stories of those who risk their lives to pursue careers in this stigmatized field. And it outlines the outrageous legislative battles that are being waged against abortion rights all over the country. With an inspiring spirit and a forward-looking approach, Erdreich holds abortion up, unabashedly, as a moral and fundamental human right.

(Note: The book contains a chapter on abortion care.)
An eye-opening, investigative account of the dismal state of women’s healthcare in the U.S. American women visit more doctors, have more surgery, and fill more prescriptions than men. In Everything Below the Waist, Jennifer Block asks: Why is the life expectancy of women today declining relative to women in other high-income countries, and even relative to the generation before them? Block examines several staples of modern women’s health care, from fertility technology to contraception to pelvic surgery to miscarriage treatment, and finds that while overdiagnosis and overtreatment persist in medicine writ large, they are particularly acute for women. One third of mothers give birth by major surgery; roughly half of women lose their uterus to hysterectomy. Feminism turned the world upside down, yet to a large extent the doctors’ office has remained stuck in time. Block returns to the 1970s women’s health movement to understand how in today’s supposed age of empowerment, women’s bodies are still so vulnerable to medical control—particularly their sex organs, and as result, their sex lives.

An indispensable resource for students, scholars, and activists concerned about current attacks on abortion rights, this book offers an unmatched account of the emergence, consolidation, and consequences of the antiabortion movement’s paternalistic abortion regret narrative. * Examines the historical continuity of the abortion regret narrative as a political strategy used to limit women’s access to abortion * Asserts that the abortion regret narrative is intimately tied to a gendered and paternalistic construction of women’s divine role as mothers * Examines the antiabortion movement’s strategy to place the “grieving” mother at the center of its oppositional narrative * Uses interviews, textual analysis of primary sources, and content analysis of state antiabortion policies to trace the growing impact of the abortion regret narrative * Examines and reveals the antiabortion movement’s calculated political motivation for using the abortion regret narrative as its primary strategy to oppose abortion rights.

This anthology assembles two decades’ of work initiated by SisterSong Women of Color Health Collective, creators of the human rights-based “reproductive justice” framework to move beyond polarized pro-choice/pro-life debates. Rooted in Black feminism and built on intersecting identities, this revolutionary framework asserts a woman’s right to have children, to not have children, and to parent and provide for the children they have.

Historically associated with military service, conscientious objection has become a significant phenomenon in health care. Mark Wicclair offers a comprehensive ethical analysis of conscientious objection in three representative health care professions: medicine, nursing and pharmacy. He critically examines two extreme positions: the ‘incompatibility thesis’, that it is contrary to the professional obligations of practitioners to refuse provision of any service within the scope of their professional competence; and ‘conscience absolutism’, that they should be exempted from performing any action contrary to their conscience. He argues for a compromise approach that accommodates conscience-based refusals within the limits of specified ethical constraints. He also explores conscientious objection by students in each of the three professions, discusses conscience protection legislation and conscience-based refusals by pharmacies and hospitals, and analyzes several cases. His book is a valuable resource for scholars, professionals, trainees, students, and anyone interested in this increasingly important aspect of health care.

As more feminism migrates online, full-spectrum doulas remain focused on life’s physically intimate relationships: between caregivers and patients, parents and pregnancy, individuals and their own bodies. They are committed to supporting a pregnancy no matter the outcome—whether it results in birth, abortion, miscarriage, or adoption—and to facing the question of choice head-on.

A Critical Introduction to the Ethics of Abortion addresses some of the most prominent and influential arguments to the abortion debate. These include the Being a Person verses Functioning as a Person Argument, women’s rights vis-à-vis the rights of the foetus, personhood as an essentially contested concept, and a virtue ethics approach. Also covered are central bioethical issues concerning prenatal screening, stem cell research and cloning. Based on a critical assessment of the evidence, the book offers an impartial view and draws on the importance of critical thinking and the logic of argumentation. Providing an overview of the legal history of abortion in the United States, it discusses five of the most influential Supreme Court cases on abortion law during the past fifty years and examines the current state of abortion law, politics and the main trends. Presenting a balance between ethical concepts, views and arguments, A Critical Introduction to the Ethics of Abortion is an up-to-date introduction to the choice of abortion illustrating the importance of evidence, clear thinking and good arguments for supporting one’s ethical beliefs.

Following the U.S. Congress’s attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion became a viral conduit for abortion storytelling. This book is a collection of photos, essays, and creative work inspired by the movement of the same name, a template for building new communities of healing, and a call to action. Shared stories and communities built around these conversations include: making art, hosting comedy shows, creating abortion-positive clothing, altering billboards, making zines, and hosting thank you letter-writing parties for their local abortion providers.

An obstetrician and gynecologist offers guidance both to women who may decide to terminate their pregnancies and to their husbands, lovers, relatives, close friends, and counselors. A Woman’s Choice compels us to re-examine our attitudes toward abortion – and to extend to women the simple human dignity of the right to choose.

Abortion Under Attack addresses a spectrum of personal and social influences, ranging from dealing with remorse to the impact that economics, race, and culture have on a woman’s right to choose. Krista Jacob, longtime advocate for reproductive rights and former abortion counselor, has compiled an impressive collection of writings by a diverse group of pro-choice activists who go beyond the same old analysis of reproductive rights to present the current issues facing the pro-choice movement.

Their detailed account of the nationally publicized trial and the fundamentalist Christian community’s response to the bombings will be important and compelling reading for those concerned with the abortion controversy and other issues that encompass social violence and contemporary religion. Scholars will be interested in the work as a comprehensive sociological analysis of religious fundamentalism, an ideology that the authors tie to a medieval world view. Placing anti-abortion violence in the context of social movement theory, they conclude that persons who are predisposed toward such behavior are likely to be working-class males under age 35, socially isolated from countervailing attitudes. Religious fundamentalists, they warn, will continue to utilize violence in reaction to such subjects as pornography, homosexuality, sex education, equality for females, and prayer in public schools.

This book brings together ethicist, political scientist, and civil libertarian John M. Swomley’s far ranging writings on abortion rights. It is an important contribution to the white-hot national debate over the right of every woman to decide for herself if and when to become a mother and the intense campaign by some political and sectarian leaders to curtail that right.

If most North Americans admit they support a woman’s right to an abortion, why does the controversy still rage? Are there issues that the pro-choice movement hasn’t addressed? issues that remain confusing and unresolved for women? Kathleen McDonnell describes the often conflicting needs and emotions experienced prior to and after abortion. She also unravels the ethical debates surrounding the issue, examines the constituency and strategy of the anti-abortion movement and evaluates the arguments regarding men’s rights in abortion decisions. McDonnell’s feminist exploration places these issues within the context of rapidly changing reproductive technology and the much broader matter of reproductive rights. This classic feminist text is still extremely topical today, and relevant for a whole new generation of women.

Looks at the organizations involved, discusses cultural, ideological, and political influences, and argues that the movement is a rejection of modern secular life.

ABORTION & COMMON SENSE cuts through the rhetoric and misinformation surrounding the abortion debate to look at the facts. Four of every ten women in the United States will have at least one abortion in their lifetimes. Worldwide, 46 million women terminate their pregnancies every year, some safely, some dangerously. Demonstrating that placing arbitrary restrictions on girls’ and women’s access to safe early abortion is illogical, unworkable, and unfair, the authors urge that the humane treatment of problem pregnancies be integrated into health and family planning programs as a routine element of good medical care and of an equitable and rational social policy.

On profound questions of birth, death, and human choice that are raised by abortion-where opposing sides see no common ground-how can the conflict be managed? The abortion debate in the United States today involves all Americans in complex questions of sex and power, historical change, politics, advances in medicine, and competing social values. In this best-selling book, an eminent constitutional authority shows how the nation has struggled with these questions and then sets forth new approaches that reflect both sides’ passionately held convictions. The paperback edition includes discussion of the latest court decisions and excerpts from the major cases, including the Supreme Court’s landmark June 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Comprehensive and balanced, this new third edition again makes available the most useful writing on the controversial abortion issue. Twenty-four essays and four excerpts from landmark Supreme Court decisions – including eleven new outstanding contributions – cover the history of abortion in the pre-Roe period; creative responses to the problem of abandoned infants; abortion in relation to the Constitution, feminism, and Christianity; and fundamental moral issues surrounding this polarizing controversy.

This basic manual resolves the abortion debate most convincingly in favor of women’s freedom to choose. It is scholarly, religiously ecumenical in a broad sense, and scientific. Legislators and judges will find it must reading.” – Alfred McClung Lee

On the eve of the nation’s first abortion-related murder trial, a journalist receives an ominous and frightening tip from an antiabortion leader: “Something big, something REALLY big, is coming.”LIVE FROM THE GATES OF HELL is a bone-chilling first-person account that reads like a gripping murder mystery. Author Jerry Reiter’s eye-opening journey takes you into the antiabortion underground–a journey set off by Rescue America leader Don Treshman’s foreboding words. Each person he meets–from Klan members to Operation Rescue antiabortion radicals to militiamen–offers a piece to a puzzle that points to a deadly domestic terrorist plot to be carried out in the name of life.

LIVE FROM THE GATES OF HELL takes you inside the secret meetings and intrigues that set the stage for violence by radical antiabortion groups, militias, and other radicals from the Religious Right. It is a story with serious implications for the entire Christian conservative movement and, by extension, the Republican Party.

In this book, Lori Brown examines the relationship between space, defined physically, legally and legislatively, and how these factors directly impact the spaces of abortion. It analyzes how various political entities shape the physical landscapes of inclusion and exclusion to reproductive healthcare access, and questions what architecture’s responsibilities are in respect to this spatial conflict. Employing writing, drawing and mapping methodologies, this interdisciplinary project explores restrictions and legislatures which directly influence abortion policy in the US, Mexico and Canada. It questions how these legal rulings produce spatial complexities and why architecture isn’t more culturally and spatially engaged with these spaces.

The majority of women who have had abortions report feeling happy, satisfied, and relieved following their abortion. Some few women who have had an abortion may experience some feelings of guilt and sadness; however, this rarely lasts longer than a few days. Those very few women who present with prolonged feelings of sadness and mental health problems are women who have either had these problems prior to their abortion, had other risk factors, or were influenced by frightening demonstrations and inaccurate biased information provided prior to the abortion. Through this book the authors hope to train general therapists and counselors in pre- and post-abortion counseling techniques–to avoid women experiencing unnecessary psychological problems created by those who insist that the non-existent “post-abortion syndrome” exists.

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.

Every day in America, abortion providers and the women who need them are in danger. This collection of 25 powerful stories from contributors both famous and ordinary, privileged and poor, provides often harrowing insights into what happens when women are denied the right to choose. Testimonials from teenagers, college students, overloaded young mothers, and even a retired male Marine put a human face on one of this country’s most controversial issues and offer passionate arguments for access to legal and safe abortions.

In the struggle for reproductive freedom, there are religious extremists at one end and liberal secularists at the other. Lost in this battle and often invisible to the public eye are the religious leaders and institutions that have worked in favor of protecting reproductive rights.

In Sacred Work, Tom Davis brings to light the ways in which the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a leading reproductive rights organization, and the clergy are not as incongruent as they often are construed to be. Although clergy supporters of choice are rarely, if ever, given attention in the media, Davis shows that they in fact play a major role in advancing women’s rights, rebutting right wing arguments, and helping to make (and keep) abortion legal nationwide.

On May 31, 2009, Scott Roeder walked into a Wichita church, drew a pistol, and shot Dr. George Tiller at point blank range. Tiller, who was the most public practitioner of late-term abortions in America, had been a lightning rod for controversy, regularly referred to in the conservative media as “Tiller, the Baby Killer.” Tiller’s death was not an isolated act of violence, but a pivotal, public murder in a war that has been raging for decades. It’s a war of violently opposing ideologies, encompassing abortion, but also questions of privacy, sexuality, and religion. It’s being fought in our nation’s courtrooms, at school and churches, on television sets, at our dinner tables, and in our bedrooms. And more and more, the key battlegrounds are in Kansas, once home to Brown vs. Board of Education and some of the bloodiest conflicts of the Civil War. This is a gripping look at a cold-blooded terrorist action, two men representing opposite ideological extremes, and the region where those violent forces clash.

Here’s a fact that we often ignore: unplanned pregnancy and abortion are a normal part of women’s reproductive lives. Roughly one-third of US women will have an abortion by age forty-five, and fifty to sixty percent of the women who have abortions were using birth control during the month they got pregnant. Yet women who have abortions are routinely shamed and judged, and safe and affordable access to abortion is under relentless assault, with the most devastating impact on poor women and women of color.

Rebecca Todd Peters, a Presbyterian minister and social ethicist, argues that this shaming and judging reflects deep, often unspoken patriarchal and racist assumptions about women and women’s sexual activity. These assumptions are at the heart of what she calls the justification framework, which governs our public debate about abortion, and disrupts our ability to have authentic public discussions about the health and well-being of women and their families.

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.

For most Americans today, Roe v. Wade concerns just one thing: the right to choose abortion. But the Supreme Court’s decision once meant much more. The justices ruled that the right to privacy encompassed the abortion decision. Grassroots activists and politicians used Roe and popular interpretations of its raw material in answering much larger questions: Is there a right to privacy? For whom, and what is protected?

As Mary Ziegler demonstrates, Roe’s privacy rationale attracted a wide range of citizens demanding social changes unrelated to abortion. Movements questioning hierarchies based on sexual orientation, profession, class, gender, race, and disability drew on Roe to argue for an autonomy that would give a voice to the vulnerable. So did advocates seeking expanded patient rights and liberalized euthanasia laws. Right-leaning groups also invoked Roe’s right to choose, but with a different agenda: to attack government involvement in consumer protection, social welfare, racial justice, and other aspects of American life.

2013 marks the 40th anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s abortion decision in Roe v. Wade. In recent years, attempts to overturn the ruling have reached a fevered pitch, with nearly 100 new laws going into effect. The chilling effect of these laws has been to establish a reproductive health care system in these states that makes abortion legal in name only, and which places women – especially poor, rural or those of colour – into a separate health care class, with few choices or control. Featuring a foreword by Gloria Feldt.

The most thorough and detailed case for the moral permissibility of abortion yet published. Critically examining a wide range of arguments that attempt to prove that every human fetus has a right to life, Boonin shows that each of these arguments fails on its own terms. He then explains how even if the fetus does have a right to life, abortion can still be shown to be morally permissible on the critique of abortion’s own terms. Finally he considers several pro-life arguments that do not depend on claims that the fetus has a right to life and concludes that these too are ultimately unsuccessful. This major book will be especially helpful to those teaching applied ethics and bioethics in philosophy departments or professional schools of law and medicine. It will interest students of women studies and general readers for whom abortion remains a high-profile issue.

Presents both sides of the debate over abortion in the United States in historical, international, and medical contexts, including summaries and excerpts of historical documents, and data on abortion incidences and practice.

A moving collection of 24 personal essays about the real, human experiences behind the highly politicized issue of reproductive choice. At a time when a woman’s most complex decisions have been reduced to political rhetoric and impersonal theory, and political debate has been hijacked by pundits and name-callers, Choice joins the discourse with an assortment of candid voices in an effort to humanize the debate about reproductive rights. In addressing a wide range of women’s choices from using birth control to taking the morning-after pill, from adopting a child to putting a child up for adoption, from having an abortion to bringing a pregnancy to full term Choice explores the complexities inherent in every reproductive decision.

Presents stories of the Society for Humane Abortion–otherwise known as the Jane Collective–and draws political lessons about their program, success, and cooptation that are relevant to the agendas of abortion-rights groups today. Records the experiences, successes and ideas of this early wave of activism, and provides astute analysis for building a broader reproductive freedom movement in the 1990s.

Abortion remains legal in the US, but access has been slowly eroded since prohibition was ruled unconstitutional nearly fifty years ago. Simultaneously abortion remains culturally stigmatised – it is kept secret and presumed shameful. But feminist activists are working to increase access and challenge this stigma. Numerous organisations and campaigns are challenging abortion stigma using the internet and social media and intersectional feminist sensibilities. From A Whisper to a Shout takes a closer look at four of these organisations – #ShoutYourAbortion, Lady Parts Justice, #WeTestify, and The Abortion Diary – and how they are integrating feminist tactics, social media, and political strategies to challenge abortion stigma and promote abortion access.

This book explores the spiritual essence of abortion, its historical context, and the empowering lessons of the abortion experience. Abortion can help anyone learn the importance of making conscious choices about how we live our lives. It opens the way to greater connection with life, love, death, and power. It is a rite of passage from identifying as a victim to knowing from the heart. It is a legitimate experience. The essentially pro-life nature of abortion asks us to learn to accept death as part of the flow of life. Misunderstanding and denying the importance of death in life is one of the main reasons for the ferocious “abortion wars”. Making conscious choices about pregnancy shows us how we are part of nature, not separate from it. Coming to grips with abortion, both individually and collectively, is a step down the road to taking responsibility for the well being of all life. Women are rising and becoming empowered on a world scale.

Simultaneously examining four significant, never-before-combined case studies, this unique feminist analysis offers troubling revelations about the private-public interaction in U.S. policy affecting birth control drugs.

The facts in the birth control battle are sobering, among them that women’s access to contraception and medical abortion in the United States has never been offered without restriction. More disturbing, as studies of four key, birth-control-related drugs demonstrate, is the realization that politics and profit have continually trumped medical considerations in determining the availability and use of birth control drugs.

While there is extensive literature on the social history, politics, and legal aspects of birth control and abortion in the United States, the history of family planning as a policy remains to be fully recorded. This volume is intended to contribute to this history by examining birth control and abortion within a larger cultural, policy, and comparative framework. The essays contained in this volume represent a variety of perspectives and scholarly interests. In many instances the authors differ with each other as well as with the editor on fundamental points of historical interpretation. They all, however, share a commitment to study the politics of population within a scholarly framework that emphasizes the importance of policy history for understanding past and contemporary problems.

This demanding, scholarly work traces the rhetoric surrounding the abortion controversy in the United States from 1965 to 1985. Using a sophisticated framework of rhetorical analysis, Condit describes the process by which the persuasive argumentation and vocabulary used by “Pro-life” and “Pro-choice” advocates has evolved and how it has created a deadlocked situation at the activist level, while mass attitudes on abortion reflect a compromise between the two positions. For the general public, Condit says, abortion falls within the realm of personal choice, but is generally regarded as morally objectionable.

The right wing is eroding women’s reproductive rights, and America’s pro-choice majority must sound the battle cry, writes Feldt, former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in this provocative work. The “war” goes beyond abortion, Feldt claims, to encompass “the right to have full access to family planning information, facilities, and products, the right to have children or not, sex education for young people that goes beyond the abstinence-only education being promoted by the right wing, and the right to medically accurate information.”

In What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said, eleven distinguished constitutional scholars rewrite the opinions in this landmark case in light of thirty years of experience but making use only of sources available at the time of the original decision. Taking positions both for and against the constitutional right to abortion, the contributors offer novel and illuminating arguments that get to the heart of this fascinating case. In addition, Jack Balkin gives a detailed introduction to Roe v. Wade, chronicling the history of the Roe litigation, the constitutional and political clashes that followed it, and the state of abortion rights in the U.S. today.

Does the morality of abortion depend on the moral status of the human fetus? Must the law of abortion presume an answer to the question of when personhood begins? Can a law which permits late abortion but not infanticide be morally justified? These are just some of the questions this book sets out to address. With an extended analysis of the moral and legal status of abortion, Kate Greasley offers an alternative account to the reputable arguments of Ronald Dworkin and Judith Jarvis Thomson and instead brings the philosophical notion of ‘personhood’ to the foreground of this debate. Structured in three parts, the book will (I) consider the relevance of prenatal personhood for the moral and legal evaluation of abortion; (II) trace the key features of the conventional debate about when personhood begins and explore the most prominent issues in abortion ethics literature: the human equality problem and the difference between abortion and infanticide; and (III) examine abortion law and regulation as well as the differing attitudes to selective abortion. The book concludes with a snapshot into the current controversy surrounding the scope of the right to conscientiously object to participation in abortion provision.

Peter S. Wenz argues that the Supreme Court reached the right decision in Roe v. Wade but for the wrong reasons. Wenz contends that a woman’s right to terminated her pregnancy should be based, not on her constitutional right to privacy, but on the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom, a basis for freedom of choice that is not subject to the legal criticisms advanced against Roe. At least up to the 20th week of a pregnancy, one’s belief whether a human fetus is a human person or not is a religious decision. He maintains that because questions about the moral status of a fetus are religious, it follows that anti-abortion legislation, to the extent that it is predicated on such “inherently religious beliefs,” is unconstitutional.

This thought-provoking reference work explores the evolution of America’s heated abortion debate in a selection of over 40 primary documents from the 19th century to the present day. The guide includes not only key laws and court cases that have determined abortion policy, but also political speeches, medical essays, theological writings, newspaper advertisements, magazine articles, and popular books that offer insight into America’s changing attitudes towards women, race, the medical field, and the role of government in its citizens’ personal lives. Each document is preceded by an introduction and is followed by analysis to help readers understand its significance and historical context.

While it is commonly assumed that state protection of the fetus as a form of human life undermines women’s reproductive rights, McDonagh instead illuminates how it is exactly such state protection of the fetus that strengthens, rather than weakens, not only women’s right to an abortion, but even more significantly, women’s ability to call on the state for abortion funding. McDonagh’s approach, by bridging the divide between pro-life and pro-choice advocates, revolutionizes the abortion debate in a way that opens up a whole new avenue for resolving the abortion conflict and advancing women’s rights.

McDonagh reframes the abortion debate by locating the missing piece of the puzzle: the fetus as the cause of pregnancy. The central issue then becomes what the fetus, as an active agent, does to a woman’s body during pregnancy, whether that pregnancy is wanted or not. McDonagh graphically describes the massive changes produced by the fetus when it takes over a woman’s body. As such, pregnancy is best depicted not as a condition that women have a right to choose but rather as a condition to which they must have a right to consent.

In this important study of the abortion controversy in the United States, Kristin Luker examines the issues, people, and beliefs on both sides of the abortion conflict. She draws data from twenty years of public documents and newspaper accounts, as well as over two hundred interviews with both pro-life and pro-choice activists. She argues that moral positions on abortion are

From Publishers Weekly: The case is daringly made here that abortion is a positive experience–and Lunneborg’s argument is both moving and persuasive. The author, a retired women’s studies professor from the University of Washington, provides an oral history of abortion elicited from the patients and providers at Planned Parenthood and American feminist health clinics. She finds abortion clinics to be places where women are highly valued and patients’ self-esteem is carefully tended; some patients here report being treated better in the clinics than anywhere else. Calling on the results of a questionnaire and interviews, Lunneborg demonstrates that patients seldom experience guilt or trauma, despite the ethical dilemma inherent in the procedure. “The reality of the abortion is there’s no regret, no sadness, no guilt, nor remorse. It’s a sense of relief,” asserts one woman. Many others report feeling more in charge of their lives afterward. The book explodes many myths. (Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Twenty-five years after Roe v. Wade, the ripple effect of that landmark ruling still rocks our culture, politics, and social relationships. Roe may have given women the right to choose abortion, but that difficult personal choice will always be embedded in many contexts. Autonomy, bodily integrity, and freedom—all at the heart of Roe—collide with other powerful forces whenever a woman considers ending her pregnancy.

The New Civil War: The Psychology, Culture, and Politics of Abortion examines the individual and combined influence of religion, morality, race, politics, personal history, sociopolitical context, and economics on a woman’s decision to continue or terminate her pregnancy. This exhaustive analysis of the way Americans feel about abortion reveals that, at core, abortion continues to be defined primarily as a moral issue, often at the expense of women’s health and well-being.

Nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Articles of Faith is a powerful exploration of one of the most divisive issues in our recent political history, and the only book to portray the passion of both sides of the abortion conflict. Drawing from more than five hundred interviews as well as previously unseen archival material, Cynthia Gorney has written a compelling narrative that explores the years between Roe v. Wade (1973) and William L. Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), the first case to challenge the Roe decision before an anti-Roe court. Meet Judith Widdicombe, the registered nurse who runs the abortion underground in 1960s St. Louis and then the first legal clinic after Roe v. Wade. And meet Samuel Lee, a young pacifist and would-be seminarian whose provocative abortion bill becomes the centerpiece of William L. Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. The Supreme Court case brings the two advocates head-to-head.

Based on the struggle over a Fargo, North Dakota, abortion clinic, Contested Lives explores one of the central social conflicts of our time. Both wide-ranging and rich in detail, it speaks not simply to the abortion issue but also to the critical role of women’s political activism.

A new introduction addresses the events of the last decade, which saw the emergence of Operation Rescue and a shift toward more violent, even deadly, forms of anti-abortion protest. Responses to this trend included government legislation, a decline in clinics and doctors offering abortion services, and also the formation of Common Ground, an alliance bringing together activists from both sides to address shared concerns. Ginsburg shows that what may have seemed an ephemeral artifact of “Midwestern feminism” of the 1980s actually foreshadowed unprecedented possibilities for reconciliation in one of the most entrenched conflicts of our times.

Targets of Hatred charts the development of the anti-abortion movement in North America. Beginning in the years preceding the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion, the book examines the roles played by the Catholic Church, Fundamentalist Protestants, and Republican and Democratic parties, and assesses points of overlap and divergence. The voices of more than 190 providers in the United States and Canada–clinic owners, doctors, nurses, technicians, and their families–give readers an in-depth look at what it means to work in a field in which arson, bombings, harassment, and killing are routine. Filled with dramatic, eye-witness accounts of anti-abortion terrorism, the book demonstrates law enforcement’s failure to stem the violence and is a call to arms for concerned individuals.

In his gripping, behind-the-scenes account, journalist William Saletan reveals exactly how, thirty years after Roe v. Wade, “pro-choice” conservatives have won the abortion war. Having successfully turned abortion into a privacy issue, conservatives now prevail on issues ranging from abortion’s legality and parental notification to Medicaid, rape, and cloning; consequently, reproductive autonomy is now becoming inaccessible to the young and the poor. This eye-opening exposé tells how abortion rights activists—people who desired social change, women’s equality, and broader access to health care—have had their message co-opted in a culture of privacy and limited government. Bearing Right is also a story about the essentially conservative character of the United States today. This book is a crucial lesson in how politicians and interest groups can change the way we vote, not by telling us facts or lies, but by reshaping the way we think—in part through mass marketing.

Thirty years after Roe v. Wade, the argument between “pro-choicers” and “pro-lifers” has reached stalemate. Pro-choice arguments haven’t persuaded a comfortable majority that legal abortion is vital to our society, nor addressed our moral qualms. Younger people are less and less supportive of reproductive rights. Since 1996, state legislatures have enacted nearly 300 pieces of anti-choice legislation. With Roe in jeopardy, International Planned Parenthood Council Chair Alexander Sanger asks a simple but heretical question: How many more pieces of anti-choice legislation will it take to get the pro-choice movement to rethink its approach to the issue?

In Beyond Choice, Sanger explores the history of the reproductive rights movement to discover how it got stuck in its thinking, and then provides a convincing new argument for the moral rightness of its cause. He shows why it is vital to the health and survival of the human race that couples be able to have children, or not, when they choose; why reproductive rights are just as important to men as to women; and why, in an era of new reproductive technologies, completely unfettered choice is not morally defensible. Beyond Choice is inspiring and important reading for women’s rights advocates, opinion leaders, medical ethicists, and anyone concerned to preserve our freedom to reproduce, or not, without government intervention.

Undivided Rights presents a fresh and textured understanding of the reproductive rights movement by placing the experiences, priorities, and activism of women of color in the foreground. Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies. Undivided Rights shows how women of color—-starting within their own Latina, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities—have resisted coercion of their reproductive abilities. Projected against the backdrop of the mainstream pro-choice movement and radical right agendas, these dynamic case studies feature the groundbreaking work being done by health and reproductive rights organizations led by women-of-color. Undivided Rights articulates a holistic vision for reproductive freedom. It refuses to allow our human rights to be divvied up and parceled out into isolated boxes that people are then forced to pick and choose among.

From Booklist: The passion of the pro-life movement extends beyond abortion opposition to an overarching desire to end contraceptive use and to restrict sex to procreation only, argues Page, director of a national pro-choice organization. In contrast, by supporting women’s ability to control their reproductive lives, the pro-choice movement has helped to improve life for American women across a broad range of social and economic issues. She details the corrosive influence of pro-life politics on science, including lobbying to prevent FDA approval of an emergency contraceptive pill to be sold over the counter. The pro-life movement has political “muscle that extends across the globe,” harming efforts to reduce family size in developing nations and to encourage advancement of women. Page outlines the threats to the Roe decision and the privacy rights that also protect all aspects of sexuality, from contraception to homosexuality. This is a well-researched and thoughtful look at the politics behind reproductive issues and the implications for all Americans, whatever their position on abortion. Vanessa Bush. Copyright © American Library Association.

The abortion fight has long been a crucible of political tactics, with both sides employing strategies ranging from litigation to civil disobedience to outright violence. Anti-abortion activists have arguably been more tactically innovative than their pro-choice peers. Opposition and Intimidation looks at how their use of political harassment fits—or doesn’t—with more conventional political efforts in the struggle over abortion.

Alesha Doan’s insightful interviews and observations powerfully portray anti-abortion activists’ relationship to the objects of their protest. Her portrait is augmented by thorough quantitative analysis of harassment’s role within the movement’s multitiered strategy—a strategy that Doan shows has forced a decline in the availability and popularity of abortions. Using her unique study of the anti-abortion movement as a model, Doan extends her findings to propose a novel and valuable theory of the new politics of harassment.

Publisher’s Weekly review: Activist, filmmaker (of I Had an Abortion) and co-author (Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future) Baumgardner dedicates her work to spreading awareness about abortion. Graced with black and white photo portraits by Tara Todras-Whitehill of women wearing Baumgardner’s shirt, reading simply “I had an abortion,” the emphasis is on the testimony of these patients, revealing not only how common the procedure is (one in three women, according to the Guttmacher Institute) but how diverse those women and their situations are. Baumgardner begins with a brief history of abortion legislation in America, from pre-Roe v. Wade restrictions to clinic workers and doctors protested, threatened and murdered (as in the case of Buffalo doctor Barnett Slepian). Still, as Baumgardner says, it’s the record of “our lives [that] might provide the best road map to strengthening women’s reproductive freedoms.”

Award-winning journalist Michelle Goldberg shows how the emancipation of women has become the key human rights struggle of the twenty-first century in The Means of Reproduction. Deeply reported across four continents, the book explores issues such as abortion, female circumcision, and Asia’s missing girls to dramatize the connections between international policymaking and individual lives. Goldberg demonstrates how women’s rights are key to addressing both overpopulation and rapid population decline, reducing world poverty, and retarding the spread of AIDS. Sweeping and ambitious, this is a must-read book for feminists, health and policy workers, and anyone concerned about the future of our world.

The intense policing of women’s reproductive capacity places women’s health and human rights in great peril. Poor women are pressured to undergo sterilization. Women addicted to illicit drugs risk arrest for carrying their pregnancies to term. Courts, child welfare, and law enforcement agencies fail to recognize the efforts of battered and incarcerated women to care for their children. Pregnant inmates are subject to inhumane practices such as shackling during labor and poor prenatal care. And decades after Roe, the criminalization of certain procedures and regulation of abortion providers still obstruct women’s access to safe and private abortions.

In this important work, Jeanne Flavin looks beyond abortion to document how the law and the criminal justice system police women’s rights to conceive, to be pregnant, and to raise their children. Through vivid and disturbing case studies, Flavin shows how the state seeks to establish what a “good woman” and “fit mother” should look like and whose reproduction is valued. With a stirring conclusion that calls for broad-based measures that strengthen women’s economic position , choice-making, autonomy, sexual freedom, and health care, Our Bodies, Our Crimes is a battle cry for all women in their fight to be fully recognized as human beings. At its heart, this book is about the right of a woman to be a healthy and valued member of society independent of how or whether she reproduces.

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

The term “reproductive politics” was coined by feminists in the 1970s to describe contemporary Roe v. Wade-era power struggles over contraception and abortion, adoption and surrogacy, and other satellite issues. Forty years later, questions about reproductive rights are just as complex–and controversial–as they were then. Focusing mainly on the United States, Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know explores the legal, political, religious, social, ethical, and medical dimensions of this hotly contested arena.

Tracing the historical roots of reproductive politics up through the present, Rickie Solinger considers a range of topics from abortion and contraception to health care reform and assisted reproductive technologies. Solinger tackles some of the most contentious questions up for debate today, including the definition of “fetal personhood,” and the roles poverty and welfare policy play in shaping reproductive rights. The answers she provides are informative, balanced, and sometimes quite surprising.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade stands as a historic victory for abortion-rights activists. But rather than serving as the coda to what had been a comparatively low-profile social conflict, the decision mobilized a wave of anti-abortion protests and ignited a heated struggle that continues to this day. Picking up the story in the contentious decades that followed Roe, The Street Politics of Abortion is the first book to consider the rise and fall of clinic-front protests through the 1980s and 1990s, the most visible and contentious period in U.S. reproductive politics. Joshua Wilson considers how street level protests lead to three seminal Court decisions―Planned Parenthood v. Williams, Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western N.Y., and Hill v. Colorado.

The eventual demise of street protests via these cases taught anti-abortion activists the value of incremental institutional strategies that could produce concrete policy gains without drawing the public’s attention. Activists on both sides ultimately moved―often literally―from the streets to fight in state legislative halls and courtrooms. Wilson demonstrates how the abortion-rights movement, despite its initial success with Roe, has since faced continuous challenges and difficulties, while the anti-abortion movement continues to gain strength in spite of its losses.

(Kindle only)

From Dr. West (Amazon.com): This book contains mature subject matter that might be disturbing to some and is for mature readers only. Reader discretion is advised. By that I mean that this is a book about the truth of factual reality that far too many people just can’t handle – or won’t. It is my hope that anyone who begins reading this book will read it completely and with honest and serious reflection upon its content.

I am a psychiatrist, and obstetrician-gynecologist, and an abortion provider (now outlawed by Republican malfeasance in Texas government). This is a book of thoughts on the current Republican Party, the very real Republican War on Women, the misnamed “pro-life” movement, the Tea Party, extreme religion, un-American theocrats among us, and sanctimonious home-grown terrorist bigots and bullies who are quite reasonably referred to as the American “Christian Taliban.” It is about the health and safety of women and teenage girls vs. the appallingly cruel and willful insanity of the extremes of all religions and the unconscionable cruelty of the so-called “pro-life” movement and other related sociopolitical forces using extreme religious belief as license to discriminate against women and teenage girls and the religious beliefs of those women and girls – among some of the many other severe threats posed by pervasive disorders of thought established and reinforced by extreme religious belief that are responsible for ever-deepening catastrophe in this state, this nation, and around the world.

A powerful argument for abortion as a moral right and social good by a noted feminist and longtime columnist for The Nation

Forty years after the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, “abortion” is still a word that is said with outright hostility by many, despite the fact that one in three American women will have terminated at least one pregnancy by menopause. Even those who support a woman’s right to an abortion often qualify their support by saying abortion is a “bad thing,” an “agonizing decision,” making the medical procedure so remote and radioactive that it takes it out of the world of the everyday, turning an act that is normal and necessary into something shameful and secretive. Meanwhile, with each passing day, the rights upheld by the Supreme Court are being systematically eroded by state laws designed to end abortion outright.

In this urgent, controversial book, Katha Pollitt reframes abortion as a common part of a woman’s reproductive life, one that should be accepted as a moral right with positive social implications. In Pro, Pollitt takes on the personhood argument, reaffirms the priority of a woman’s life and health, and discusses why terminating a pregnancy can be a force for good for women, families, and society. It is time, Pollitt argues, that we reclaim the lives and the rights of women and mothers.

This book tells the forgotten story of the transition from the back alley to safe care after Roe v. Wade was enacted in 1973. The legalization of abortion resulted in prompt and dramatic health improvements for women, children, and families, but an entire generation of Americans has grown up unaware of the harsh and unnecessary tragedies of back-alley abortions. Current attacks on safe, legal abortion at the state level are designed to return women to those desperate, dangerous days before abortion was legalized. One of the world’s leading abortion scholars, Dr. Grimes chronicles the public-health story of legal abortion in America and the harms women face at the mercy of state laws restricting access to care. He shares the stories of his patients seeking abortion and how they and their families benefited. The book also refutes anti-choice myths about abortion with a wealth of scientific evidence.

Weaving together analyses of archival material, news coverage, and interviews conducted with journalists from mainstream and partisan outlets as well as with activists across the political spectrum, Deana A. Rohlinger reimagines how activists use a variety of mediums, sometimes simultaneously, to agitate for – and against – legal abortion. Rohlinger’s in-depth portraits of four groups – the National Right to Life Committee, Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women, and Concerned Women for America – illuminates when groups use media and why they might choose to avoid media attention altogether. Rohlinger expertly reveals why some activist groups are more desperate than others to attract media attention and sheds light on what this means for policy making and legal abortion in the twenty-first century.

Abortion is a legal, common, and safe medical procedure that one in three American women will undergo. Yet ever since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, anti-abortion forces have tried nearly every tactic to eliminate it. Legislative and judicial developments dominate the news, but a troubling and all-too-common phenomenon – targeted vigilante action against individual abortion providers – is missing from the national discussion, only cropping up when a dramatic story like the murder of an abortion provider pushes it to the forefront. Every day, men and women who are associated with abortion care are harassed, threatened, stalked, picketed, sent hate mail, and otherwise terrorized.

In Living in the Crosshairs, the voices of these providers are heard for the first time, through extensive interviews that David S. Cohen and Krysten Connon conducted across the country. Drawing on ideas from the interviews, the authors propose several legal and societal reforms that could improve the lives of providers, foremost among them redefining targeted harassment as terrorism rather than protest. Living in the Crosshairs is a rich and humane portrait of women’s health professionals who persist in their work despite harassment, because they believe in what they are doing.

Abortion is, and always has been, an arena for contesting power relations between women and men. When in 1973 the Supreme Court made the procedure legal throughout the United States, it seemed that women were at last able to make decisions about their own bodies. In the four decades that followed, however, abortion became ever more politicized and stigmatized. Abortion after Roe chronicles and analyzes what the new legal status and changing political environment have meant for abortion providers and their patients.

Johanna Schoen sheds light on the little-studied experience of performing and receiving abortion care from the 1970s–a period of optimism–to the rise of the antiabortion movement and the escalation of antiabortion tactics in the 1980s to the 1990s and beyond, when violent attacks on clinics and abortion providers led to a new articulation of abortion care as moral work. As Schoen demonstrates, more than four decades after the legalization of abortion, the abortion provider community has powerfully asserted that abortion care is a moral good.

Reproductive Justice is a first-of-its-kind primer that provides a comprehensive yet succinct description of the field. Written by two legendary scholar-activists, Reproductive Justice introduces students to an intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender politics. Clearly showing how reproductive justice is a political movement of reproductive rights and social justice, the authors illuminate how, for example, a low-income, physically disabled woman living in West Texas with no viable public transportation, healthcare clinic, or living-wage employment opportunities faces a complex web of structural obstacles as she contemplates her sexual and reproductive intentions. Putting the lives and lived experience of women of color at the center of the book and using a human rights analysis, Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger show how the discussion around reproductive justice differs significantly from the pro-choice/anti-abortion debates that have long dominated the headlines and mainstream political conflict. In a period in which women’s reproductive lives are imperiled, Reproductive Justice provides an essential guide to understanding and mobilizing around women’s human rights in the twenty-first century.

A background of stigma and hostility has stifled women’s willingness to talk about abortion, which in turn distorts public and political discussion. To pry open the silence surrounding this public issue, Sanger distinguishes between abortion privacy, a form of nondisclosure based on a woman’s desire to control personal information, and abortion secrecy, a woman’s defense against the many harms of disclosure.

Laws regulating abortion patients and providers treat abortion not as an acceptable medical decision―let alone a right―but as something disreputable, immoral, and chosen by mistake. Exploiting the emotional power of fetal imagery, laws require women to undergo ultrasound, a practice welcomed in wanted pregnancies but commandeered for use against women with unwanted pregnancies. Sanger takes these prejudicial views of women’s abortion decisions into the twenty-first century by uncovering new connections between abortion law and American culture and politics.

Women from remarkably diverse religious, social, and political backgrounds made up the rank-and-file of anti-abortion activism. Empowered by–yet in many cases scared of–the changes wrought by feminism, they founded grassroots groups, developed now-familiar strategies and tactics, and gave voice to the movement’s moral and political dimensions. Drawing on oral histories and interviews with prominent figures, Karissa Haugeberg examines American women ‘s fight against abortion. Beginning in the 1960s, she looks at Marjory Mecklenburg’s attempt to shift the attention of anti-abortion leaders from the rights of fetuses to the needs of pregnant women. Moving forward she traces the grassroots work of Catholic women, including Juli Loesch and Joan Andrews, and their encounters with the influx of evangelicals into the movement. She also looks at the activism of evangelical Protestant Shelley Shannon, a prominent pro-life extremist of the 1990s. Throughout, Haugeberg explores important questions such as the ways people fused religious conviction with partisan politics, activists’ rationalizations for lethal violence, and how women claimed space within an unshakably patriarchal movement.

Since the early 1980s, neoliberalism—the political work of shrinking the state, shredding the social safety net, and increasing wealth disparities—has transformed our lives in the United States. Looking at families and households—the places where we live our economic situation—How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics argues that the politics of reproduction and reproductive labor—the work we do to keep our selves and families alive—are the arena in which we have fought over neoliberalism’s shocks and disruptions. Debates about welfare reform, immigration, IVF, and gay marriage have produced a particularly racialized airing of these conflicts. Wall Street, Republicans, and neoliberal Democrats could not have effected changes in government and the economy without designating certain households—impoverished, African American, immigrant—as unworthy of public benefits and social support. From long work hours to intensifying inequalities in infant mortality and housing, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics measures what we have lost and asks what we must do to get it back.

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.