Abortion Books

Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Books for 2004 The only book to cover the entire history of birth control and the intense controversies about reproduction rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years, The Moral Property of Women is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the award-winning historian Linda Gordon's classic history Woman's Body, Woman's Right, originally published in 1976.
Arguing that reproduction control has always been central to women's status, The Moral Property of Women shows how opposition to it has long been part of the conservative opposition to gender equality. From its roots in folk medicine and in a campaign so broad it constituted a grassroots social movement at some points in history, to its legitimization through public policy, the widespread acceptance of birth control has involved a major reorientation of sexual values.
Gordon puts today's reproduction control controversies--foreign aid for family planning, the abortion debates, teenage pregnancy and childbearing, stem-cell research--into historical perspective and shows how the campaign to legalize abortion is part of a 150-year-old struggle over reproductive rights, a struggle that has followed a circuitous path. Beginning with the "folk medicine" of birth control, Gordon discusses how the backlash against the first women's rights movement of the 1800s prohibited both abortion and contraception about 130 years ago. She traces the campaign for legal reproduction control from the 1870s to the present and argues that attitudes toward birth control have been inseparable from family values, especially standards about sexuality and gender equality.
Highlighting both leaders and followers in the struggle, The Moral Property of Women chronicles the contributions of well-known reproduction control pioneers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman, as well as lesser- known campaigners including the utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen, the three doctors Foote--Edward Bliss Foote, Edward Bond Foote, and Mary Bond Foote--the civil libertarian Mary Ware Dennett, and the daring Jane project of the 1970s, in which Chicago women's liberation activists performed illegal abortions.

Gingerbread "I have promised to be a model citizen daughter....I have confined my Shrimp time to making out with him in the Java the Hut supply closet and quick feels on the cold hard sand at the beach during our breaks, but enough is enough....Delia and I are planning a party at Wallace and Shrimp's house and I am spending the night whether Sid and Nancy notice or not. I will be as wild as I wanna be."

After being kicked out of a fancy New England boarding school, Cyd Charisse is back home in San Francisco with her parents, Sid and Nancy, in a household that drives her crazy. Lucky for Cyd, she's always had Gingerbread, her childhood rag doll and confidante.

After Cyd tests her parents' permissiveness, she is grounded in Alcatraz (as Cyd calls her room) and forbidden to see Shrimp, her surfer boyfriend. But when her incarceration proves too painful for the whole family, Cyd's parents decide to send her to New York to meet her biological father and his family, whom Cyd has always longed to know.

Summer in the city is not what Cyd Charisse expects -- and Cyd isn't what her newfound family expects, either.

With Gingerbread, debut author Rachel Cohn creates a spirited world of in-your-face characters who are going to stay with readers for a long time.

Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization.
Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. Reproducing Empire suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism.
Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.

Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion For more than 30 years, our nation has argued about abortion. In that time, more than 30 million women have had one or more abortions.

While the political battle rages, little has been done to address the emotional needs of those who struggle with the aftermath of an experience that is deeply traumatic and often coerced and unwanted. Instead, social taboos stifle discussion of abortion-related feelings. Women are left feeling isolated, and their recovery is inhibited.

Forbidden Grief is a compelling, haunting review of Dr. Theresa Burke's experience in counseling hundreds of women who have experienced abortion. Dr. Burke exposes the obstacles in the way of post-abortion healing, reviews the full range and depth of post-abortion issues, and illustrates how we can create a more understanding, just and healing society where women will no longer be required to hide their pain.

Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (California Series on Social Choice & Political Economy) 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 intimately tied to views on sexual behavior, the care of children, family life, technology, and the importance of the individual.

Roe V. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History (Landmark Law Cases and American Society) Abortion. In a sharply divided America is there a more divisive issue? The bitter debate over Roe v. Wade--in the courts, legislatures, press, and streets--has grown ever more ferocious since the Supreme Court's landmark decision in 1973. For years pro-choicers have applauded Roe as a guarantee of women's rights, while pro-lifers have condemned it as the work of an activist and atheistic Court. Now it looms at the center of a growing political storm, as a new president, an old Court, and a divided Congress reconsider Roe's status in the wake of the controversial 2000 elections.

Anyone looking for a concise, balanced, readable, teachable, current, and complete guide to the case need search no further than this new volume by N. E. H. Hull and Peter Charles Hoffer. Giving due respect to both sides of the conflict, the authors effectively trace and analyze the core debates, examine the case's unique history, clarify the jurisprudence behind the Court's ruling, and gauge its impact on American society. Of special note is their revealing account of how the Court attempted to steer a middle course by rejecting both abortion on demand and the absolute right to life and yet, in the end, wound up igniting a firestorm of protest instead.

Unlike other accounts of Roe, this one examines the complete social and legal context of the case. Hull and Hoffer review more than a century of abortion practice (and abuse), common-law views on abortion, nineteenth-century criminalization measures, and the rapid changes in science, public mores, and civil rights that finally brought the issue before the Supreme Court. They also trace abortion law through the twentieth century, reprise the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the Supreme Court overturned a state law against contraceptives, and reexamine the highly publicized attempts to reverse Roe in Webster v. Reproductive Services (1989) and Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992).

All of the key actors are here: Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" who never actually had the abortion she originally sought; attorney Sarah Weddington, who challenged Texas law by drawing on her own abortion experience; lobbyists on both sides of the question; and each of the Supreme Court justices. This is a book that can inform and enlighten those on either side of the debate, as well as all of those in between.

Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China China's one-child rule is unassailably one of the most controversial social policies of all time. In the first book of its kind, Susan Greenhalgh draws on twenty years of research into China's population politics to explain how the leaders of a nation of one billion decided to limit all couples to one child. Focusing on the historic period 1978-80, when China was just reentering the global capitalist system after decades of self-imposed isolation, Greenhalgh documents the extraordinary manner in which a handful of leading aerospace engineers hijacked the population policymaking process and formulated a strategy that treated people like missiles. Just One Child situates these science- and policymaking practices in their broader contexts--the scientization and statisticalization of sociopolitical life--and provides the most detailed and incisive account yet of the origins of the one-child policy.

Matters of Life and Death MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH, Third Edition, is a collection of original essays by leading philosophers devoted to the major moral issues of the day, including abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, famine, war, suicide, the environment, and animal rights.

The Cider House Rules First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is John Irving's sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.

Recommended Books on Abortion