My favorite books that reveal the unexpected history of abortion in the US

This is the definitive account of what abortion looked like for the one hundred years during which it was almost completely illegal in the United States.

Reagan does an excellent job of showing us the different ways that women nevertheless accessed abortion care during that time, even as she points out how access was always shaped by race and class.

She is also great at demonstrating how and why police and lawmakers cracked down on abortion and made it less accessible at particular moments in this one-hundred-year period, ultimately showing why it was eventually decriminalized in 1973. 

Mary Ziegler is arguably the country’s foremost expert on abortion law; I hear her on NPR every time judges and justices weigh in on women’s reproductive freedom.

This is her account not of how Roe v. Wade got decided or what the law did, but instead of how the case has become symbolic of the Supreme Court writ large and the struggles over women’s autonomy in the United States. In essence, this is a history of how we have all come to invest so much in the myth of Roe, even as it was recently overturned.

I find Ziegler to be a lively storyteller, and she brings a variety of perspectives to the book, interrogating Roe’s relationship to racial justice, religious liberty, privacy (of course), and the role of science in public life. 

The word “abortionist” usually conjures up images of dangerous back alleys where untrained men take advantage of women.

In the case of Rickie Solinger’s book, instead, we meet Ruth Barnett, who performed approximately 40,000 abortions in the mid-twentieth century (1918-1968) in Portland, Oregon, without losing a single patient.

What I loved about this book is how Solinger takes us behind the scenes of a thoroughly illegal abortion clinic that still managed to provide expert care to all its patients, even as it sought to evade the law and its enforcers at every turn. 

Part biography of the author’s mother and their neighbor and part history of the fight for abortion rights and the anti-sterilization campaign in New York State, the book is also a portrait of two overlapping and divergent movements for reproductive rights and justice from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Kornbluh is especially diligent about showing why certain parts of the struggle for reproductive justice mattered to different constituencies of women and how white middle-class women were often blinded by their own privileges.

This is down-in-the-trenches social activism history at its best. 

What happens to women who can’t get the abortions that they want or need? For most of our history, the answers were anecdotal and speculative until Diana Greene Foster and a team of fellow researchers followed one thousand women, some of whom obtained abortions, some of whom could not do so.

The answer is a triumph of social science reporting. By almost every measure, those women who could not access abortion care fared worse ten years later, and many of the years in between, than those women who were able to make their own choices about their bodies and their lives.

What I loved about the book was how transparent Foster was about the research design for the study and how intertwined she showed that abortion is in so many aspects of women’s lives.