Reproductive justice – reproductive rights – reproductive self-determination – this has been my passion for decades. I’m a historian. The most important thing I’ve learned is how reproductive bodies have always been racialized in the United States, from 1619 to the present day. Circumstances and tactics have changed over time, but lawmakers and others have always valued the reproduction of some people while degrading the reproduction of people defined as less valuable – or valueless – to the nation. Throughout our history, reproductive politics has been at the center of public life. As we see today. I keep writing because I want more and more of us to understand where we are – and why.
I wrote...
Reproductive Justice: An Introduction
By
Rickie Solinger,
Loretta Ross
What is my book about?
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. Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger put the lives and lived experience of women of color at the center of the book and use a human rights analysis to 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.
Arguing that reproductive justice is a political movement of reproductive rights and social justice, the authors illuminate, for example, the complex web of structural obstacles a low-income, physically disabled woman living in West Texas faces as she contemplates her sexual and reproductive intentions. 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.
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The Books I Picked & Why
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
By
Dorothy Roberts
Why this book?
I go back to this book again and again and so do all the people I know who are committed to understanding reproductive politics in the United States. I read and reread this book because it’s a brilliant, basic, and perennially relevant explanation of the history, politics, and legal supports sustaining racialized reproduction in the United States, from the slavery regime to its long aftermath.
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Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century
By
Brianna Theobald
Why this book?
This book is a first. Theobald gives us a really interesting and comprehensive history of pregnancy, birthing, motherhood -- and activism -- on the Crow Reservation in Montana. She explains the interventions of the federal government, for example, via coercive sterilization and child removal, and provides rich accounts of family, tribal, and inter-tribal resistance -- and claims of self-determination -- in the face of these interventions.
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Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
By
Deirdre Cooper Owens
Why this book?
Remember when the statute of Dr. J. Marion Sims was removed from Central Park a few years ago? Cooper Owens's book provides the back story: Sims's brutal, racist practices as a developer of gynecology and the equally horrible work of his many colleagues, who invented gynecology as a medical specialty, using the bodies of enslaved women in the 19th century South. Once these white, medical men perfected their techniques, they turned away from their Black "guinea pigs" and offered their new skills to white women who could pay and whose bodies and children were of value to the nation, according to white supremacist thinkers and actors.
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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
By
Saidiya V. Hartman
Why this book?
This is just simply a beautiful, powerful, unique -- poetic -- book about the lives of Black women at the beginning of the 20th century in New York and Philadelphia, women who crafted their own lives, in contexts heavy with coercions and degradations. Hartman is an extraordinary writer and a gorgeous thinker.
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Just Get on the Pill, 4: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics
By
Krystale E. Littlejohn
Why this book?
This book has arrived with a bang, telling stories about how women and couples navigate questions of contraception. Littlejohn is a great writer, telling vivid story after vivid story about how decisions about contraception get made -- who has it easy, who doesn't, and why women rarely fall in the first category.
