Here are 100 books that Abortion in America fans have personally recommended if you like
Abortion in America.
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I am fascinated by how gender and sex, characteristics of our beings that we take to be the most intimate and personal, are just as subject to external forces as anything else in history. I have written about the cultivation of masculinity in college fraternities, the history of young people and the age of consent to marriage, and about a same-sex couple who lived publicly as “father and son” in order to be together. My most recent book is a biography of an abortion provider in nineteenth-century America who became the symbol that doctors and lawyers demonized as they worked to make abortion a crime. I am a professor at the University of Kansas.
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.
Prior to Roe v. Wade, hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions occurred in the United States every year. Rickie Solinger uses the story of Ruth Barnett, an abortionist in Portland, Oregon, between 1918 and 1968 to demonstrate that it was the law, not so-called back-alley practitioners, that most endangered women's lives in the years before abortion was legal. Women from all walks of life came to Ruth Barnett to seek abortions. For most of her career she worked in a proper suite of offices, undisturbed by legal authorities. In her years of practice she performed forty thousand abortions and never…
I grew up in Scotland, and from the moment I visited New York City as a tourist, I have been obsessed! I moved to NYC officially in 2000 and have been endlessly fascinated by its history. As a new immigrant who moved here knowing no one and having very little money, I struggled a lot in my initial years, and that left me wondering how people, particularly women, had survived being in the City in prior years, especially with less privileges than I had and so many more obstacles in their way to making a living. I hope these books give you the insight they gave me.
I had always been aware of the story of Madame Restell, but I always wanted to read something more detailed about her, especially that wasn’t judgmental of her career. Because she was a female physician (mainly known for her abortion services) operating in the 1840s until 1875, her story has often been distorted and sensationalized.
I loved that Wright gave more context to her story and brought it to life through the environmental details of the era. She also emphasized the urgency of the story, particularly the historical moment we are currently living in. Mired in controversy for most of her life, Madame Restell (born Ann Trow Lohman) is a character that Wright renders in a compelling, sympathetic, and human manner.
**Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Nonfiction (2023)**
**An Amazon EDITOR'S PICK for BEST BOOKS OF 2023 SO FAR in BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR and HISTORY**
**An Amazon EDITOR'S PICK for BEST BOOKS OF THE MONTH (March 2023)**
**A Bookshop.Org EDITOR'S PICK (March 2023)**
“This is the story of one of the boldest women in American history: self-made millionaire, a celebrity in her era, a woman beloved by her patients and despised by the men who wanted to control them.”
An industrious immigrant who built her business from the ground up, Madame Restell was a self-taught surgeon on the cutting…
Years ago, I wrote mystery novels featuring women investigators when that was new in the genre. Now, I discover stories of real-life women whose lives have a natural story arc that can engage the reader from start to finish. Like gambling and prostitution, abortion, when it was illegal in the US, as it is now again in many places, was simultaneously in your face and undercover. It was also largely practiced by women, which is why I’m fascinated by books about it.
I thought I had nothing left to learn about Madame Restell, the unapologetic 19th-century abortion provider until I saw how this book was organized. While keeping the narrative flowing, Syrett helpfully organizes Restell’s career into phases defined by changes in the law, her trials, and the emergence of one male adversary after another.
I loved learning that, even after Restell met her Waterloo, her loving grandchildren profited from her legacy. As told by Syrett, a gender-norm-defying woman who was literally hounded to death somehow managed to have the last laugh.
The biography of one of the most famous abortionists of the nineteenth century-and a story that has unmistakable parallels to the current war on reproductive rights
For forty years in the mid-nineteenth century, "Madame Restell," the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. It was the abortions that made her famous. "Restellism" became the term her detractors used to indict her.
I am fascinated by how gender and sex, characteristics of our beings that we take to be the most intimate and personal, are just as subject to external forces as anything else in history. I have written about the cultivation of masculinity in college fraternities, the history of young people and the age of consent to marriage, and about a same-sex couple who lived publicly as “father and son” in order to be together. My most recent book is a biography of an abortion provider in nineteenth-century America who became the symbol that doctors and lawyers demonized as they worked to make abortion a crime. I am a professor at the University of Kansas.
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.
The definitive history of abortion in the United States, with a new preface that equips readers for what's to come.
When Abortion Was a Crime is the must-read book on abortion history. Originally published ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this award-winning study was the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with that monumental case in 1973. When Abortion Was a Crime is filled with intimate stories and nuanced analysis, demonstrating how abortion was criminalized and policed-and how millions of women…
Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by religion, initially in struggling with individual belief and later with its place within the social and political world. As a bioethicist, I studied and worked with patients and practitioners as they dealt with religious and moral concerns in healthcare. Then, as an international human rights advocate, educator, and governance development practitioner, I engaged with people of faith and secularists in the struggle to protect human rights and dignity as well as to attempt to promote peacebuilding in the post-conflict areas in which I worked, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Cote d’Ivoire.
In trying to exclude religion from the public sphere, most critics argue that religion precludes reasoned discussion: that secular arguments are rational and religious arguments are not.
Ronald Dworkin correctly recognizes that arguments over moral issues ultimately rest upon personal values, whether expressed in secular or religious terms. I love how he brilliantly breaks down arguments over such emotionally and morally controversial issues as abortion and euthanasia and then tries to identify the values relied on by both sides in how they attempt to justify their position.
In doing so, he makes two critical points: first, fundamental secular beliefs ultimately rest upon a religious-like understanding of the world, and second, in engaging with the thoughtful believer and secularist, it is possible to find common values. He uses the idea of the "sacredness of life" as one such meeting point shared by each.
Internationally renowned lawyer and philosopher Ronald Dworkin addresses the crucially related acts of abortion and euthanasia in a brilliantly original book that examines their meaning in a nation that prizes both life and individual liberty. From Roe v. Wade to the legal battle over the death of Nancy Cruzan, no issues have opened greater rifts in American society than those of abortion and euthanasia. At the heart of Life's Dominion is Dworkin's inquest into why abortion and euthanasia provoke such controversy. Do these acts violate some fundamental "right to life"? Or are the objections against them based on the belief…
I have been fortunate to have had many Supreme Court experiences–seven arguments, a clerkship for Justice John Paul Stevens, head of Justice Stephen Breyer’s confirmation team, two books on the Court, analysis for the media, and my current Georgetown Law School position teaching constitutional law. I love to read about the Supreme Court and write and talk about the Court and its Justices. The vivid sagas that underlie the Justices and their cases help us to understand this powerful institution about which we know less than our other branches. It has never been more important to understand the Supreme Court and its role in American life and our constitutional democracy.
Every American needs to understand the current Supreme Court's aggressive new “supermajority.”
The Court has quickly implemented far-reaching changes, eliminating reproductive rights; overturning gun safety laws; and sharply limiting the government’s authority to respond to crises ranging from COVID to climate change.
Michael Waldman brilliantly analyzes the new Court. He vividly places it in historical context, and, drawing on past eras, highlights possible democratic responses. In addition to illuminating the current moment, the book is a superb, readable, and highly informative one-volume history of the Supreme Court.
A “terrific, if chilling, account” (The Guardian) of how the Supreme Court’s new conservative supermajority is overturning decades of law and leading the country in a dangerous political direction.
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?
I am fascinated by how gender and sex, characteristics of our beings that we take to be the most intimate and personal, are just as subject to external forces as anything else in history. I have written about the cultivation of masculinity in college fraternities, the history of young people and the age of consent to marriage, and about a same-sex couple who lived publicly as “father and son” in order to be together. My most recent book is a biography of an abortion provider in nineteenth-century America who became the symbol that doctors and lawyers demonized as they worked to make abortion a crime. I am a professor at the University of Kansas.
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.
Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this urgent book from historian Felicia Kornbluh reveals two movement victories in New York that forever changed the politics of reproductive rights nationally
Before there was a “Jane Roe,” the most important champions of reproductive rights were ordinary people working in their local communities. In A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life, historian Felicia Kornbluh delivers the untold story of everyday activists who defined those rights and achieved them, in the years immediately before and after Roe v. Wade made abortion legal under federal law.
Sasha Issenberg has been a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, and editor, and teaches in the political science department at UCLA. He is the author of four books, on topics as varied as the global sushi business, medical tourism, and the science of political campaigns. The most recent tackles his most sweeping subject yet: the long and unlikely campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in the United States. One of his favorite discoveries in the decade he spent researching the book was that a movement that ended with a landmark Supreme Court decision had been catalyzed by a Honolulu activist’s public-relations stunt sprawling out of controltwenty-five years earlier.
In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Constitution guaranteed a “right to privacy” as it struck down Connecticut’s longstanding ban on the sale and use of birth control. (Amazing trivia: the state legislator who drafted the state’s 1879 anti-contraceptive law was P.T. Barnum.) Garrow’s history recounts the decades-long efforts of Connecticut activists to challenge the restriction, and how lawyers shifted their choice of plaintiffs from doctors asserting the law interfered with their ability to provide medical advice to married women claiming a right to privacy within their marriages. In the years following Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court gradually expanded that novel privacy doctrine, extending it to the intimate decisions of unmarried people, and eventually to cover the right to an abortion with Roe v. Wade.
"Liberty and Sexuality" is a 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 abortion. Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established that right, grew out of not only efforts to legalize abortion but also out of earlier battles against statutes that criminalized birth control. When the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, voided such a prohibition as an outrageous intrusion upon marital privacy, it opened a previously unimagined constitutional door: the opportunity to argue that a…
I began gathering stories about pregnancy and its avoidance in Mexican archives twenty-five years ago when I was working on my dissertation on religious history. This topic fascinated me because it was central to the preoccupations of so many women I knew, and it seemed to present a link to past generations. But as I researched, I also realized that radical differences existed between the experiences and attitudes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexican women and the concerns, practices, and understandings of my own period that I had assumed were timeless and unchanging. For me, this was a liberating discovery.
I appreciate Christopolous’ book because he renders concrete the abstract realm of papal pronouncements by studying their reception by sixteenth-century Italian women and their confessors. He also unearths the complexity of attitudes to abortion that existed even within the church establishment in this period.
When Pope Sixtus issued a 1588 edict declaring all who aborted their pregnancies were automatically excommunicated and reserving the right to absolve them to the papacy alone, bishops across Italy’s Renaissance states objected. They argued that neither they nor their confessants could afford to travel to Rome to seek absolution; they sought mercy and forgiveness for the women to whom they ministered.
With this example, and in other parts of his book, Christopolous treats his subjects with sensitivity and precision.
A comprehensive history of abortion in Renaissance Italy.
In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Italians maintained a fundamental ambivalence about abortion. Italians from all levels of society sought, had, and participated in abortions. Early modern Italy was not an absolute anti-abortion culture, an exemplary Catholic society centered on the "traditional family." Rather, Christopoulos shows, Italians held many views on abortion, and their responses to its…
I'm now retired. But like many historians of my generation, I've been lucky. Having gone to the University of California when there was no tuition and got through graduate school thanks to the GI Bill, I then taught history for five decades, briefly at San Francisco State College and the University of Hawaii, and for a long stretch at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. During those years, I wrote eight books, one was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and three won prizes—the Albert J. Beverage Award in 1970, the second-place Lincoln Prize in 2001, and the Langum Trust Prize in 2015. All but one deal with slavery and power.
This book also deserves more attention than it has received. And it, too, is a corrective. Taking to task a host of biographers and historians who have pretended that the “founding fathers” were blind to slavery and that slavery was a secondary issue in 1787, Finkleman contends that slavery was always a major bone of contention. Moreover, contends Finkelman, Thomas Jefferson was anything but an antislavery man. Instead, he was on the proslavery and anti-Black side in most controversies.
In Slavery and the Founders, Paul Finkelman addresses a central issue of the American founding: how the first generation of leaders of the United States dealt with the profoundly important question of human bondage. The book explores the tension between the professed idea of America as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and the reality of the early American republic, reminding us of the profound and disturbing ways that slavery affected the U.S. Constitution and early American politics. It also offers the most important and detailed short critique of Thomas Jefferson's relationship to slavery available, while at the same time…
