Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten

Kimberly M. Mutcherson, Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten (Cambridge University Press, 2020). 

Reproductive justice (RJ) is a pivotal movement that supplants the language and limitations of reproductive rights. RJ's tenets are that women have the human rights to decide if or when they'll become pregnant, whether to carry a pregnancy to term, and to parent the children they have in safe and healthy environments. Recognizing the importance of the rights at stake when the law addresses parenting and procreation, the authors in this book re-imagine judicial opinions that address the law's treatment of pregnancy and parenting. The cases cover topics such as forced sterilization, pregnancy discrimination, criminal penalties for women who take illegal drugs while pregnant, and state funding for abortion. Though some of the re-imagined cases come to the same conclusions as the originals, each rewritten opinion analyzes how these cases impact the most vulnerable populations, including people with disabilities, poor women, and women of color. 

-Publisher's Description

After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate

Mary Ziegler (FSU College of Law). After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Harvard Univ. Press, 2015).

"In the early years after the decision, advocates on either side of the abortion battle sought common ground on issues from pregnancy discrimination to fetal research. Drawing on archives and more than 100 interviews with key participants, Ziegler’s revelations complicate the view that abortion rights proponents were insensitive to larger questions of racial and class injustice, and expose as caricature the idea that abortion opponents were inherently antifeminist. But over time, 'pro-abortion' and 'anti-abortion' positions hardened into 'pro-choice' and 'pro-life' categories in response to political pressures and compromises. This increasingly contentious back-and-forth produced the interpretation now taken for granted—that Roe was primarily a ruling on a woman’s right to choose."

—Publisher's website

Perfecting Pregnancy: Law, Disability, and the Future of Reproduction

Isabel Karpin & Kristin Savell (University of Sydney), Perfecting Pregnancy: Law, Disability, and the Future of Reproduction (University of Cambridge Press, 2014).

"Prenatal and preimplantation testing technologies have offered unprecedented access to information about the genetic and congenital makeup of our prospective progeny. Future developments such as preconception testing, noninvasive prenatal testing, and more extensive preimplantation testing promise to increase that access further still. . . . The overwhelming question for legislators has been whether and, if so, how to regulate the use of these technologies in the face of compelling but seemingly contradictory claims about the advancement of reproductive choice and the dangers of eugenic or discriminatory effects."

                                                               —Publisher's website