Fountaindale Public Library

A woman's life is a human life, my mother, our neighbor, and the journey from reproductive rights to reproductive justice, Felicia Kornbluh

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-381) and index

illustrationsplates

index present

non fiction

A woman's life is a human life

bibliography

1348178287

Felicia Kornbluh

my mother, our neighbor, and the journey from reproductive rights to reproductive justice

Before there was a "Jane Roe," the most important champions of reproductive rights were ordinary people working in their local communities. In this book, 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. This book is the story of two movements in New York that transformed the politics of reproductive rights: the fight to decriminalize abortion and the fight against sterilization abuse, which happened disproportionately in communities of color and was central to an activism that was about the right to bear children, as well as not to. Each initiative won key victories that relied on people power and not on the federal courts. Their histories cast new light on Roe and constitutional rights, on the difficulty and importance of achieving a truly inclusive feminism, and on reproductive politics today. This is a book full of drama. From dissident Democrats who were the first to try reforming abortion laws and members of a rising feminist movement who refashioned them, to the nation's largest abortion referral service established by progressive Christian and Jewish clergy, to Puerto Rican activists who demanded community accountability in healthcare and introduced sterilization abuse to the movement's agenda, and Black women who took the cause global, this book documents the diverse ways activists changed the law and worked to create a world that would support all people's reproductive choices. The first in-depth study of a winning campaign against a state's abortion law and the first to chronicle the sterilization abuse fight side-by-side withe the one for abortion rights, this book is rich with firsthand accounts and previously unseen sources - including those from Kornbluh's mother, who wrote the first draft of New York's law decriminalizing abortion, and their across-the-hall neighbor, Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias, a Puerto Rican doctor who cofounded the movement against sterilization abuse

adult