With the Supreme Court likely to reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion decision, American debate appears fixated on clashing rights. The first comprehensive legal history of a vital period, Abortion and the Law in America illuminates an entirely different and unexpected shift in the terms of debate. Rather than simply championing rights, those on opposing sides battled about the policy costs and benefits of abortion and laws restricting it. This mostly unknown turn deepened polarization in ways many have missed. Never abandoning their constitutional demands, pro-choice and pro-life advocates increasingly disagreed about the basic facts. Drawing on unexplored records and interviews with key participants, Ziegler complicates the view that the Supreme Court is responsible for the escalation of the conflict. A gripping account of social-movement divides and crucial legal strategies, this book delivers a definitive recent history of an issue that transforms American law and politics to this day.

In Policing the Womb, Michele Goodwin explores how states abuse laws and infringe on rights to police women and their pregnancies. This book looks at the impact of these often arbitrary laws which can result in the punishment, incarceration, and humiliation of women, particularly poor women and women of color. Frequently based on unscientific claims of endangering a fetus, these laws allow extraordinary powers to state authorities over reproductive freedom and pregnancies. In this book, Michele Goodwin discusses real examples of women whose pregnancies have been controlled by the law and what has led to the United States being the deadliest country in the developed world for a woman to be pregnant.

Legislative efforts to reduce the incidence of babies born low-birth weight is tangled in race and class profiling, which detracts from an evidence-based approach to reduce fetal health harm. On inspection, prescription drug use, domestic violence, and assisted reproductive technology measure significantly in the incidence of fetal health harm and the dramatic rise in neonatology treatments and costs. Goodwin’s article provides an empirical counter narrative to the provocative legislative assumptions about fetal health harm.

Punishing pregnant women increasingly serves as a litmus test in political discourse, inviting more than a metaphor about state sanctioned violence targeted at women. In 2016, candidates for the United States presidency threatened to defund Planned Parenthood if elected and a leading candidate promised he would "punish" pregnant women who seek abortions. Other presidential candidates urged that even victims of rape and incest should be forced to carry their pregnancies to term, imposing yet another penalty or strike against sexually violated women and girls. Local legislatures and governors show equal contempt for and desire to penalize women in the United States and specifically Utah, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Policing wombs brings private, intimate spaces into the public theatre, creating spectacles of poor, pregnant women and their children; and this public humiliation functions to visually inscribe these women’s place in the social hierarchy. This article contemplates how we might reconsider these negative externalities relative to the public policy interests that fetal drug laws support. The author argues that the reproductive policing efforts of the past twenty years are consistent with a communitarian approach to reproduction. Goodwin sheds light on the inconsistencies of this approach to behavior policing, which tends to disfavor the less sophisticated, less powerful members of society – namely drug-addicted, poor women of color – and yet ignores the risks posed to fetuses by wealthier would-be parents who use sophisticated, expensive reproductive technologies in their attempts to reproduce.

What exactly does it mean to be human or for that matter a “nonhuman”? This essay unpacks questions regarding the personhood of embryos and fetuses. It takes as its lead the escalating political demand for embryos to attain rights and the status of children. The essay argues that such political demands are not in isolation physically, medically, or legally of women’s health and rights. It makes the case that embryos and fetuses cannot be granted rights without impermissibly implicating pregnant women. Thus, the essay argues against the extension of criminal and tort law to punish pregnant women under fetal protection laws by drawing an analogy to the duty to rescue jurisprudence.

After 100 years of considering abortion a criminal offense, Argentina underwent a major change in the legal framework on December 30, 2020, when Congress approved Law 27.610, Acceso a la Interrupción Voluntaria del Embarazo (Access to Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy). With enactment of this law, the country transitioned from criminalization to legalization of abortion on request up to 14 weeks’ gestational age while keeping the legal indications for abortion (ie, rape or risk to life or health of the pregnant person) as before.

Every year, thousands of women and girls are denied their rights and choices by El Salvador’s total ban on abortion and its criminalization. Women and girls who are carrying an unwanted pregnancy are confronted with two options: commit a crime by terminating the pregnancy, or continue with the unwanted pregnancy. This report details the pervading cultural and institutional barriers that women and girls in El Salvador face in exercising their human rights, particularly those barriers that obstruct the realization of their sexual and reproductive rights.

This essay explores prisons as sites of reproductive injustice by focusing on barriers to abortion and safe childbirth. Published in RADICAL REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique, edited by Loretta J. Ross, Lynn Roberts, Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples, and Pamela Bridgewater Toure (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017).

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, medication abortion, which typically includes mifepristone (ie, progesterone receptor antagonist) and misoprostol (ie, prostaglandin), gained prominence because it can be provided without physical contact. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other professional organizations quickly endorsed telehealth and no-test abortion care. These protocols omit Rh testing and use patient history, rather than routine ultrasonography, to assess pregnancy duration and screen for ectopic pregnancy risks. To mitigate potential risk of complications, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) require that mifepristone be dispensed in a medical office, clinic, or hospital, prohibiting dispensing from pharmacies. Between a federal judge’s ruling that suspended enforcement of this requirement in July 2020 and a reversal by the Supreme Court in January 2021, clinicians could offer medication abortion via telehealth and dispense from mail-order pharmacies where not prohibited by state law. During this period, a virtual clinic called Choix began providing medication abortions in California. We assessed safety and efficacy outcomes of a telehealth medication abortion model, which could inform the FDA’s decision regarding removal of the REMS.

People have always and will always find ways to try to end their pregnancies when necessary. Many do so safely without the involvement or direct supervision of healthcare professionals by self-managing their abortions. In 2022, the well-established safety and efficacy of abortion medications prompted WHO to fully endorse self-managed medication abortion as part of a comprehensive range of safe, effective options for abortion care. But despite robust evidence supporting the safety and effectiveness of the self-use of medications for abortion, abortion laws and policies around the world remain at odds with clinical evidence and with the realities of self-managed medication abortion in the present day. The present article considers legal issues related to self-managed abortion and addresses the role of obstetricians, gynecologists, and other healthcare professionals in promoting clinical and legal safety in abortion care through support of self-managed abortion.

To summarize clinical outcomes and adverse effects of medical abortion regimens consisting of mifepristone followed by buccal misoprostol in pregnancies through 70 days of gestation. We used PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, and reference lists from published reports to identify relevant studies published between November 2005 and January 2015 using the search terms "mifepristone and medical abortion" and "buccal and misoprostol." Studies were included if they presented clinical outcomes of medical abortion using mifepristone and buccal misoprostol through 70 days of gestation. Studies with duplicate data were excluded.

62 DAYS is an urgent examination of a growing trend of laws that seek to control a pregnant woman's body. It tells the story of a brain-dead pregnant woman whose family was forced to keep her on life support against their will. Marlise Muñoz was 33 years old and 14 weeks pregnant with her second child when she suffered a pulmonary embolism and was pronounced brain-dead in a hospital in Texas. Marlise had been clear about her end-of-life wishes: she did not want to be on mechanical support under any circumstances. But Marlise was kept alive because of a little-known law that states "a person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment... from a pregnant patient." The film reveals that this is not an anomaly: there are currently 32 states (and counting) with similar or identical pregnancy exclusion policies. 62 DAYS follows the Muñoz family as they journey from private loss, to unwanted media attention, and finally towards activism as they fight to change this law. This timely short film powerfully addresses critical issues surrounding bodily integrity and women's health and needs to be seen by anyone studying or engaged in activism around reproductive rights.

BIRTHRIGHT: A WAR STORY is the real-life "Handmaid’s Tale." This urgent documentary examines how women are being jailed, physically violated and even put at risk of dying as a radical movement tightens its grip across America. The film tells the story of women who have become collateral damage in the aggressive campaign to take control of reproductive health care and to allow states, courts and religious doctrine to govern whether, when and how women will bear children. BIRTHRIGHT: A WAR STORY explores the accelerating gains of the crusade to control pregnant women and the fallout that is creating a public health crisis, turning pregnant women into criminals and challenging the constitutional protections of every woman in America.

Bei Bei Shuai, a Chinese Immigrant living in Indiana, is charged with murder and feticide. Her Crime? Attempting suicide while pregnant. Abandoned by the father of her unborn child and suffering from severe perinatal depression, Bei Bei Shuai attempts suicide while eight months pregnant. She survives the attempt, but her baby, delivered by emergency c-section, dies in her arms three days later. Following devastating personal tragedy, Bei Bei finds herself transformed from a grief stricken mother into a criminal, charged with murder and attempted feticide. Bei Bei is moved to the Marion County Jail where she remains for a year and a half, until her lawyer Linda Pence is able to secure her release on bail. As Bei Bei and Ms. Pence take on the Indiana state justice system, her case begins to gain national attention. Their fight raises important questions about personhood laws, fetal rights, immigrant rights, and the criminalization of the mentally ill.