Hardback
October 31, 2023
9781421447636
English
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75125
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v2.1 Reference
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October 31, 2023
9781421447643
9781421447636
English
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75125
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9.00 Inches (US)
6.00 Inches (US)
$29.95 USD, £25.00 GBP
v2.1 Reference

Policing Pregnant Bodies

From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America

Explores the historical roots of controversies over abortion, fetal personhood, miscarriage, and maternal mortality.

On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision, asserting that the Constitution did not confer the right to abortion. This ruling, in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health case, was the culmination of a half-century of pro-life activism promoting the idea that fetuses are people and therefore entitled to the rights and protections that the Constitution guarantees. But it was also the product of a much longer history of archaic ideas about the relationship between pregnant people and the fetuses they carry.

In Policing Pregnant Bodies: From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America, historian Kathleen M. Crowther discusses the deeply rooted medical and philosophical ideas that continue to reverberate in the politics of women's health and reproductive autonomy. From the idea that a detectable heartbeat is a sign of moral personhood to why infant and maternal mortality rates in the United States have risen as abortion restrictions have gained strength, this is a historically informed discussion of the politics of women's reproductive rights.

Crowther explains why pro-life concern for fetuses has led not just to laws restricting or banning abortion but also to delaying or denying treatment to women for miscarriages and police investigations of miscarriages. She details the failure to implement policies that would actually improve the quality of infant life, such as guaranteed access to medical care, healthy food, safe housing, and paid maternity leave. We must understand the historical roots of these archaic ideas in order to critically engage with the current legal and political debates involving fetal life.

About the Author

Kathleen M. Crowther (NORMAN, OK) is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation.

Endorsements

"This book is a masterpiece. Though the medical and legal surveillance of pregnant women's bodies is relatively recent, Crowther demonstrates how wombs have historically been considered dangerous places and how the policing of pregnant bodies today is an insidious extension of that train of thought. The explicit links that she draws between the present and the past are the brilliant foundation of this perceptive historical analysis."

- Elizabeth Reis, Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York, author of Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex

"There's a long history of showing the fetus as independent, with the body of the person carrying it as passive, or even hostile. This lively and readable introduction shows how historical metaphors of pregnancy can help us understand modern preoccupations with saving babies rather than supporting women."

- Helen King, The Open University, author of Hippocrates' Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece

"A timely, important intervention that reveals the long histories of many of our modern ideas about reproduction. In our time of reproductive health crisis in the United States, this book illuminates the ways in which ideas about women as threats to fetuses or about inherent conflict between fetuses and women are neither natural nor inevitable."

- Julie Hardwick, University of Texas at Austin

"While fetal monitors and ultrasounds seem to define pregnancy today, Crowther reveals that our ideas about the relationship between fetus and pregnant person are profoundly shaped by very old ideas about procreation. Incisive and elegant, this critical commentary is urgent reading in our current moment."

- Mary Fissell, Johns Hopkins University

"From Aristotle to 21st-century statehouses, Crowther excavates the embryologic origins of symbolics of the fetus and the pregnant body that now dominate medical, political, and popular discourse around abortion and pregnancy in the U.S. Essential reading for anyone interested in how a range of policies harm the well-being of babies and birthing people."

- Carolyn Sufrin, author of Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars

"In this compelling, accessible history of embryology, pregnancy, and its interruption, Crowther reveals the development of ideas that have led to pregnant persons' rights to bodily autonomy being diminished, denied, even condemned. With nuance, Crowther puts past and present into dialogue to expose a history of insidious ideas that continue to shape our present."

- John Christopoulos, author of Abortion in Early Modern Italy
Johns Hopkins University Press
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Hardback
October 31, 2023
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Electronic book text
October 31, 2023
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