Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Rickie Solinger
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0199811415
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The term "reproductive politics" was coined by feminists in the 1970s to describe contemporary Roe v. Wade-era power struggles over contraception and abortion, adoption and surrogacy, and other satellite issues. Forty years later, questions about reproductive rights are just as complex--and controversial--as they were then. Focusing mainly on the United States, Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know® explores the legal, political, religious, social, ethical, and medical dimensions of this hotly contested arena.
Tracing the historical roots of reproductive politics up through the present, Rickie Solinger considers a range of topics from abortion and contraception to health care reform and assisted reproductive technologies. Solinger tackles some of the most contentious questions up for debate today, including the definition of "fetal personhood," and the roles poverty and welfare policy play in shaping reproductive rights. The answers she provides are informative, balanced, and sometimes quite surprising.
Offering a wide range of information in an accessible and engaging manner, Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know® orients readers and provides the knowledge necessary to follow the debates in this important and continually evolving field.
What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
Sanctifying Misandry: Goddess Ideology and the Fall of Man
03_Solinger_Ch03.indd 19 10/19/2012 6:59:20 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Oct 19 2012, NEWGEN 20 REPRODUCTIVE POLITICS nationwide ended in abortion. This development (as well as women’s increasing use of contraception, particularly in the cities) deeply disturbed the first generation of feminists, women who met at Seneca Falls in 1848 and in a stirring Declaration of Sentiments proclaimed women’s equality with men. Individually and as a group, they opposed the separation of sex
2012, NEWGEN 60 REPRODUCTIVE POLITICS care providers and pharmacies, raising the possibility of an impermissible “undue burden.” The courts have also dealt with questions about whether conscience clauses can constitute an undue hardship for a pharmacist’s employer who might lose business because of the employee’s refusal to dispense contraceptives. Opponents of conscience clauses also raise issues about whether, over time, providers of medical services might invoke such clauses to justify their
require women to wait for a prescribed period of time (usually twenty-four hours, but at least one state, Utah, has passed a law requiring a seventy-two-hour period) between receiving state-mandated information about the procedure at an abortion clinic and having the abortion. State legislation mandates these waiting periods under the theory that a woman who spends the interval thinking about what she has learned during pre-abortion counseling sessions will be less likely to go ahead with the
early thirties. Now implicitly, even explicitly, ever-larger percentages of pregnant women and their partners are 18_Solinger_Ch18.indd 130 10/26/2012 11:14:36 AM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Oct 26 2012, NEWGEN Disability and Reproductive Politics 131 affirming their immutable preference for a “perfect baby.” These developments, according to those concerned with the dignity and human rights of disabled persons, are contributing to the isolation and indignity of disabled
While sterilization had become the most common form of contraception for American women by the 1970s, poor women, and particularly African American, Puerto Rican, and Mexican American women, often found themselves targeted by formal and informal public policies and widespread attitudes among hospital personnel supporting coerced post-delivery sterilization. Sometimes doctors and nurses obtained “permission” for the operation while the woman was in labor. After Roe v. Wade, the federal government
