FP Staff List: Reproductive Justice Reads
As we hit the streets in protest and donate to abortion funds, here’s what we’re reading this week:
Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique
Edited by Loretta J. Ross, Lynn Roberts, Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples, and Pamela Bridgewater Toure
Expanding the social justice discourse surrounding "reproductive rights" to include issues of environmental justice, incarceration, poverty, disability, and more, this crucial anthology explores the practical applications for activist thought migrating from the community into the academy.
Radical Reproductive Justice assembles two decades of work initiated by SisterSong Women of Color Health Collective, creators of the human rights-based “reproductive justice” framework to move beyond polarized pro-choice/pro-life debates. Rooted in Black feminism and built on intersecting identities, this revolutionary framework asserts a woman's right to have children, to not have children, and to parent and provide for the children they have.
THE DOULAS: Radical Care for Pregnant People
by Mary Mahoney and Lauren Mitchell
As more feminist conversation migrates online, the activist providers of the Doula Project remain focused on life’s physically intimate relationships: between caregivers and patients, parents and pregnancy, individuals and their own bodies. They are committed to supporting a pregnancy no matter the outcome—whether it results in birth, abortion, miscarriage, or adoption—and to facing the question of choice head-on.
In this eye-opening book, Doula Project founders Mary Mahoney and Lauren Mitchell present the history, philosophy, and practices of these caregivers, contextualizing the doula movement within the larger scope of pregnancy care and reproductive rights. They illustrate how, through their unique hands-on activism, full-spectrum doulas provide tangible support for those confronting life, death, and the sticky in-between.
ALL THE WOMEN ARE WHITE, ALL THE BLACKS ARE MEN, BUT SOME OF US ARE BRAVE: BLACK WOMEN’S STUDIES
Edited by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith
Originally published in 1982, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies is the first comprehensive collection of black feminist scholarship. Featuring essays by Alice Walker, the Combahee River Collective, and Barbara Smith, and original resources, this book is vital to today's conversation on race and gender in America.
A QUESTION OF CHOICE
by Sarah Weddington
A powerful memoir about how a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer won Roe v. Wade. Sharing her personal story behind that great legal challenge, Sarah Weddington traces how a group of attorneys, doctors, and pro-choice advocates—unsuspecting that their case would reach the Supreme Court—challenged Texas anti-abortion law, and fought the landmark case that forever changed the national conversation.
WITCHES, MIDWIVES, & NURSES (SECOND EDITION): A History of Women Healers
by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
Witches, Midwives, & Nurses, first published by the Feminist Press in 1973, is an essential book about the corruption of the medical establishment and its historic roots in witch hunters. In this new edition, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have written an entirely new chapter that delves into the current fascination with and controversies about witches, exposing our fears and fantasies. They build on their classic exposé on the demonization of women healers and the political and economic monopolization of medicine. This quick history brings us up-to-date, exploring today's changing attitudes toward childbirth, alternative medicine, and modern-day witches.
COMPLAINTS & DISORDERS (SECOND EDITION): The Sexual Politics of Sickness
by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
From prescribing the "rest cure" to diagnosing hysteria, the medical profession has consistently treated women as weak and pathological. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's concise history of the sexual politics of medical practices shows how this biomedical rationale was used to justify sex discrimination throughout the culture, and how its vestiges are evident in abortion policy and other reproductive rights struggles today.
INTIMATE WARS: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room
by Merle Hoffman
Merle Hoffman became an expert in women’s reproductive healthcare and used her entrepreneurial spirit to build one of the most comprehensive women’s medical centers in the country. In 1971, two years before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision made abortion legal throughout the US, Hoffman founded the New York abortion clinic Choices. As a medical provider, she pioneered “patient power,” encouraging women to participate in their own health care decisions.
This fascinating cultural history of abortion features the life of a woman devoted to choice, and a provocative chronicle of the feminist movement that will startle and inspire.
CELEBRATE PEOPLE'S HISTORY (SECOND EDITION):The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution
Edited by Josh MacPhee
Spanning nearly three thousand years of history—from the ancient Secession of the Plebs to the 2017 protests of the Confederate Soldiers Monument in Durham, from Sojourner Truth to Naoto Matsumura—these posters pay tribute to the long-standing human legacy of revolution, creative activism, and grassroots organizing. In this book, contemporary artists imagine and interpret often-overlooked events and figures in movements for racial justice, women's rights, queer liberation, labor organizing, and environmental conservation.
The second edition of Celebrate People's History includes almost one hundred new posters printed in duotone, presenting these essential moments as a visual tour through decades and across continents. Featured artists include Miriam Klein Stahl, Swoon, Cristy C. Road, Bishakh Som, Sabrina Jones, Nicole Schulman, Christopher Cardinale, Eric Drooker, Klutch, Carrie Moyer, Laura Whitehorn, Dan Berger, Ricardo Levins Morales, Chris Stain, and more.
THE FEMINIST UTOPIA PROJECT: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future
Edited by Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff
More than fifty powerful feminist voices imagine the world we could build together. Both visionary and touching, this exciting collection includes pieces from Lori Adelman on sex, Melissa Harris Perry on the promised land, Jill Soloway describes a hilarious woman-only commune, and Janet Mock envisions a world so safe that true happiness is attainable.
Download a free excerpt from The Feminist Utopia Project about abortion access here.
