Policing the Womb, Michele Goodwin
Policing the Womb, Michele Goodwin
List: $22.95 | Sale: $16.07
Club: $11.47

Policing the Womb
Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood

Author: Michele Goodwin

Narrator: Robin Eller

Unabridged: 13 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/01/2023

Synopsis

Policing the Womb brings to life the chilling ways in which women have become the targets of secretive state surveillance of their pregnancies. Michele Goodwin expands the reproductive health and rights debate beyond abortion to include how legislators increasingly turn to criminalizing women for miscarriages, stillbirths, and threatening the health of their pregnancies. The horrific results include women giving birth while shackled in leg irons, in solitary confinement, and even delivering in prison toilets. In some states, pregnancy has become a bargaining chip with prosecutors offering reduced sentences in exchange for women agreeing to be sterilized. The author shows how prosecutors may abuse laws and infringe women’s rights in the process, sometimes with the complicity of medical providers who disclose private patient information to law enforcement. Often the women most affected are poor and of color. Goodwin warns, however, poor women are simply the canaries in the coalmine as some legislators now claim that women’s constitutional rights equal that of embryos and fetuses.In this book, Michele Goodwin brings to light how the unrestrained efforts to punish and police women’s reproduction has led to the United States being the deadliest country in the developed world for pregnant women.

About Michele Goodwin

Michele Goodwin is an executive committee member of the American Civil Liberties Union and elected member of the American Law Institute. She is a chancellor’s professor at the University of California, Irvine where she teaches constitutional law and directs the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. She is an internationally recognized voice on women’s rights, reproductive health, and constitutional law and lectures worldwide on matters relating to the exploitation of women and girls and the rising regulation of pregnancy and criminalization of women.

About Robin Eller

Robin Eller is a narrator, actress, singer, and dance educator. She has appeared on stage, in films, and on such television programs as The Bernie Mac Show, The Bold and the Beautiful, The Young and the Restless, and General Hospital, as well as numerous commercials. As a dancer, she has traveled the world with the legendary James Brown.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Leah

This book is wonderful but I had to pace myself because I became so enraged that I needed to close the book and calm down and absolutely do not send death threats to the pope.......more

Goodreads review by Linda

This is an important book if you are concerned about women's rights and specifically reproductive rights. It is a very difficult read when you discover the horrendous treatment of pregnant women, particularly women of color and poor women. The insidious changes to laws in many states, giving the fet......more

Goodreads review by Kaula

This book brought to light the ways in which women and girls are being oppressed in the name of law, but under a guise of protecting women’s health along with the health of their children (born or unborn). It’s scary. It’s thought provoking. It’s necessary. Now a gem for my shelf.......more

Goodreads review by Marita

Extremely prescient, given the current attack on reproductive freedom. Goodwin is a lawyer and writes like one - not in a bad way, but providing legal details and facts from the cases that she analyzes. It's the cases that are wrenching. Consider the woman whose decomposing body was kept alive, desp......more

Goodreads review by Merricat

At the core of this book there is a fascinating and horrifying body of research that was almost entirely new to me. Goodwin amasses evidence on new “fetal protection” laws, as well as the reinterpretation of old child abuse statutes to apply to fetuses, and reports on women whose lives have been des......more

Quotes

“For anyone interested in the American reality for many women, Policing the Womb is essential reading.” Washington Post

“Exposes a new era of reproductive policing and harm in the United States that has gone largely unnoticed.” Boston Review

“Policing the Womb pleads with readers to put an end to this history of indifference.” American Politics

“A must-read for students and scholars of reproductive health, law, and criminal justice.” Choice

“An urgent call to end the dehumanizing practice of criminalizing pregnancy.” Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body

“Brilliantly captures what is at stake in the war on women’s reproductive health and rights. I could not put the book down.” Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union

“Policing the Womb is the roadmap we need right now to understand how to navigate the sandstorm of laws being created to claim ownership of our bodies.” Lizz Winstead, television producer and co-founder of Abortion Access Front

“This brilliant, shocking book…makes clear the heartbreaking irony of laws that, in the name of protecting life, divide women’s bodies against themselves.” Patricia Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law emerita, Columbia Law School

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List