The battle for legal abortion in the United States may have been won, but access to safe medical abortions is rapidly narrowing. Some 84 percent of all U.S. counties are now without abortion facilities, and the situation is growing worse. How are we to explain the crisis of abortion access? In Doctors of Conscience, Carole Joffe argues that in addition to the violence and disruption of the anti-abortion movement, the medical community itself must share the blame. Joffe traces the ways mainstream medicine has marginalized abortion even after Roe vs. Wade, by failing to establish needed training and services and by stigmatizing and penalizing doctors who perform abortions. The costs have been high - not only for women with unwanted pregnancies, but also for doctors committed to providing safe medical abortions. Based on in-depth interviews with forty-five physicians who have provided or facilitated abortions, Doctors of Conscience recalls the days before Roe, when emergency rooms were filled with women maimed and infected by botched abortions. Witnessing the desperation of women seeking illegal abortions was a turning point in the careers of many of the doctors interviewed. After Roe, they continued to be haunted by their experiences.

Lader spotlights the struggle for abortion rights, discusses the brutal clinic murders in Pensacola and Boston, and argues that RU 486 could markedly reduce clinical abortions by making the termination of a pregnancy a 'private matter'.

"The issues she takes on are crucial not solely the subject areas of reproductive rights and law, or public policy lenses and judicial impact in women s and children s lives, but also the more difficult and fundamental questions of how these hot topics can be approached so as to make the most of the good will of all and the force of free discussion for social learning.... she brings a strong, evolving and distinctive perspective to the discussion." Emily Fowler Hartigan

In Abortion and Dialogue, Ruth Colker argues that the state falsely views the woman and the fetus as having conflicting needs when it intervenes in decisions regarding preganancies. Colker's feminist-theological perspective on reproductive health issues encourages both pro-choice and pro-life advocates to consider how the value of life is implicated in discussions of reproduction.

Colker argues that theology can contribute to our understanding if we apply the concepts of love, compassion, and wisdom to problems identified by feminist theory and to actual concrete situations: the impact of abortion regulations on poor female adolescents; the judicial treatment of abortion regulations; state intervention into women s decision-making during pregnancies carried to term. Colker concludes by examining effective and respectful family-planning strategies that truly help women in making reproductive choices."

In this book, Robert N. Wennberg looks at all the major arguments from the whole spectrum of positions on the abortion issue. He does so both earnestly and fairly, taking care to point out that most of the arguments follow soundly from their premises, and that most of the parties to the debate are altruistically motivated. Cutting through the sensationally prejudicial language often used in arguments about abortion, Wennberg clearly lays out what merit the various arguments have individually so readers can compare them sensibly. Writing out of the evangelical Protestant tradition, Wennberg nevertheless looks fairly and with an open mind at all of the arguments. The book will be valuable to anyone who wants a noncrusading presentation of this crucial issue.

John Riddle uncovers the obscure history of contraception and abortifacients from ancient Egypt to the seventeenth century with forays into Victorian England--a topic that until now has evaded the pens of able historians.

Riddle's thesis is, quite simply, that the ancient world did indeed possess effective (and safe) contraceptives and abortifacients. The author maintains that this rich body of knowledge about fertility control--widely held in the ancient world--was gradually lost over the course of the Middle Ages, becoming nearly extinct by the early modern period. The reasons for this he suggests, stemmed from changes in the organization of medicine. As university medical training became increasingly important, physicians' ties with folk traditions were broken. The study of birth control methods was just not part of the curriculum.

In an especially telling passage, Riddle reveals how Renaissance humanists were ill equipped to provide accurate translations of ancient texts concerning abortifacients due to their limited experience with women's ailments. Much of the knowledge about contraception belonged to an oral culture--a distinctively female-centered culture. From ancient times until the seventeenth century, women held a monopoly on birthing and the treatment of related matters; information passed from midwife to mother, from mother to daughter. Riddle reflects on the difficulty of finding traces of oral culture and the fact that the little existing evidence is drawn from male writers who knew that culture only from a distance. Nevertheless, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, the author pieces together the clues and evaluates the scientific merit of theseancient remedies in language that is easily understood by the general reader. His findings will be useful to anyone interested in learning whether it was possible for premodern people to regulate their reproduction without resorting to the extremities of dangerous surgical abortions, the killing of infants, or the denial of biological urges.

As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms “the portal,” where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats–from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness–begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal’s void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. “Are we in hell?” the people of the portal ask themselves. “Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?”

Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: “Something has gone wrong,” and “How soon can you get here?” As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.

How do people become activists for causes they care deeply about? Many people with similar backgrounds, for instance, fervently believe that abortion should be illegal, but only some of them join the pro-life movement. By delving into the lives and beliefs of activists and nonactivists alike, Ziad W. Munson is able to lucidly examine the differences between them.
Through extensive interviews and detailed studies of pro-life organizations across the nation, Munson makes the startling discovery that many activists join up before they develop strong beliefs about abortion--in fact, some are even pro-choice prior to their mobilization. Therefore, Munson concludes, commitment to an issue is often a consequence rather than a cause of activism.
"The Making of Pro-life Activists" provides a compelling new model of how people become activists while also offering a penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between religion, politics, and the pro-life movement. Policy makers, activists on both sides of the issue, and anyone seeking to understand how social movements take shape will find this book essential.

A star debater at school, Norman Haire had always wanted to be an actor. Forced to study medicine, he followed his other passion: saving the world from sexual misery. When he arrived in London in 1919 he was a poor Jewish outsider from Australia. By 1930 he had a flourishing gynaecology practice in Harley Street, a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce and a country house. His parties were attended by the medical, intellectual and cultural elite. As a prominent sexologist and a campaigner for birth control, Haire took a leading role in the world's first international conference on birth control in 1922 and organised, with Dora Russell, the World League for Sexual Reform's highly successful 1929 Congress in London. He lectured in America, Germany, France and Spain, and wrote and edited many accessible books on sex education. In 1940 Haire returned to Australia where he attracted a loyal following, but was also hounded by the security service. The ABC Board was censured in parliament for choosing him as the key speaker in a population debate, and his weekly advice column in the magazine Woman was strongly opposed by the Catholic Church. Peter Coleman called Haire 'one of Australia's most famous freethinkers and sex reformers'. This biography pays a tribute to this tenacious, humane, witty, innovative and brave man's contribution to birth control, sexology and human rights history.

In this important study of the abortion controversy in the United States, Kristin Luker examines the issues, people, and beliefs on both sides of the abortion conflict. She draws data from twenty years of public documents and newspaper accounts, as well as over two hundred interviews with both pro-life and pro-choice activists. She argues that moral positions on abortion are intimately tied to views on sexual behavior, the care of children, family life, technology, and the importance of the individual.

It seems unthinkable that citizens of one of the most powerful nations in the world must risk their lives and livelihoods in the search for access to necessary health care. And yet it is no surprise that in many places throughout the United States, getting an abortion can be a monumental challenge. Anti-choice politicians and activists have worked tirelessly to impose needless restrictions on this straightforward medical procedure that, at best, delay it and, at worst, create medical risks and deny women their constitutionally protected right to choose. Obstacle Course tells the story of abortion in America, capturing a disturbing reality of insurmountable barriers people face when trying to exercise their legal rights to medical services. Authors David S. Cohen and Carole Joffe lay bare the often arduous and unnecessarily burdensome process of terminating a pregnancy: the sabotaged decision-making, clinics in remote locations, insurance bans, harassing protesters, forced ultrasounds and dishonest medical information, arbitrary waiting periods, and unjustified procedure limitations. Based on patients' stories as well as interviews with abortion providers and allies from every state in the country, Obstacle Course reveals the unstoppable determination required of women in the pursuit of reproductive autonomy as well as the incredible commitment of abortion providers. Without the efforts of an unheralded army of medical professionals, clinic administrators, counselors, activists, and volunteers, what is a legal right would be meaningless for the almost one million people per year who get abortions. There is a better way-treating abortion like any other form of health care-but the United States is a long way from that ideal.

This text provides a careful examination of "mizuko kuyo", a Japanese religious ritual for aborted foetuses. Popularized during the 1970s, when religious entrepreneurs published frightening accounts of foetal wrath and spirit attacks, mizuko kuyo offers ritual attonement for women who, sometimes decades previously, chose to have abortions.;In its exploration of the complex issues that surround this practice, the text takes into account the history of Japanese attitudes towards abortion, the development of abortion rituals, the marketing of religion and the nature of power relations in intercourse, contraception and abortion. Although abortion in Japan is accepted and legal and was commonly used as birth control in the early postwar period, entrepreneurs used images from foetal photography to mount a surprisingly successful tabloid campaign to promote mizuko kuyo. Adopted by some religionists as an economic strategy, it was rejected by others on doctrinal, humanistic and feminist grounds.

This text addresses the following two questions: "What kinds of problems can the law solve?" and "What kinds of problems does the law create?" Using these questions as starting points, Meier and Geis evenhandedly explore the role and function of law relating to six major issues that often divide Americans today: prostitution, drug use, homosexuality, abortion, pornography, and gambling. Statutes and public opinion have shifted dramatically over recent decades in regard to these behaviors. The book details these developments and offers explanations of why they have occurred. Some people view all or some of these behaviors as acts that ought to be permitted, as part of individual freedom. Others find one, some, or all of them to be genuine threats to the country's social and moral fiber and believe that they ought to be criminalized. Still others maintain that action ought to be taken to limit some of the behaviors, but that using the criminal justice system is not the best way to proceed. Meier and Geis' provocative book offers sophisticated, in-depth discussions of these issues, then reviews the conflicting opinions about the proper role of criminal law in dealing with them. It is written in straightforward, jargon-free language, providing an ideal background for exploring the facts and views regarding what are often contentious concerns. Criminal Justice and Moral Issues increases student understanding through the abundant use of relevant illustrations, examples, and case studies.

In Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the Constitution protects a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. In a companion case, Doe v. Bolton, the Court held further that a state may not unduly burden a woman's fundamental right to abortion by prohibiting or substantially limiting access to the means of effectuating her decision. Instead of settling the issue, the Court's decisions kindled heated debate and precipitated a variety of governmental actions at the national, state and local levels designed either to nullify the rulings or hinder their effectuation. These governmental regulations have, in turn, spawned further litigation in which resulting judicial refinements in the law have been no more successful in dampening the controversy. This book offers an overview of the development of abortion law from 1973 to the present. Beginning with a brief discussion of the historical background, the book analyses the leading Supreme Court decisions over the past 34 years, emphasising particularly the landmark decisions of Roe v. Wade and others. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

In the wake of Texas enacting a bill to deny abortions after 6 weeks, Loved and Wanted shines a light on motherhood and the right to choose. For readers of Educated and Hillbilly Elegy. In 2017, after becoming unexpectedly pregnant, Christa Parravani requested a termination. With two children already to care for and a history of ectopic pregnancies, she was worried she would not be able to find adequate medical care. However, when she asked for help, her doctor refused. The only doctor who would perform an abortion made it clear that this would be illicit, not condoned by her colleagues or their community. In exploring her own choice, or rather in discovering her lack of it, Christa reveals the desperate state of female healthcare in contemporary America, and examines her own reckoning with life, death and choice.

Teenage pregnancy is a public health concern that is growing more prevalent in both developed and developing countries. Understanding the problems of teenage motherhood and suggesting relevant preventive strategies and interventions can help break the cycle of poverty, poor education, and risky behaviors that can lead to health and child welfare issues. Socio-Cultural Influences on Teenage Pregnancy and Contemporary Prevention Measures is an essential reference source that discusses the causes and factors responsible for early motherhood, as well as the mental and psychological outlooks of teen mothers. Featuring research on topics such as minority populations, family dynamics, and sex education, this book is ideally designed for healthcare students, medical professionals, practitioners, nurses, and counselors seeking coverage on the issues, reasons, and outcomes of teenage pregnancy, as well as preventive strategies to combat teenage motherhood.

Conservative and progressive religious groups fiercely disagree about issues of sex and gender. But how did we get here? Melissa J. Wilde shows how today's modern divisions began in the 1930s in the public battles over birth control and not for the reasons we might expect. By examining thirty of America's most prominent religious groups-from Mormons to Methodists, Southern Baptists to Seventh Day Adventists, and many others-Wilde contends that fights over birth control had little do with sex, women's rights, or privacy. Using a veritable treasure trove of data, including census and archival materials and more than 10,000 articles, statements, and sermons from religious and secular periodicals, Wilde demonstrates that the push to liberalize positions on contraception was tied to complex views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny among America's most prominent religious groups. Taking us from the Depression era, when support for the eugenics movement saw birth control as an act of duty for less desirable groups, to the 1960s, by which time most groups had forgotten the reasons behind their stances on contraception (but not the concerns driving them), Birth Control Battles explains how reproductive politics divided American religion. In doing so, this book shows the enduring importance of race and class for American religion as it rewrites our understanding of what it has meant to be progressive or conservative in America.

A Critical Introduction to the Ethics of Abortion addresses some of the most prominent and influential arguments to the abortion debate. These include the Being a Person verses Functioning as a Person Argument, women's rights vis-a-vis the rights of the foetus, personhood as an essentially contested concept, and a virtue ethics approach. Also covered are central bioethical issues concerning prenatal screening, stem cell research and cloning. Based on a critical assessment of the evidence, the book offers an impartial view and draws on the importance of critical thinking and the logic of argumentation. Providing an overview of the legal history of abortion in the United States, it discusses five of the most influential Supreme Court cases on abortion law during the past fifty years and examines the current state of abortion law, politics and the main trends. Presenting a balance between ethical concepts, views and arguments, A Critical Introduction to the Ethics of Abortion is an up-to-date introduction to the choice of abortion illustrating the importance of evidence, clear thinking and good arguments for supporting one's ethical beliefs.

Among all human practices, procreation seems the most paradoxical. It starts as a fully personal choice and ends with the creation of a new subject of rights and responsibilities. Advances in reproductive genetics pose new ethical and legal questions. They are expected to prevent the transmission of genetic diseases to progeny and also to improve genetically-endowed mental and physical attributes. Genetic selection and enhancement may affect a child's identity, as well as the parent-child relationship. The authors are committed to a pluralistic approach that captures all aspects of this relationship in terms of moral virtues and principles. They elucidate that most of the conflicts between parental preferences and a child's rights could be resolved with reference to the meaning and nature of procreation.

Abortion in Popular Culture: A Call to Action brings together scholars who examine depictions of abortion in film, television, literature, and social media. By examining texts ranging from medical dramas of the 1960s and recent films such as Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Unpregnant to dystopian novels and social-media campaigns, the essays analyze a range of narrative styles, rhetorical strategies, and cinematic techniques, all of which shape cultural attitudes toward abortion. They also analyze cultural shifts, including the willingness or reluctance of networks and cable channels to acknowledge medication abortion and the role that abortion plays in family planning. As a whole, however, the essays argue that popular culture can play a significant role in destigmatizing abortion by including a wider range of narratives and doing so with nuance and empathy. With reproductive rights under attack in the United States, each essay is a call to action for writers, producers, directors, showrunners, authors, and musicians to use their platforms to tell more positive and accurate stories about abortion.

An indispensable resource for students, scholars, and activists concerned about current attacks on abortion rights, this book offers an unmatched account of the emergence, consolidation, and consequences of the antiabortion movement's paternalistic abortion regret narrative. Abortion Regret explores the emergence and consolidation of the antiabortion movement's paternalistic efforts to "protect" women from abortion regret. It begins by examining the 19th-century physician's campaign to criminalize abortion and traces the contours of the women-protective abortion regret narrative through to the 21st century. Based on interviews, textual analysis of primary sources, and a content analysis of state antiabortion policy from 2010-2015, the authors argue that the contemporary rise of the abortion regret narrative has armed the antiabortion movement with a unifying and compelling strategy to oppose abortion through a woman-centered approach. In addition to covering the historical origins of our nation's criminal abortion laws, the book covers topics that include the origins and growth of crisis pregnancy centers, including recent efforts provide perinatal hospice services; an analysis of leading Supreme Court decisions on abortion; the emergence of the "pro-woman/pro-life" antiabortion platform, including its deeply religious roots; the infiltration of this position into the political and legal spheres in the guise of a secular rationale for limiting access to abortion; and an evidence-based rejoinder to the position that abortion harms women. Examines the historical continuity of the abortion regret narrative as a political strategy used to limit women's access to abortion Asserts that the abortion regret narrative is intimately tied to a gendered and paternalistic construction of women's divine role as mothers Examines the antiabortion movement's strategy to place the "grieving" mother at the center of its oppositional narrative Uses interviews, textual analysis of primary sources, and content analysis of state antiabortion policies to trace the growing impact of the abortion regret narrative Examines and reveals the antiabortion movement's calculated political motivation for using the abortion regret narrative as its primary strategy to oppose abortion rights

Our progressive philosophy calls for more freedom and more prosperity for more people. Yet author Kevin Galalae says you can't always have more. Overpopulation is making us victims of our own triumphs over nature. Lacking a popular consensus to control population, the ruling elite have resorted to covert means. Their depopulation project has had considerable success, but at a terrible cost. "Strict secrecy and deception have been necessary to prevent the masses from discovering the bitter truth that for the past 68 years they have been the object of a silent and global offensive, a campaign of attrition that has turned the basic elements of life into weapons of mass infertility and selective death." "The birth of nearly two billion people has been prevented and the death of half a billion hurried. While these goals have been intentional, the architects of the Global Depopulation Policy have unintentionally undermined the genetic and intellectual endowment of the human species and have set back eons of natural selection." We are adding a billion people every 10 - 15 years, while consumption per person has skyrocketed - placing unsustainable demands on resources like water and fuel. The only decent alternative is voluntary population control to reduce world population. Here are the methods actually being used. - Contraception and abortion. Chemical sterilization: Flouridation, BPA-contaminated plastic and metal food packaging. Drawbacks: increase in chronic illnesses and lowering of IQ will lead to massive degeneracy in a couple generations. - The coercive one child policy -- overall a success story for China; surgical sterilization in India. - Biological: synthetic HIV virus in Africa, flu viruses, GMO crops. Lowering human fertility, while weakening the immune system to increase mortality. - Psychosocial: weakening the family, forcing women to work, high divorce rates, youth unemployment, countercultures, drug, tobacco and alcohol abuse, incarceration, accelerated urbanization. Successful in Europe where population has started to shrink. Political drawbacks: a secret state conducting genocide against its own people; sham democracy; a culture of deception. Endangering the gene pool and the ecosystem. Even so, it is more humane than the alternative of another world war to reduce numbers. Social costs: economic decline, collapse of social safety nets. Sustainable development policies don't mention the risks of covert sterilization that underpin them. "Population control as a substitute to war is the progeny of the bipolar world order that followed World War II ... they agreed to wage a demographic war on their own people, and on those within their spheres of influence, rather than risk their mutually assured destruction in a nuclear confrontation." The way forward: broad popular understanding of the issues. Yet politicians don't want to open up to a policy based on popular consensus, because that would undermine their power, which is based on manipulation. Aside from his writings, the author's efforts to awaken the world have included hunger strikes, imprisonment and legal battles.

Where do you turn when you are wrestling with a painful decision& #63; You turn to your spouse, trusted friends and relatives, to professionals, to religious advisers. But sometimes you want accurate information and suggestions all in one place, in a form you can use on your own.

The decision to have an abortion is not an easy one, and it is not the right decision for every pregnant woman, even in difficult circumstances. Every situation is different. Women considering abortion range in age from nine to fifty-five years. They are rich and poor; married and unmarried; white, black, brown, yellow, and red; members of every religious group and ethnic origin; heterosexual and homosexual. Some have no one to talk to and others have too many people talking to them. Some are in danger from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse.

"Abortion: Facts and Feelings" is for women who are considering whether to have an abortion, women who have had an abortion and want to do more thinking about it, and relatives, mates, lovers, friends, and health professionals who want to help the women they care for make the best possible choices for themselves. Partners in relationships, families, and friends, and, of course, pregnant women themselves, deserve to have accurate information about this common, but controversial, procedure& mdash;information they can use to make both personal and policy decisions.

This book contains that information. It discusses The practice of abortion in other times and places, and practical information about how it is practiced now How to find out about abortion laws where you live, and laws in other places where you might go if necessary The attitudes of major NorthAmerican religious groups about abortion, and how to obtain more specific information about the approaches of your religion to your situation The medical and psychological outcomes of abortion Alternatives to abortion& mdash;delivering the baby and either caring for it yourself or allowing someone else to provide the parenting The needs and concerns of women in special circumstances, and of women& rsquo;s loved ones

Most important, it will help you think through and carry out your own decision, whatever it is.

Abortion remains one of the most politicized issues globally and whilst some countries such as the USA continue to experience restrictions to access to abortion, Northern Ireland stands out as having enacted historical positive change in abortion law, from an almost complete ban throughout the Twentieth Century to decriminalization achieved in 2019. This book documents and analyzes how this historical change was achieved. This, the second of two volumes, places emphasis on allies and support for abortion provision, illustrating how the movement has relied upon an intersectional network of social movement actors, NGOs and fundraisers to maintain momentum and inclusivity. It also focuses on the reality of abortion provision. Each chapter is written by those directly involved in the long-fought battle to change abortion law - including those with personal experience of seeking abortions, activists, academics, legal experts, political actors, NGOs, and volunteers. This interdisciplinary text will be of relevance to academics and students in the disciplines of law, policy, political science, and sociology, but also to organizers and policy makers in other global contexts and across other social justice campaigns.

"Liberty and Sexuality" is a definitive account of the legal and political struggles that created the right to privacy and won constitutional protection for a woman's right to choose abortion. Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established that right, grew out of not only efforts to legalize abortion but also out of earlier battles against statutes that criminalized birth control. When the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, voided such a prohibition as an outrageous intrusion upon marital privacy, it opened a previously unimagined constitutional door: the opportunity to argue that a woman's access to a safe, legal abortion was also a fundamental constitutional right. Garrow's essential history details both the unheralded contributions of the young lawyers who filed America's first abortion rights cases and also the inside-the-Supreme Court deliberations that produced Roe v. Wade. In this updated and expanded paperback edition, Garrow also traces the post-Roe evolution of abortion rights battles and the wider struggle for sexual privacy up through the 25th anniversary of Roe in early 1998.