Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood

Product Description

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 timely 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.

Review

Policing The Womb tells a frankly disquieting and frightening story about the status of reproductive health and rights in the United States.  It captures what has become the modern day horrors of reproductive health across the country, from the escalating attacks on abortion rights, to the civil and criminal penalization of pregnant women for falling down steps, refusing c-sections,  and attempting suicide. Michele Goodwin 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, 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. It brilliantly lays out all the ways politicians and the medical community are removing pregnant people from the most important decisions we will make about how best to manage our reproductive lives.” 

Lizz Winstead, Co-Creator of the Daily Show, Founder/Chief Creative Officer: Abortion Access Front

Michele Goodwin’s 
Policing the Womb
 is aprerequisite to understanding the very real dangers posed by punitive statelaws enacted under the guise of protecting women’s health, but which haveinstead criminalized women’s conduct during pregnancy, harmed women’s andgirls’ health, and allowed unimaginable state interventions into women’sreproductive lives. Goodwin brings into sharp focus the compelling stories ofthe first targets and victims of these laws–primarily poor women and women ofcolor–as she puts into context the risks to all women given the currentpolitical climate and Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. After you finish reading 
Policing the Womb
 and havequelled your anger, you will have no choice but to join one of the many localand national efforts to fight for women’s full constitutional and fundamentalhuman rights.  Kathy Spillar, ExecutiveDirector, Feminist Majority Foundation

Basedon extensive research and advocacy, Michele Goodwin vividly shows how theintensifying punishment of pregnant women in the name of fetal protection comesat a devastating cost to human health and freedom. Policing the Womb is an urgent call to end the dehumanizingpractice of criminalizing pregnancy.Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing theBlack Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

ProfessorGoodwin has written the definitive examination of the disturbing and pervasivetrend of policing pregnant women’s bodies. She skillfully draws on contemporarystories as examples that reflect how the establishment of legal rights for theunbor