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.
Author(s): Michele Goodwin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 334
City: Cambridge
03.0_pp_iv_iv_Copyright_page
04.0_pp_v_vi_Dedication
05.0_pp_vii_viii_Contents
preface-2020
introduction-2020
pregnancy-and-state-power-2020
creeping-criminalization-of-pregnancy-across-the-united-states-2020
abortion-law-2020
changing-roles-of-doctors-and-nurses-hospital-snitches-and-polic-2020
revisiting-the-fiduciary-relationship-2020
creating-criminals-race-stereotypes-and-collateral-damage-2020
the-pregnancy-penalty-when-the-state-gets-it-wrong-2020
policing-beyond-the-border-2020
lessons-for-law-and-society-a-reproductive-justice-new-deal-or-b-2020
conclusion-2020
epilogue-2020
notes-2020
select-bibliography-2020
index-2020
