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A Woman's Life Is a Human Life

My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this urgent audiobook from historian Felicia Kornbluh reveals two movement victories in New York that forever changed the politics of reproductive rights nationally.
A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life is the story of the movements that transformed the politics of reproductive rights: the fight to decriminalize abortion and the campaign against sterilization abuse, at a time when sterilization was disproportionately proposed as birth control to Black, Latinx, and poor women. Their victories occurred just before and after Roe v. Wade, and their histories cast new light on the case and the fate of reproductive rights and justice today. From dissident Democrats and members of a rising feminist movement who refashioned abortion laws, to progressive ministers and rabbis who led the nation’s largest abortion referral service, to Puerto Rican activists who introduced sterilization abuse to the reproductive rights agenda and Black women who took the cause global, A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life chronicles how activists changed the law and demanded reproductive justice. The first in-depth study of a winning campaign to change a state’s abortion law, with firsthand accounts and previously unseen sources—including from her mother, who drafted New York’s law decriminalizing abortion, and across-the-hall neighbor, Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías, a Puerto Rican doctor and leader in the movement against sterilization abuse—Felicia Kornbluh shows how grassroots action overcame the odds—and how it might work today.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 19, 2022
      Kornbluh (The Battle for Welfare Rights), a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Vermont, delivers an eye-opening chronicle of grassroots campaigns by New York State women to change laws regarding abortion access and involuntary sterilization. In 1968, the author’s mother, Beatrice Kornbluh, wrote a law to repeal all state restrictions on abortion. Though her position garnered support from New York Democratic Party activists, feminist organizations, religious leaders, and medical professionals, the final version of the bill, which passed in 1970, set a time limit for “unrestricted abortion access” at 24 weeks of pregnancy. Still, it was the most liberal abortion law in the country and served as a model for 17 other states,helping to pave the way to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Meanwhile, Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías, a neighbor of the Kornbluhs’, led efforts to ban involuntary or coercive sterilization, using an intersectional approach focused on the needs of women of color and others historically subjected to sterilization abuses. The resulting guidelines were adopted by New York hospitals, codified in state law, and made into national policy in 1979. Throughout, Kornbluh makes public policy and legal history come alive by demonstrating the power of women’s collective action. The result is an inspiring study of how progress happens.

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  • English

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