Overview

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.

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Reviews

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 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 Exposes a new era of reproductive policing and harm in the United States that has gone largely unnoticed. -- Boston Review For anyone interested in the American reality for many women, Policing the Womb is essential reading. -- Washington Post 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

Author Information

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.

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