Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood
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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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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.
Robin Eller is an accomplished actress, dance educator, and voice artist who has appeared on stage and television and in films and commercials. The narrator of several audiobooks, she speaks fluent Italian and has performed with prominent musicians, including James Brown, with whom she traveled the world as a dancer.
