Additional Resources

Secondary Sources

• Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (University of California Press, new ed. 2022).
  • History of the “entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century” until Roe. The new edition features a preface with a prescient warning about the dangers for legal abortion ahead
• Joshua Prager, The Family Roe: An American Story (W. W. Norton & Co., 2021).
  • About the “true story” of the woman who became better known as “Jane Roe” and how her life led to the watershed Supreme Court decision
• Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (NYU Press, 2005; 2019).
  • Synthetic history of ~250 years of reproductive politics in the US, from a reproductive justice framework. A good introduction to some of the key issues
• Rickie Solinger, ed. Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950–2000 (University of California Press, 1998).
  • Edited volume with essays focusing on different moments and flashpoints in the struggle to make abortion available, from 20 years before to nearly 30 years after Roe 
• Lauren G. Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke Univerity Press, 1997).
  • Feminist/queer theoretical work that discusses “the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture” in the US and the role of the American child, especially the “unborn child” as an “ideal citizen” in post-Reagan neoliberal America
• Johanna Schoen, Abortion after Roe (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
  • Post-Roe history tracing the routes through which abortion took on a moral valence and today has become a “moral good”
• Diana Greene Foster, The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having–or Being Denied–An Abortion (Scribner, 2021).
  • 10-year scientific study comparing women who had received an abortion to those who were turned away by providers, looking at impacts on each group 
• David A. Grimes, with Linda G. Brandon, Every Third Woman in America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation (Daymark Publishing, 2014).
  • History via an MD and public health professional about the impact of Roe on pregnant people’s health in the years that followed the decision
• Sara Matthiesen, Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021).
  • History tracing the limits of reproductive choice post-Roe, especially for poor people and Black, Indigenous, and people of color 
• Becca Andrews, No Choice: The Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right (Public Affairs, 2022).
  • Timely book tracing the recent dismantling and battle over the fall of Roe–and its antecedents and ramifications for people living in the US
• Erica Millar, Happy Abortions: Our Bodies in the Era of Choice (Zed Books, 2017).
  • Broaches the idea that happiness is an unspeakable emotion in modern liberal Western culture w/r/t abortion, in contrast to the cultural imaginaries of motherhood 
• Carol Sanger, About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America (Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2017).
  • Draws connections between US abortion policy and American culture and politics
• Ziad Munson, Abortion Politics (Polity Press, 2018).
  • Published in 2018 as “a balanced, clear-eyed overview of the abortion debate” in the US
• M.N. Olasky, The Press and Abortion, 1838-1988 (Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates).
  • Focuses on journalism’s role in laying the groundwork for Roe. Author takes an anti-choice position. See here for more information 
• Kath Browne and Sydney Calkins, eds. After Repeal: Rethinking Abortion Politics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
  • A comparative look at Ireland’s repeal of its abortion ban in global context. See here for more