Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945

Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945
Author: Carole Ruth McCann
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801486128

In a disturbing behind-the-scenes history of the early achievements of Margaret Sanger's American birth control movement, Carole R. McCann scrutinizes the movement's compromises as well as its successes.

A History of the Birth Control Movement in America

A History of the Birth Control Movement in America
Author: Peter C. Engelman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2011-04-19
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0313365105

This narrative history of one of the most far-reaching social movements in the 20th century shows how it defied the law and made the use of contraception an acceptable social practice—and a necessary component of modern healthcare. A History of the Birth Control Movement in America tells the extraordinary story of a group of reformers dedicated to making contraception legal, accessible, and acceptable. The engrossing tale details how Margaret Sanger's campaign beginning in 1914 to challenge anti-obscenity laws criminalizing the distribution of contraceptive information grew into one of the most far-reaching social reform movements in American history. The book opens with a discussion of the history of birth control methods and the criminalization of contraception and abortion in the 19th century. Its core, however, is an exciting narrative of the campaign in the 20th century, vividly recalling the arrests and indictments, banned publications, imprisonments, confiscations, clinic raids, mass meetings, and courtroom dramas that publicized the cause across the nation. Attention is paid to the movement's thorny alliances with medicine and eugenics and especially to its success in precipitating a profound shift in sexual attitudes that turned the use of contraception into an acceptable social and medical practice. Finally, the birth control movement is linked to court-won privacy protections and the present-day movement for reproductive rights.

When Abortion Was a Crime

When Abortion Was a Crime
Author: Leslie J. Reagan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0520387422

The definitive history of abortion in the United States, with a new preface that equips readers for what’s to come. When Abortion Was a Crime is the must-read book on abortion history. Originally published ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this award-winning study was the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with that monumental case in 1973. When Abortion Was a Crime is filled with intimate stories and nuanced analysis, demonstrating how abortion was criminalized and policed—and how millions of women sought abortions regardless of the law. With this edition, Leslie J. Reagan provides a new preface that addresses the dangerous and ongoing threats to abortion access across the country, and the precarity of our current moment. While abortions have typically been portrayed as grim "back alley" operations, this deeply researched history confirms that many abortion providers—including physicians—practiced openly and safely, despite prohibitions by the state and the American Medical Association. Women could find cooperative and reliable practitioners; but prosecution, public humiliation, loss of privacy, and inferior medical care were a constant threat. Reagan's analysis of previously untapped sources, including inquest records and trial transcripts, shows the fragility of patient rights and raises provocative questions about the relationship between medicine and law. With the right to abortion increasingly under attack, this book remains the definitive history of abortion in the United States, offering vital lessons for every American concerned with health care, civil liberties, and personal and sexual freedom.

Sacred Work

Sacred Work
Author: Tom Davis
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2005
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780813534930

In Sacred Work, Tom Davis brings to light the ways in which the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a leading reproductive rights organization, and the clergy are not as incongruent as they often are construed to be. Beginning with Margaret Sanger's efforts to include mainline clergy in the fight to provide information about contraceptives to the general public, Davis details the religious and historical dimensions of this long alliance up through current debates.

Birth Control and American Modernity

Birth Control and American Modernity
Author: Trent MacNamara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2018-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316519589

MacNamara reveals how ordinary women and men legitimized birth control through private moral action, as opposed to public advocacy, in the early twentieth century.

Preaching Eugenics

Preaching Eugenics
Author: Christine Rosen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2004
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 019515679X

'Preaching Eugenics' tells how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders confronted and, in many cases, enthusiastically embraced eugenics - a movement that embodied progressive attitudes about modern science at the time.

Baby Markets

Baby Markets
Author: Michele Bratcher Goodwin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-02-22
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1139788655

Creating families can no longer be described by heterosexual reproduction in the intimacy of a couple's home and the privacy of their bedroom. To the contrary, babies can be brought into families through complex matrixes involving lawyers, coordinators, surrogates, 'brokers', donors, sellers, endocrinologists, and without any traditional forms of intimacy. In direct response to the need and desire to parent, men, women, and couples - gay and straight - have turned to viable, alternative means: baby markets. This book examines the ways in which Westerners create families through private, market processes. From homosexual couples skirting Mother Nature by going to the assisted reproductive realm and buying the sperm or ova that will complete the reproductive process, to Americans travelling abroad to acquire children in China, Korea, or Ethiopia, market dynamics influence how babies and toddlers come into Western families. Michele Goodwin and a group of contributing experts explore how financial interests, aesthetic preferences, pop culture, children's needs, race, class, sex, religion, and social customs influences the law and economics of baby markets.

The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State

The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State
Author: Catherine McNicol Stock
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2018-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501717731

"However urban the nation has become," Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston write, "twenty percent of its citizens still live outside major metropolitan areas. Moreover, rural economic activity—agricultural, extractive, recreational, and industrial—has an enormous impact on the nation's overall economic well-being. The stories of contemporary rural people still have the power to move us.... They reflect the values, dreams, and ideals at the core of the economically, racially, and ethnically diverse American experience." The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State moves rural history into explorations of modern politics: diverse rural peoples and their complex relationships to the American state in the twentieth century. The volume's contributors examine African American progressive farm organizers; the experiences of Caribbean and Mexican farm laborers; agrarian intellectuals in the New Deal; the politics of land and landscape in the Rocky Mountain west; and the origins of today's rural political movements.

Gender and Jewish History

Gender and Jewish History
Author: Marion A. Kaplan
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 025322263X

""A Major Collection of Scholarship that Contains the most up-to-Date, Indeed Cutting-Edge Work on Gender and Jewish History by Several Generations of Top Scholars."--Atina Grossmann, the Cooper Union.