Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood
Cambridge University Press, 3/12/2020
EAN 9781107030176, ISBN10: 110703017X
Hardcover, 334 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
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. This timely book brings to light how the unrestrained efforts to punish and police women's bodies have led to the United States being the deadliest country in the developed world to be pregnant.
1. Introduction
2. Pregnancy and state power
prosecuting fetal endangerment
3. Creeping criminalization of pregnancy across the United States
4. Abortion law
5. Changing roles of doctors and nurses
hospital snitches and police informants
6. Revisiting the fiduciary relationship
7. Creating criminals
race, stereotypes, and collateral damage
8. The pregnancy penalty
when the state gets it wrong
9. Policing beyond the border
10. Lessons for law and society
a reproductive justice New Deal or Bill of Rights
11. Conclusion.