Below is a list of books that we read when Choice Reads was a bimonthly book club from March 2007 - June 2008. All led to lively discussions about issues of reproductive choice.

Learn more about our book-of-the-month club, Choice Reads.

 

 

Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice
By Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, Elena Gutierrez

Undivided Rights presents a fresh and textured understanding of the reproductive rights movement by placing the experiences, priorities, and activism of women of color in the foreground. Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies.

 

 

Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America
By Eyal Press

On October 23, 1998, the Buffalo abortion provider Barnett Slepian was killed by a sniper’s bullet fired through the kitchen window of his home. Days later, police informed another local doctor, Shalom Press, that they had received a threat warning that he was "next on the list." In Absolute Convictions, Eyal Press returns to his hometown seeking to understand how an issue many people thought was settled decades ago could inspire such rage. Press combines a retelling of his family’s experience with firsthand accounts of protesters arrested outside his father’s office, patients who braved the gauntlet of demonstrators, and politicians who attempted to appease both sides.

 

 

The Choices We Made: Twenty-Five Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion
Edited by Angela Bonavoglia

Every day in America, abortion providers and the women who need them are in danger. First published in 1991, this collection of 25 powerful stories from contributors both famous and ordinary, privileged and poor, provides often harrowing insights into what happens when women are denied the right to choose. Testimonials from teenagers, college students, overloaded young mothers, and even a retired male Marine put a human face on one of this country's most controversial issues and offer passionate arguments for access to legal and safe abortions.

 

 

August 2007:

Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead. The authors provide a wholly new framework for understanding why poor women have lower rates of marriage and have children outside of wedlock.

 

 

October 2007:

A powerful and groundbreaking revelation of the secret history of the 1.5 million women who surrendered children for adoption in the several decades before Roe v. Wade. In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade.

 

 

By Rickie Solinger

Solinger shows how historical distinctions between women of color and white women, between poor and middle-class women, were used in new ways during the era of "choice." Politicians and policy makers began to exclude certain women from the class of "deserving mothers" by using the language of choice to create new public policies concerning everything from Medicaid funding for abortions to family tax credits, infertility treatments, international adoption, teen pregnancy, and welfare.

 

 

 

By Joan Williams

 

In this theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly accessible treatise on gender, work and domesticity, Williams offers a new vision of "family-friendly" feminism that would support women in all the various roles on the worker-caregiver continuum. With special attention to the diversity of women's experience in terms of race and social class, this book challenges common assumptions about gender roles and women's choices concerning work, family and career.

 

 

 

Edited by Karen E. Bender and Nina De Gramont

 

Choice attempts to raise the discourse on reproductive choice by posing the question - what is it like to make any sort of reproductive choice? What is it truly like to use birth control, the morning-after pill, use a sperm bank, have an abortion, adopt a child, give a child up for adoption, bring a pregnancy to term? The essays in Choice explore the complexities inherent in every reproductive decision.

 

 

 

By Kenneth C. Edelin, MD

 

Broken Justice is a true story about Dr. Ken Edelin, a young, black doctor who arrived in Boston in 1971 to do his residency training in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Boston City Hospital. In April 1974 he was three months away from completing his residency when he was indicted on a charge of manslaughter by a secret Grand Jury. The indictment concerned an abortion he had performed on a 17-year old girl, and the alleged victim washer aborted fetus. The indictment was sought by an overzealous, anti-abortion prosecutor and because of the racial, political and religious climate which existed in Boston the indictment received national and international attention. The book reveals, for the first time, the maneuverings and conflicts which went on behind the scenes during the time leading up to the trial and during the trial itself.