Choice Reads

Below is a list of books from our past meetings. All led to lively discussions about issues of reproductive choice.

Learn more about the current book we're reading and how you can join the book club!

 

 

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.