Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories
Authors:
Murray, Melissa / Shaw, Katherine / Siegel, Reva B.
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2019
16 chapters
have results for reproductive rights
Chapter 5: Coerced Sterilization of Mexican-American Women: The Story of Madrigal v. Quilligan 22 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Reproductive Justice, Not Just Rights
- The Madrigal Ten filed their lawsuit in June 1975 and launched their pursuit of injunctive relief to toughen federal and state policies surrounding informed consent to sterilization. In their legal filings on behalf of the women, Hernández and Nabarrete argued that the lack of appropriate Spanish language consent forms and other safeguards to protect against coerced sterilization resulted in violations of the women’s constitutional right to procreate. decision, the dominant narrative around reproductive rights concerned abortion rights. The Madrigal Ten’s lawyers sought a broader conception of reproductive rights—one that encompassed the right to choose an abortion the right to give birth. The lawyers brought the still-nascent framework of reproductive justice to bear on the case, incorporating concerns about discrimination along intersectional lines of gender, race, poverty, and immigration status—all issues at play in the
- case galvanized Chicana feminist activism in ways that highlighted tensions between mainstream white feminists and women of color. In the 1960s and 1970s, white feminist groups focusing on reproductive rights emphasized the right to become a parent, but women of color during this same time period began fighting for a broader conception of reproductive justice. While white feminist activists argued for unimpeded access to sterilization, contraception, and abortion, women of color sought to expand the discussion of reproductive rights to include their concerns about abusive practices designed to restrict racial minority women’s reproduction.
- As new reproductive technologies advance, the tension between access and abuse that Reproductive justice advocates fear that unchecked enthusiasm for LARCs might lead once again to coercive reproductive control over vulnerable women. Yet reproductive technologies continue to present both promise and peril. Since ideology often drives the use of these technologies, the risk remains that efforts to increase access will also increase abuse, particularly on marginalized populations.
- 3 (2005) (describing the “double-edged application of reproductive technologies” which “could extend reproductive control to women, or they could be used to control women’s reproduction.”).
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Introduction 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- This volume remedies that oversight. Reading this group of cases together makes visible forms and effects of reproductive regulation that are less evident when the cases are read in isolation or in their more familiar doctrinal contexts. The framework of “reproductive justice” highlights the intersecting relations of race, class, sexuality, and sex that shape the regulation of reproduction. It examines the many ways law shapes the choice to have, as well as to avoid having, children. The volume addresses decisionmaking about contraception and abortion—the traditional subject matter of “reproductive rights”—in this larger reproductive justice framework, and locates this body of law alongside cases that consider a wider range of issues, including sterilization, assisted reproductive technology, pregnancy discrimination, the criminalization of pregnancy, and access to reproductive health care.
- This book is being published at a pivotal moment for this area of law. In 2018, Justice Anthony Kennedy, a long-standing voice in the U.S. Supreme Court’s disposition of reproductive rights and justice cases, retired, and was replaced by Brett Kavanaugh. Past changes in the Court’s membership have deeply shaped this body of law, as stories in this volume show. The retirement of Justice Kennedy and his replacement by Justice Kavanaugh will surely shape the dynamics of the Supreme Court in ways that will have important repercussions for this field. But the account of law and social change contained within these pages suggests that while the Supreme Court is an important player in these debates, it cannot settle the future of this body of law today any more than it could a generation ago. As importantly, many of the law stories in this volume involve questions of reproductive rights and justice in areas of constitutional law, employment discrimination law, and family law that will be...
- Ferguson v. City of Charleston, Priscilla Ocen tracks one of the most notorious efforts to criminalize the reproductive choices of poor black women and the ways in which law failed to adequately address the various reproductive harms these women experienced as a result. Beginning in 1989, at the height of the moral panic surrounding crack cocaine, staff at the Medical University of South Carolina drug tested poor black pregnant women without their consent. The drug testing was part of a program developed in coordination with local law enforcement, ostensibly in an effort to promote fetal rights. Feminist lawyers, horrified by stories of black women being dragged from their hospital beds, sought to challenge the hospital’s policy as a violation of the right to procreation, equal protection, and privacy, and in so doing, underscored the policy as part of a larger ...the reproductive choices of black women. In 2001, the Supreme Court struck down the policy as a violation of the...
- We have decided to organize the chapters in this volume in chronological order, rather than by subject matter. This format highlights the lived horizon in which women and men encounter—and struggle with—questions of reproductive rights and justice, and the ways American law has responded at different eras in the nation’s history. But chronological order is just one way to make sense of the stories about rights, justice, and various forms of law-making inside and outside of the courts collected in these pages.
- litigation inspired the anti-sterilization abuse movement in California and helped to shape Chicana feminism in the 1970s. The case galvanized Chicana feminist activism in ways that highlighted tensions between mainstream white feminists focusing on reproductive rights and women of color focusing on reproductive justice. The Chicana activists brought the still nascent framework of reproductive justice to the forefront, incorporating concerns about discrimination along intersectional lines of gender, race, poverty, and immigration status—all issues at play in the
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Chapter 8: Pregnant While Black: The Story of Ferguson v. City of Charleston 35 results (showing 5 best matches)
- protections for pregnant women, it has, however, ignited debate among feminists regarding how to articulate demands for reproductive autonomy and liberty. Indeed, women of color have called upon feminists to abandon the traditional reproductive rights “choice” framework that has typically been preoccupied by the right not to have children. Instead, they suggest a reproductive justice framework that highlights and challenges the various structural impediments to procreation and parenting that disproportionately burden the reproductive capacities of poor women, including racism, poverty, housing, healthcare, childcare, education, employment and access to affordable and nutritious food.
- At the time, Paltrow, a then-31-year-old white woman, was a staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights and Policy in New York. Although she began her career litigating for abortion rights, she had spent a number of years challenging the criminalization of women for behavior during pregnancy. She began litigating cases on behalf of pregnant women after becoming disillusioned with the mainstream reproductive rights movement’s focus on choice, abortion, and contraception. In her estimation, the mainstream reproductive rights choice-based agenda was largely organized around the experiences of white, middle-class women, a perspective which obscured the structural constraints placed upon marginalized women’s ability to make meaningful reproductive decisions. ...—or the right to procreate—was as much a site of government control of women’s bodies as abortion, particularly for poor black women whose reproduction has long been viewed as a social problem in need of correction...
- For Paltrow, at bottom, the case involved the right to procreate and parent, a right that was largely underdeveloped in constitutional jurisprudence. In particular, she argued that these cases invoked “the constitutional right to privacy that guarantees all women, even those with addiction problems, the right to decide, without coercion, whether or not to have a child.” Given the dearth of precedent on the rights of pregnant women, mainstream feminists and reproductive rights advocates often framed the issue of state intervention during a pregnancy as conflict between fetal and maternal rights. advocates argued that fetuses do not have rights independent of their mothers. As such, they argued, state efforts to regulate maternal behavior in order to protect independent fetal rights were unconstitutional, as they undermined women’s constitutionally protected right to bodily integrity and reproductive autonomy. ...the scope of the right to procreate in federal court, Paltrow drew...
- made Ferguson and other pregnant black women vulnerable to criminalization and state regulation of their reproductive lives. Indeed, throughout the proceedings, federal courts rejected the expansive articulations of reproductive autonomy and equal protection offered by Ferguson and her attorneys. Because she sought to carry a pregnancy to term, Ferguson’s injury was not cognizable in a reproductive rights framework grounded in abortion and contraception. Because she was targeted by a facially neutral drug testing policy, her claims of racial discrimination were dismissed. While the involvement of law enforcement in the policy that resulted in her arrest provided Ferguson with a Fourth Amendment avenue of relief, the Court’s decision in
- highlights the need for a capacious vision of reproductive justice, one that can contest the limitations of existing constitutional jurisprudence and in so doing protect the interests of poor black women who are among the most vulnerable to state regulation of their bodies and their reproductive choices.
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Chapter 2: The Pregnant Captain, the Notorious REG, and the Vision of RBG: The Story of Struck v. Secretary of Defense 22 results (showing 5 best matches)
- note 81, at 35 (discussing reproductive freedom as the right to decide whether to have children without state interference, and viewing as about “coercion”). For an account of reproductive rights claims of the era, see Reva B. Siegel,
- to be “the first reproductive choice case.” as an ideal vehicle for raising both sides of the issue of reproductive choice:
- . at 53–54 & n.55 (citing Roe v. Wade, 314 F. Supp. 1217 (N.D. Tex. 1970)). For Ginsburg’s recent reemphasis on the link between constitutional equality and liberty in the area of reproductive rights, see Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 170–72, 184–86 (2007) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (citing constitutional sex equality cases as supporting the abortion right).
- brief self-consciously pointed—between cases enforcing women’s right to equal protection and decisions protecting their autonomy in deciding whether and when to bear children. , Ginsburg later wrote, “could have served as a bridge, linking reproductive choice to [sex discrimination].” “[C]onfronted with Captain Struck’s unwanted discharge,” she continued, “might the Court have comprehended an argument, or at least glimpsed a reality, it later resisted—that disadvantageous treatment of a woman because of her pregnancy and reproductive choice is a paradigm case of discrimination
- Struck headed next to the Supreme Court, where she was represented by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her capacity as general counsel for the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. Ginsburg recently described several litigation efforts on behalf of women’s rights at the time: Another major effort was “reproductive choice.”
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Chapter 7: Undue-ing Roe: Constitutional Conflict and Political Polarization in Planned Parenthood v. Casey 47 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Advocacy for and against abortion rights informed the Supreme Court’s decision in , shaping the decision’s paradoxical result. On the one hand, the ruling provided a more powerful constitutional foundation for abortion rights, foregrounding the claims to women’s equal citizenship long emphasized by feminists. honored the state’s interest in potential life, and by green-lighting a wider range of abortion regulations, allowed anti-abortion activists and legislators to limit abortion access in the name of protecting women. For feminist advocates of reproductive justice, abortion regulations for poor and low-income women’s access to reproductive health care. For the conservative legal movement,
- , abortion opponents put reproductive rights and justice advocates on the defensive, employing various strategies to undermine or reverse the Court’s decision. Between 1973 and 1980, abortion foes focused primarily on two campaigns: one for a Human Life Amendment that would enshrine fetal rights in the federal constitution by declaring that life begins at conception; and another for restrictions on public funding for abortion care. The Supreme Court upheld state and federal funding bans in and its progeny believed that courts should not consider abortion a fundamental right, but rather should defer to legislative judgments about abortion and uphold regulations with a “rational basis.”
- Guam’s ban, passed in March 1990, caught advocates on both sides off-guard. Anita Arriola, a thirty-two-year-old pro-choice lawyer whose mother, Guam Senator and Catholic lay leader Elizabeth Arriola, authored the restrictive law, alerted ACLU Reproductive Rights Project Director Janet Benshoof. Benshoof called the statute’s surprise unanimous passage, under threat of excommunication by Guam’s Catholic Archbishop, “Pearl Harbor for women.”
- ’s concept of liberty in defining the capacity of women to act in society, and to make reproductive decisions.” And “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”
- City of Akron v. Akron Ctr. Reproductive Health, 462 U.S. 416, 463–65 (1983) (O’Connor, J., dissenting).
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Chapter 3: The Unfinished Story of Roe v. Wade 50 results (showing 5 best matches)
- As the effort to secure legislative reform stalled, those in favor of abortion rights turned to other approaches and audiences. Might an appeal to the courts and to the Constitution succeed in changing the law governing abortion—and if so, on what grounds? Young lawyers—recent law school graduates, many of them women—began to make new claims, about a recent Supreme Court decision recognizing a right to privacy in reproductive decision-making,
- violated the right to privacy recognized in the Supreme Court’s due process cases, The Weddington-Coffee brief incorporated the doctrinal privacy arguments that Roy Lucas had advanced in the New York litigation, but did not mention the movement equality concerns about sex and motherhood that Nancy Stearns and her colleagues were pressing as the reason for recognizing women’s right to control their reproductive lives.
- It was not until feminists joined the movement for decriminalization that woman-centered arguments for abortion reform emerged. Betty Friedan, the founder of the National Organization for Women, made such an argument in a fiery speech to an abortion-rights conference in Chicago in February 1969. The conference was sponsored by the Illinois Citizens for the Medical Control of Abortion, Friedan presented the audience with a completely different rationale for reform: “[T]here is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we assert and demand the control over our own bodies, over our own reproductive process.”
- The Court acquiesced in these funding decisions as consistent with the right recognized in to expose poor women of color to the same health and reproductive inequalities they endured before
- . at 856 (“The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”).
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Chapter 1: Sexual Liberty and Criminal Law Reform: The Story of Griswold v. Connecticut 29 results (showing 5 best matches)
- struck down the Connecticut birth control ban and famously announced a right to privacy emanating from the “penumbras” of various constitutional guarantees. ’s logic has underwritten a broader commitment to reproductive rights—one that has expanded the right to contraception, secured a woman’s right to choose an abortion,
- —one that has been woefully overlooked. Although we have come to regard it as a constitutional law case, or as a reproductive rights case, at bottom,
- After her work challenging the contraceptive ban, Roraback would continue litigating on behalf of reproductive rights in Connecticut. She litigated a string of cases challenging Connecticut’s criminal ban on abortion, leading to the law’s invalidation by a three-judge panel in 1972, just a few months before Abele v. Markle, 351 F. Supp. 224 (D. Conn. 1972). In challenging the Connecticut abortion statute, Roraback “started developing some of these ideas that a woman has a right to control her own destiny.” Weisberg,
- is a meditation on the relationship between enumerated and unenumerated rights. For others, it is a reproductive rights case, laying a foundation for greater recognition of bodily autonomy. For still others, it stands as a warning about the perils of judicial overreaching and creating rights out of whole cloth.
- and the Unenumerated Right of Privacy
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Chapter 6: Elision and Erasure: Race, Class, and Gender in Harris v. McRae 22 results (showing 5 best matches)
- ) Because of the Hyde Amendment’s racial impact, many opponents of the funding restriction articulated their disapproval of the measure in the language of race. One important activist group that challenged the restriction in racial terms was the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (“CARASA”). Most CARASA members were socialist feminists whose activism focused on issues of reproductive justice because they understood the relationship between economic oppression, reproductive control, and women’s subordination.
- The abortion cutbacks will mean increased sterilization abuse because federally funded abortions are no longer an option for poor women. Since birth control is never 100% effective, sterilizations become the only funded alternative to bearing unwanted children…. Both the Hyde Amendment and forced sterilization are illegitimate interferences with a woman’s right to choose whether or not to bear children. To limit a woman’s reproductive choices is sexist; to promote sterilizations in Black, Hispanic and Native American communities is racist.
- while also explaining why these elements were absent from the Court’s opinion. By excavating these critical elements, the essay provides a more complete understanding of the case and its place in the broader debate over abortion access and reproductive rights and justice.
- litigators—who included the Center for Constitutional Rights lawyers Rhonda Copelon and Nancy Stearns, ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project director Janet Benshoof, New York University Law School professor Sylvia Law, and several others—failed to challenge the Hyde Amendment as a racially discriminatory measure. These lawyers made no mention of race in their challenge to the Hyde Amendment because the Burger Court’s precedents counseled strongly against it. Specifically, the Court’s 1976 decision in
- The politics swirling around the Equal Rights Amendment (“ERA”), and the effort to ratify it, also dissuaded Copelon and her team from arguing that the Hyde Amendment was sex discrimination prohibited by the equal protection clause. Many proponents of the ERA were wary of arguing that restrictions on abortion and abortion funding amounted to sex discrimination because they worried that support for the ERA—and the votes to ratify it—would be undermined (especially among more moderate legislators) if there was any established link between abortion rights and equal protection.
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Chapter 10: “Similar in Their Ability or Inability to Work”: Young v. UPS and the Meaning of Pregnancy Discrimination 15 results (showing 5 best matches)
- and indeed of the PDA itself—features a set of alliances that complicate the fault lines evident elsewhere in this volume. That is, the legal fight to protect women who not only become but remain pregnant, and who wish to continue working while pregnant, has produced coalitions of individuals and organizations that take starkly different views on many other issues involving reproductive rights and justice. So
- UAW v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 499 U.S. 187, 211 (1991) (“It is no more appropriate for the courts than it is for individual employers to decide whether a woman’s reproductive role is more important to herself and her family than her economic role. Congress has left this choice to the woman as hers to make.”).
- , Pregnancy Discrimination, and Reproductive Liberty
- She gave birth in April 2007, returned to work that June, and in July initiated a challenge that would strengthen the rights of pregnant workers nationwide.
- might require of employers—in particular, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes it an unlawful employment practice for an employer “to discriminate against any individual with respect to …. compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of reported at the time, “A cause that has managed to unite women from feminists to members of the Right to Life movement is the right to disability benefits for time lost due to pregnancy.”
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Chapter 12: The Story of Brooke S.B. v. Elizabeth A.C.C.: Parental Recognition in the Age of LGBT Equality 19 results (showing 5 best matches)
- .’s narrow reading of the statutory term ‘parent’ … has not kept pace with the reality for thousands of children, particularly those raised by committed same-sex couples, many of whom conceived through assisted reproductive technology (‘ART’).”).
- Questions of reproductive rights are often entangled with questions of equality. An important and voluminous scholarly literature examines how the regulation of pregnancy, contraception, and abortion relates to questions of sex equality.
- Yet, the emphasis on LGBT equality can shape approaches to parental recognition in ways that yield recognition for some families—namely, same-sex couples and those using assisted reproductive technologies (ART)—while leaving other families in an uncertain state—namely, families in which the nonbiological parent did not participate in the plan to have the child but nonetheless raised the child. This distinction captures differences between A functional approach focuses on events that occur after the child is born, such as whether there is an existing parent-child relationship, and whether, with the consent of the legal parent, the individual claiming parental rights formed a bonded parental relationship with the child.
- Intentional parenthood focuses on the intent to be a parent of the child. This approach, which traces its origins to married, different-sex couples using assisted reproductive technologies (ART),
- Not only had the nation come to recognize same-sex couples’ right to marry, but courts and legislatures in many states had recognized the rights of
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Chapter 9: Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs: Universalism and Reproductive Justice 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- : Universalism and Reproductive Justice
- In April 1998, William Hibbs filed a lawsuit against the State of Nevada for violating his rights under the FMLA. By counting the banked leave donated by his coworkers against his twelve-week FMLA allocation without giving him sufficient advance notice, he alleged, the state had violated the statute. He also alleged that the state had violated the statute by retaliating against him for invoking his FMLA rights.
- vii (2d ed. 1983) (“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most important civil rights legislation of this century. Title VII of that Act … has been its most important part.”).
- Universalism and Civil Rights (With Notes on Voting Rights After
- As Justice Ginsburg later explained, “[t]he California law sharply divided women’s rights advocates”:
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Chapter 4: Sex Equality and the U.S. Welfare Regime: The Story of Geduldig v. Aiello 19 results (showing 5 best matches)
- poses the crucially important question whether constitutional sex equality requires public responsibility for the costs of reproduction. This story begins with an account of the U.S. welfare regime’s gendered origins, which simultaneously constructed women’s secondary status in the labor market and private familial responsibility for reproduction. The story continues in the late 1960s and 1970s, analyzing feminist advocacy both to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting sex discrimination in employment, and to win recognition for a constitutional right to sex equality under the Equal Protection Clause. Specifically, feminist attorneys and reformers drew an analogy between pregnancy and temporary disability as a means to secure the inclusion of pregnancy and childbirth within both the public and private dimensions of the welfare regime. In its 1974 decision in ...to realize either economic or reproductive justice for women. Not until the early...
- equality, the Council asserted in 1966, could not be achieved via formal equality—same treatment of similarly situated individuals—but rather required a recognition of reproductive sex difference, with pregnancy subject to ‘special’ recognition. In 1970, the CACSW performed an abrupt turnaround, issuing a report stating: “Childbirth and complications of pregnancy are, for all job-related purposes, temporary disabilities and should be treated as such under any health insurance, temporary disability insurance, or sick leave plan of an employer, union, or fraternal society.” The temporary disability paradigm represented a new strategy for realizing economic security for pregnant workers, based on an antidiscrimination right rather than on an independent claim to a social-welfare entitlement.
- reproductive rights and from evolving social norms that gave women greater freedom not to become mothers.
- Universalism and Reproductive Justice
- litigation pitted principles of individual freedom, anti-stereotyping, and reproductive autonomy against bureaucratic authority, paternalistic conceptions of pregnancy, and patriarchal opposition to maternal employment. In contrast to
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Chapter 11: Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt and What It Means to Protect Women 23 results (showing 5 best matches)
- as “the most important abortion case on reproductive rights … in twenty-five years,”
- Indeed, lawmakers argued, the surgical center requirement would hurt women because it would drive reproductive healthcare clinics out of business, leaving vast numbers of women—particularly those who live in rural areas and/or lack financial resources—without access to care. If the law were permitted to take effect, the best estimates suggested that two million Texas women of reproductive age would be required to drive more than fifty miles to reach a provider, and nearly one
- questions about the projected costs to women’s (and men’s) healthcare of closing dozens of reproductive health clinics throughout the state, Laubenberg simply repeated, in almost rote fashion, that the bill was designed to protect women’s health.
- The bill’s opponents repeatedly observed that Texas was at or near the bottom in a broad range of categories related to reproductive health and women’s wellbeing more generally. They noted that Texas ranks dead last when it comes to the percentage of state residents with health insurance.
- Recognizing that H.B. 2 was almost certain to pass, legislators who opposed the bill offered a series of amendments designed to blunt its impact on women’s access to reproductive healthcare. One such amendment required the state to cover the cost of converting abortion
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- Publication Date: April 22nd, 2019
- ISBN: 9781683289920
- Subject: Reproductive Rights
- Series: Law Stories
- Type: Overviews
- Description: This book tells the movement and litigation stories behind important reproductive rights and justice cases. The twelve chapters span topics including contraception, abortion, pregnancy, and assisted reproductive technologies, telling the stories of these cases using a wide-lens perspective that illuminates the complex ways law is debated and forged—in social movements, in representative government, and in courts. Some of the chapters shed new light on cases that are very much part of the constitutional law canon—Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs. Others introduce the reader to new cases from state and lower federal courts that illuminate paths not taken in the law. Reading the cases together highlights the lived horizon in which individuals have encountered and struggled with questions of reproductive rights and justice at different eras in our nation’s history—and so reveals the many faces of law and legal change. The volume is being published at a critical and perhaps pivotal moment for this area of law. The changing composition of the Supreme Court, increased executive and legislative action, and shifting political interests have all pushed issues of reproductive rights and justice to the forefront of contemporary discourse. The volume is suited to a wide range of law school courses, including constitutional law, family law, employment law, and reproductive rights and justice; it could also be assigned in undergraduate or graduate courses on history, gender studies, and reproductive rights and justice.