Why read A Woman's Life Is a Human Life?

Book cover of A Woman's Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice

Book description

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this urgent book from historian Felicia Kornbluh reveals two movement victories in New York that forever changed the politics of reproductive rights nationally

Before there was a “Jane Roe,” the most important champions of reproductive rights were ordinary people…

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Why read it?

1 author picked A Woman's Life Is a Human Life as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Nicholas L. Syrett

Author

Part biography of the author’s mother and their neighbor and part history of the fight for abortion rights and the anti-sterilization campaign in New York State, the book is also a portrait of two overlapping and divergent movements for reproductive rights and justice from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Kornbluh is especially diligent about showing why certain parts of the struggle for reproductive justice mattered to different constituencies of women and how white middle-class women were often blinded by their own privileges.

This is down-in-the-trenches social activism history at its best.

From Nicholas' list on revealing the unexpected history of abortion in the US.