100 Books Like Still Explosion

This sly, feminist satire posits that everything is tied to reproduction.

Zumas must have read widely before thinking out loud in print about everything from love, sex, birth, life, love, loss, loneliness, and death to small things that seem inconsequential but make sense within the tale she spins.

Narrated in a cycle by four women, the core of the novel imagines a world where abortion is banned and women are surveilled—but with absurd legal twists and deadpan irony. Zumas blends social commentary with magical realism to deliver a novel that disturbs the reader with inconvenient truths and difficult questions.

This is a page-turner of a novel about a shooting at a women’s reproductive health services clinic in Mississippi, where the 15-year-old daughter of the hostage negotiator is caught inside the clinic. A variety of people are trapped inside the clinic for hours that day. The shooter, the daughter, the hostage negotiator, the abortion doctor, a pro-life protestor who was spying inside the clinic, and a woman who just had an abortion in the clinic–their characters and motivations are all very understandable to me, which makes the tension about this horrible situation that much more riveting. 

Taking place in New York City after the Civil War, this novel is filled with fascinating historical information about the beginnings of the woman suffrage movement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the life of free love advocate Victoria Woodhull, and the challenges a Jewish immigrant woman faced making a living selling condoms. At the same time, this book provides a great deal of context in which to understand how Antony Comstock, as a special agent of the U.S. Post Office, succeeded on March 3, 1873 in banning birth control, contraceptives, abortifacients, and other items he determined to be obscene. 

This historical novel about the life of Margaret Sanger, founder of the birth control movement, is full of accurate details about the life of Sanger – a revolutionary who spent her life making it possible for women to choose the number of children they wish to bear. She was an intriguing character driven by her cause and her belief that women enjoy sex as well as men do. She was charismatic, generous, ruthless, compassionate, calculating, and, when it came to her children, conflicted.

Mary Ziegler is arguably the country’s foremost expert on abortion law; I hear her on NPR every time judges and justices weigh in on women’s reproductive freedom.

This is her account not of how Roe v. Wade got decided or what the law did, but instead of how the case has become symbolic of the Supreme Court writ large and the struggles over women’s autonomy in the United States. In essence, this is a history of how we have all come to invest so much in the myth of Roe, even as it was recently overturned.

I find Ziegler to be a lively storyteller, and she brings a variety of perspectives to the book, interrogating Roe’s relationship to racial justice, religious liberty, privacy (of course), and the role of science in public life. 

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. 

What happens to women who can’t get the abortions that they want or need? For most of our history, the answers were anecdotal and speculative until Diana Greene Foster and a team of fellow researchers followed one thousand women, some of whom obtained abortions, some of whom could not do so.

The answer is a triumph of social science reporting. By almost every measure, those women who could not access abortion care fared worse ten years later, and many of the years in between, than those women who were able to make their own choices about their bodies and their lives.

What I loved about the book was how transparent Foster was about the research design for the study and how intertwined she showed that abortion is in so many aspects of women’s lives. 

Eve tackles the topic of ectogenesis – gestation outside the womb. From literature to bioethics to cutting-edge medical research, the book examines this complex topic in creative ways.

Its chapter on abortion politics is particularly insightful because it considers how technology that allows for gestation in artificial wombs might lead to restrictions in abortion laws.

Horn’s writing blends sociological, legal, and bioethical analysis together with personal reflections on her own experience of pregnancy.

Not only is this one of the best books I’ve read on reproductive politics, but it’s one of the best books on the experience of being pregnant because it beautifully reflects on the complex social meanings of pregnancy and its physical embodiment. Eve is written in a highly accessible style, so readers without prior knowledge of the topic will find the narrative compelling.

Hartmann’s book is a classic and is in its third edition.

This is an essential reading for anyone who cares about feminist politics and abortion rights because it provides a global historical context. Laws and attitudes on reproductive rights differ dramatically across the world – where one country might restrict abortion and contraception, another country might grant easy access to contraception and abortion.

This book shows the dark history of global population control efforts that used abortion and contraception to attempt to lower birthrates in poor countries. She reminds us that, across the world, governments and other organizations have used heavy-handed tactics to force contraception and abortion on some people, especially in countries where there are worries about overpopulation.

Hartmann’s book warns against focusing too narrowly on the right to end a pregnancy, without focusing enough attention on the right to bear children too.

This is the most important book to read if you want to understand (a) eugenics generally and (b) how it played out in Alberta, the part of Canada where these ideas got the most traction. Dyck is a great historian, but even better, she does not forget that history is about real people. Her history is detailed and thorough, but it is not dry. She uses all kinds of interesting sources including courtroom evidence and personal records to bring the issues to life. She also moves the story forward by writing about abortion in the 1970s and 1980s and shows us in a very thought-provoking way the connections between eugenic “fitness” and our notions of “disability” today.