100 Books Like The Turnaway Study

The word “abortionist” usually conjures up images of dangerous back alleys where untrained men take advantage of women.

In the case of Rickie Solinger’s book, instead, we meet Ruth Barnett, who performed approximately 40,000 abortions in the mid-twentieth century (1918-1968) in Portland, Oregon, without losing a single patient.

What I loved about this book is how Solinger takes us behind the scenes of a thoroughly illegal abortion clinic that still managed to provide expert care to all its patients, even as it sought to evade the law and its enforcers at every turn. 

This is the definitive account of what abortion looked like for the one hundred years during which it was almost completely illegal in the United States.

Reagan does an excellent job of showing us the different ways that women nevertheless accessed abortion care during that time, even as she points out how access was always shaped by race and class.

She is also great at demonstrating how and why police and lawmakers cracked down on abortion and made it less accessible at particular moments in this one-hundred-year period, ultimately showing why it was eventually decriminalized in 1973. 

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. 

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.

As I read this book, I realized the more things change, the more they stay the same, particularly when it comes to the battle for reproductive rights. The two women chronicled here were “rivals,” and they were direct opposites when it came to upbringing, personality, and strategic views. But they both were dedicated to making birth control legal in this country – it’s hard to believe that providing it was once a crime – and both fought hard and sacrificed much to achieve that goal. The author shows clearly how history repeats itself: the battles these two women fought mirror current ones over reproductive rights and show that women’s rights are far from guaranteed in any era. 

This book showed me that rivalry and competition can actually fuel a cause and help both participants achieve their goals. In this case, two strong-willed women from widely varied backgrounds had differing opinions… show more.

When I read this book as a young lawyer in reproductive rights in the 1990s, it resonated deeply with the daily bias that I witnessed against my clients. Decades later, a highlight of my book tour was being invited to do a talk with Professor Roberts at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Dorothy Roberts’ exploration of “race, reproduction and the meaning of liberty” is powerful.

Her writing clearly lays out how restrictions on abortion, parenting, and access to basic health care are shaped by and also perpetuate American racism. This book inspired me to work for equity and reproductive freedom for all, and hopefully, it will continue to do so for others, too. 

For years, women have been imprisoned by the myth that we must rely on medications with undesired side effects to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Yet the reality is simple: Men can take the responsibility not to ejaculate inside someone who has not requested they do so.

This book helped me take control of my reproductive health by asserting boundaries for how partners treat me. It's my body, after all. 

In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Constitution guaranteed a “right to privacy” as it struck down Connecticut’s longstanding ban on the sale and use of birth control. (Amazing trivia: the state legislator who drafted the state’s 1879 anti-contraceptive law was P.T. Barnum.) Garrow’s history recounts the decades-long efforts of Connecticut activists to challenge the restriction, and how lawyers shifted their choice of plaintiffs from doctors asserting the law interfered with their ability to provide medical advice to married women claiming a right to privacy within their marriages. In the years following Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court gradually expanded that novel privacy doctrine, extending it to the intimate decisions of unmarried people, and eventually to cover the right to an abortion with Roe v. Wade.

An elegant mystery set in a near-to-partly-cloudy future. In the wake of some sort of apocalypse, communities have rebuilt.

In the Coast Road region, a sustainable civilization based on careful attention to quotas and mutual regard would seem an idyll of peaceful coexistence.

And yet. Enid is an investigator, called upon at times of uncomfortable questions.

She and her partner are called to look into a suspicious death. The buried realities encountered reveal a less-than-ideal picture of communities coping with things that do not fit with their presumptions.

A quiet mystery built atop a fascinating portrait of What Comes Next. I was drawn to the characters, the situation, but most especially the questions hovering just outside the confines of the story.