A Woman's Life Is a Human Life

September 19, 2022
Kornbluh (The Battle for Welfare Rights), a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Vermont, delivers an eye-opening chronicle of grassroots campaigns by New York State women to change laws regarding abortion access and involuntary sterilization. In 1968, the author’s mother, Beatrice Kornbluh, wrote a law to repeal all state restrictions on abortion. Though her position garnered support from New York Democratic Party activists, feminist organizations, religious leaders, and medical professionals, the final version of the bill, which passed in 1970, set a time limit for “unrestricted abortion access” at 24 weeks of pregnancy. Still, it was the most liberal abortion law in the country and served as a model for 17 other states,helping to pave the way to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Meanwhile, Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías, a neighbor of the Kornbluhs’, led efforts to ban involuntary or coercive sterilization, using an intersectional approach focused on the needs of women of color and others historically subjected to sterilization abuses. The resulting guidelines were adopted by New York hospitals, codified in state law, and made into national policy in 1979. Throughout, Kornbluh makes public policy and legal history come alive by demonstrating the power of women’s collective action. The result is an inspiring study of how progress happens.

January 1, 2023
University of Vermont Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Kornbluh's white mother drafted the New York law that legalized abortion; her Puerto Rican-American next-door neighbor led a movement against sterilization abuse. This book shares the stories of those efforts and the fragmented, hard-fought battle to improve American reproductive care. Too often, the fight for reproductive justice was sharply segregated, with the priorities of the white middle class taking precedence over those of Black, brown, and poor communities: The success of abortion legalization arose from tireless organizing, but also from an explicit desire (shared by legislators and activists alike) to decrease the number of babies born to disabled, poor, and non-white Americans. Despite the author's best intentions, this book skews heavily toward abortion rights, sometimes giving short shrift to the broader and more inclusive vision of reproductive justice put forward by activists from marginalized communities. At the end of the book, Kornbluh wonders what might have been achieved if not for racism--a question white proponents of reproductive justice would do well to ponder in the post-Roe era.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 1, 2022
A women's studies professor explores how two 20th-century activist victories have shaped the battle over reproductive freedom in the U.S. As she recounts, Kornbluh discovered that her lawyer mother, Beatrice, had fought to decriminalize abortion in New York in the late 1960s days before she died. The author's research into the history of reproductive rights in New York led her to the full story of Dr. Helen Rodr�guez-Tr�as. Kornbluh knew the doctor as her neighbor, but she learned that she was also "an effective activist, a female Puerto Rican physician at a time when that made her an extreme outlier, and eventually the first Latina head of the American Public Health Association." The author chronicles how her mother and Rodr�guez-Tr�as were significant figures in two complementary social movements that took place before and after Roe v. Wade. In the late 1960s, Kornbluh's mother was part of a group of educated, mostly White women who worked with "risk-taking ministers, rabbis, doctors and lawyers" to force the New York legislature to pass the most liberal abortion law in the country. That law went on to become the Supreme Court's guiding light when it decided in favor of abortion rights in 1973. But in the years that followed, it became clear to Rodr�guez-Tr�as and other like-minded feminists that abortion rights did nothing to address the basic problem women, especially women of color, faced of "whether, when, and how to have children." It only masked the racial and economic biases of the American medical establishment, which had a history of coercing women of color into sterilization while discouraging "relatively well-off" White women from getting the procedure. Both timely and engaging, this insightful study reveals that the battle for abortion rights must be considered only one part of a much larger, more complex struggle that needs to address the protection of the sexual freedom and choices of all women. Necessary reading for anyone worried about this post-Dobbs world.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.