Overview

The next phase of the war over reproduction in America What's next for the battle over abortion? Mary Ziegler argues that simply undoing Roe v. Wade has never been the endpoint for the antiabortion movement. Since the 1960s, the larger goal has been to secure recognition of fetuses and embryos as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a step that the modern antiabortion movement argues would make liberal abortion laws unconstitutional. Personhood chronicles the internal struggles and changing ideas about race, sex, religion, war, corporate rights, and poverty that shaped the personhood struggle over half a century. The book explores how Americans came to take for granted that fetal personhood requires criminalization and suggests that other ways of valuing both fetal life and women's equality might be possible. Ziegler ultimately shows that the battle for personhood has long been about more than abortion: it has aimed to overhaul the regulation of in vitro fertilization, contraception, and the behavior of pregnant women; change the meaning of equality under the law; and determine how courts decide which fundamental rights Americans enjoy. This book is necessary reading for anyone seeking to understand the era launched by the reversal of Roe.

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9780300273045

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Reviews

“If supporters of reproductive rights believed that Roe v. Wade was the endgame, Mary Ziegler offers a powerful, and disturbing, history showing that the long campaign for fetal personhood has even grander ambitions. Ziegler, one of the nation’s premier historians of abortion, offers the definitive account of the concept of fetal personhood—past, present and future.”—Julian Zelizer, Princeton University “This book contributes forcefully to public conversations by showing that American anti-abortion efforts have aimed, ever since the 1960s, to establish fetal personhood in the US Constitution.  Ziegler traces the patience, flexibility, creativity, and (often) opportunism of successive anti-abortion leaders in synching their justifications for fetal rights to the politics of the moment—with significant bearing on larger conceptualizations of equality. No other work is as shrewd in probing the wider effects of the successive parallels invoked by activists intending to illuminate the deprivations suffered by the fetus lacking constitutional rights.”—Nancy F. Cott, author of Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home between the Wars “Mary Ziegler continues to establish herself as one of the most prolific and important scholars of abortion in the United States. Her detailed and meticulously researched account of the anti-choice personhood movement and its implications is as informative as it is frightening.”—Kimberly Mutcherson, editor of Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten

“If supporters of reproductive rights believed that Roe v. Wade was the endgame, Mary Ziegler offers a powerful, and disturbing, history showing that the long campaign for fetal personhood has even grander ambitions. Ziegler, one of the nation’s premier historians of abortion, offers the definitive account of the concept of fetal personhood—past, present and future.”—Julian Zelizer, Princeton University “This book contributes forcefully to public conversations by showing that American anti-abortion efforts have aimed, ever since the 1960s, to establish fetal personhood in the US Constitution.  Ziegler traces the patience, flexibility, creativity, and (often) opportunism of successive anti-abortion leaders in synching their justifications for fetal rights to the politics of the moment—with significant bearing on larger conceptualizations of equality. No other work is as shrewd in probing the wider effects of the successive parallels invoked by activists intending to illuminate the deprivations suffered by the fetus lacking constitutional rights.”—Nancy F. Cott, author of Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home between the Wars

Author Information

Mary Ziegler is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, and author of six books on the law, history, and politics of abortion and American conservatism. She lives in Sausalito, CA.

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