Roe v. Wade: Fifty Years After - Paperback

by Catherine Clinton (Editor), Rhae Lynn Barnes (Editor), Deirdre Cooper Owens (Author)

Just over fifty years ago on January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade assured millions of women that abortion was a protected constitutional right due to a woman's right to privacy. In the context of the burgeoning women's rights movement, it seemed like an inalienable victory: women might become equal to men in their right to determine what would happen to their bodies. This was a hard-won fight that reached back to colonial America and slavery, but on June 24, 2022, the decision was shockingly reversed by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. What happened? What transpired socially, politically, legally, in religious institutions and in popular culture in the half-century when "the right to choose" led to this stunning transformation in American society?

Roe v. Wade Fifty Years After, coedited by Rhae Lynn Barnes and Catherine Clinton for the History in the Headlines series, brings together a team of world-renowned scholars, prizewinning historians, and Pulitzer Prize-winning public intellectuals who specialize in reproductive history. They assembled at Harvard University in the weeks following the Dobbs decision to talk through the centuries-long history of abortion in what became the United States, how its representation changed in the law and popular culture, and how a wellspring of social movements on both the right and left led to a fifty-year showdown over some of the most outstanding human questions: What is life? When does it begin? Who has the right to end it? Who has the right to determine what happens to someone else's body? How can the law define and restrict women's reproductive health? And how have race, class, geography, sexuality, and other factors shaped who gets to be a part of answering these questions? The international impact of the struggles for reproductive freedom for women within the United States comes into sharp focus within this important volume, shedding light on past, present, and future dimensions of reproductive freedom for all Americans.

Author Biography

Deirdre Cooper Owens (Author)
DEIRDRE COOPER OWENS is an associate professor at the University of Connecticut and a former director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She is the author of the prize-winning Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology (UGA, 2017).

Fiona de Londras (Author)
FIONA DE LONDRAS is the Chair of Global Legal Studies at the University of Birmingham. She is author or co-author of four books and a dozen scholarly articles, including The Practice and Problems of Transnational Counter-Terrorism and Repealing the 8th: Reforming Abortion Law in Ireland, with Máiréad Enright.

Alicia Gutierrez-Romine (Author)
ALICIA GUTIERREZ-ROMINE is Associate Professor of History at California State University, San Bernardino. She is the author of From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969.

Johanna Schoen (Author)
JOHANNA SCHOEN is Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is author or editor of three books and over a dozen scholarly articles, including Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare in the Twentieth Century and Abortion after Roe.

Salamishah Tillet (Author)
SALAMISHAH TILLET is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies & Creative Writing at Rutgers University. She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and her other writing has appeared in over half a dozen academic journals and books.

Karin Wulf (Author)
KARIN WULF is Professor of History and the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library (both at Brown University). She is author of four books and a dozen articles, including Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia and the forthcoming Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America.

Catherine Clinton (Editor)
CATHERINE CLINTON is the Denman Professor of American History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has served as president of the Southern Historical Association, is an elected member of the Society of American Historians, and a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. She is the author and editor of more than two dozen volumes, including Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom; Mrs. Lincoln: A Life; Stepdaughters of History; and Civil War Stories (Georgia).

Rhae Lynn Barnes (Editor)
RHAE LYNN BARNES is an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. She is public speaker, writer, editor, documentarian, onscreen commenter, and coeditor of three books, including American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History. She is the author of the forthcoming books, Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface and Tragic Kingdom.