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"Birth Control"
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Birth control battles : how race and class divided American religion
\"Conservative and progressive religious groups fiercely disagree about issues of sex and gender. But how did we get here? Sociologist Melissa J. Wilde shows us how today's modern divisions began in the 1930s in the earliest public battles over birth control and not for the reasons we might expect today. By examining thirty of America's most prominent religious groups-including Mormons, Methodists, Southern Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, Quakers, Jews, and more-Wilde contends that fights over birth control were never about sex, women's rights, or privacy but were actually about race, class, and white supremacist concerns about undesirable fertility. Using census and archival data and more than 10,000 articles, statements, and sermons from religious and secular periodicals, Wilde chronicles the religious community's division on contraception. She takes us from the 1930s, when support for the eugenics movement saw birth control as an act of duty for less desirable groups, to the 1960s, when religious identities had crystalized to such an extent that most congregants had forgotten the roots of their stance on birth control. Charting the twists and turns of how reproductive politics were tied to complex views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny, Birth Control Battles shows the enduring importance of race and class for American religion as it rewrites our understandings of what it has meant to be progressive or conservative in America\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Fit to Be Tied
The 1960s revolutionized American contraceptive practice. Diaphragms, jellies, and condoms with high failure rates gave way to newer choices of the Pill, IUD, and sterilization.Fit to Be Tiedprovides a history of sterilization and what would prove to become, at once, socially divisive and a popular form of birth control.
During the first half of the twentieth century, sterilization (tubal ligation and vasectomy) was a tool of eugenics. Individuals who endorsed crude notions of biological determinism sought to control the reproductive decisions of women they considered \"unfit\" by nature of race or class, and used surgery to do so. Incorporating first-person narratives, court cases, and official records, Rebecca M. Kluchin examines the evolution of forced sterilization of poor women, especially women of color, in the second half of the century and contrasts it with demands for contraceptive sterilization made by white women and men. She chronicles public acceptance during an era of reproductive and sexual freedom, and the subsequent replacement of the eugenics movement with \"neo-eugenic\" standards that continued to influence American medical practice, family planning, public policy, and popular sentiment.
eBook
Emergency contraception : the story of a global reproductive health technology
\"Globally, more than one fourth of all pregnancies are unintended. Emergency contraception can be used after sex to reduce the risk of pregnancy. But despite their safety and efficacy, emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) have sparked controversy worldwide. In examining the journey of ECPs in fourteen countries, this volume explores the ways that a global reproductive health technology both acquires local cultural meaning and encounters similar challenges everywhere it is introduced worldwide. This book's portraits of activism and opposition highlight the range of social, cultural, religious, and political contexts that shape the interpretation of new medical technologies\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Reproducing Empire
Original and compelling, Laura Briggs'sReproducing Empireshows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the \"culture of poverty\" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization. Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history.Reproducing Empiresuggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism. Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.
eBook
Women of color and the reproductive rights movement
While most people believe that the movement to secure voluntary reproductive control for women centered solely on abortion rights, for many women abortion was not the only, or even primary, focus.
Jennifer Nelson tells the story of the feminist struggle for legal abortion and reproductive rights in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s through the particular contributions of women of color. She explores the relationship between second-wave feminists, who were concerned with a woman's right to choose, Black and Puerto Rican Nationalists, who were concerned that Black and Puerto Rican women have as many children as possible “for the revolution,” and women of color themselves, who negotiated between them. Contrary to popular belief, Nelson shows that women of color were able to successfully remake the mainstream women's liberation and abortion rights movements by appropriating select aspects of Black Nationalist politics—including addressing sterilization abuse, access to affordable childcare and healthcare, and ways to raise children out of poverty—for feminist discourse.
eBook
When Sex Changed
InWhen Sex Changed, Layne Parish Craig analyzes the ways literary texts responded to the political, economic, sexual, and social values put forward by the birth control movements of the 1910s to the 1930s in the United States and Great Britain.
Discussion of contraception and related topics (including feminism, religion, and eugenics) changed the way that writers depicted women, marriage, and family life. Tracing this shift, Craig compares disparate responses to the birth control controversy, from early skepticism by mainstream feminists, reflected in Charlotte Perkins Gilman'sHerland, to concern about the movement's race and class implications suggested in Nella Larsen'sQuicksand, to enthusiastic speculation about contraception's political implications, as in Virginia Woolf'sThree Guineas.
While these texts emphasized birth control's potential to transform marriage and family life and emancipate women from the \"slavery\" of constant childbearing, birth control advocates also used less-than-liberatory language that excluded the poor, the mentally ill, non-whites, and others. Ultimately, Craig argues, the debates that began in these early political and literary texts-texts that document both the birth control movement's idealism and its exclusionary rhetoric-helped shape the complex legacy of family planning and women's rights with which the United States and the United Kingdom still struggle.
eBook
Unnatural selection : choosing boys over girls, and the consequences of a world full of men
\"Lianyungang, a booming port city, has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls. These numbers don't seem terribly grim, but in ten years, the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. By the time those children reach adulthood, their generation will have twenty-four million more men than women. The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bleak: Asia now has 163 million females \"missing\" from its population. Gender imbalance reaches far beyond Asia, affecting Georgia, Eastern Europe, and cities in the U.S. where there are significant immigrant populations. The world, therefore, is becoming increasingly male, and this mismatch is likely to create profound social upheaval. Historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced periods of violent conflict and instability. Mara Hvistendahl has written a stunning, impeccably-researched book that does not flinch from examining not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies of sex selection but Western complicity with them\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Abortion in Mexico
Abortion in Mexico: A History concisely examines the long
history of abortion from the early postcontact period through the
present day in Mexico by studying the law, criminal and
ecclesiastical trials, medical texts, newspapers, and other popular
publications. Nora E. Jaffary draws on courts' and medical
practitioners' handling of birth termination to advance two central
arguments. First, Jaffary contends, the social, legal, and judicial
condemnation of abortion should be understood more as an aberration
than the norm in Mexico, as legal conditions and long periods of
Mexican history indicate that the law, courts, the medical
profession, and everyday Mexicans tolerated the practice. Second,
the historical framework of abortion differed greatly from its
present representation. The language of fetal personhood and the
notion of the inherent value of human life were not central
elements of the conceptualization of abortion until the late
twentieth century. Until then, the regulation of abortion derived
exclusively out of concerns for pregnant people themselves,
specifically about their embodiment of sexual honor. In
Abortion in Mexico Jaffary presents the first longue
durée examination of this history from a variety of locations
in Mexico, providing a concise yet comprehensive overview of the
practice of abortion and informing readers of just how much the
debate has evolved.
eBook