BOOK REVIEW: Joanna N. ERDMAN on Roe: the history of a national obsession by Mary Ziegler (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 1 (June), pp. 173-179)

(Image source: Taylor&Francis)

Mary Ziegler wrote Roe: The History of a National Obsession at the start of 2022. By the year’s end, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.

Yet for Ziegler, Roe was not – and has never been – simply a judicial decision that could be overturned. Roe ‘is a symbol of everything that divides us’ (xii). The us are activists, lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, judges and ordinary Americans who, for the last half-century, have used Roe as a symbol to express and to hold cultural differences and political disagreements, ambiguities, and even contradictions, over basic national values (xi). There is no overturning Roe because Roe has been turning and turning in a national obsession over the United States of America itself.

The chapters name these national values: democracy, liberty, and equality, with liberties of choice and religion, and equalities of gender, class and race, as questions of law, science, and justice. The chapters are written chronologically, punctuated by US Supreme Court judgments, when decade by decade, ideas about Roe were tested and challenged, accepted, dismissed, or simply never acknowledged. Yet again Ziegler does not let the court write this history. Narrative, not authority, structures the book. Roe is carried through time as a symbol of choice and coercion, judicial activism and restraint, scientific truth and perversion, social justice and neglect, religious liberty and strife. ‘When we talk about Roe, we contradict ourselves and one another’ (158). These contradictions only show the complexity of ideas about abortion, ideas which sometimes switched sides in political debates, debates that rarely reduced to two sides. Ziegler captures this ‘robust popular constitutional practice’ (158) in Roe as a cultural object of obsessive attachment and struggle, promise and provocation. Of course, as Roe travelled through time, Roe also travelled around the world and carried the contradictions of its meaning into comparative constitutional abortion law and politics, making this national history recognisable and relatable transnationally.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. For further information about the volume on our blog, please visit here

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2500221

BOOK: Nora E. JAFFARY, Historia del aborto en México (México: Tirant lo Blanch, 2023). ISBN: 9788411971768, pp. 164, $ 299.00 MXN

(Source: Tirant lo Blanch)

ABOUT THE BOOK 

 

Series:  Historia del Derecho en América Latina 

Todas las familias mexicanas esconden historias de embarazos imposibles y no deseados. Hubo mujeres que, legal o ilegalmente, los interrumpieron. Este libro pone en perspectiva histórica las experiencias de estas mujeres, sus comunidades y los contextos jurídicos en que vivieron, a través de un análisis de la historia del aborto en México desde el Virreinato hasta nuestros días. Se examinan las actitudes de la Iglesia Católica con respecto al aborto, las prácticas médicas utilizadas a lo largo del tiempo para interrumpir el embarazo, así como las relaciones entre estas actitudes y prácticas con las cambiantes construcciones de género. El enfoque central del libro, no obstante, recae sobre la cambiante regulación del aborto en la ley. Como demuestra esta obra, hasta finales del siglo XX, la discusión sobre la personalidad y los derechos del feto desempeñó un papel relativamente marginal para la ley, los jueces, la opinión pública e incluso la Iglesia Católica. En lugar de ello, durante gran parte de la historia de México, la regulación jurídica de esta práctica se orientó esencialmente por el imperativo de proteger el honor sexual de las mujeres y la reputación de sus familias. 

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

 

NORA JAFFARY es Doctora en Historia por la Universidad de Columbia y profesora del Departamento de Historia de la Universidad Concordia en Montreal, Canadá. Entre sus obras destacan False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (Nebraksa, 2004) y Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (UNC Chapel Hill, 2016), que recibió el premio Wallace K. Ferguson de la Asociación Histórica Canadiense.

BOOK: Mary ZIEGLER, Roe: The History of a National Obsession (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 248 pp., ISBN 9780300266108, $27

 

(image source: Yale University Press)

Book description:

What explains the insistent pull of Roe v. Wade? Abortion law expert Mary Ziegler argues that the U.S. Supreme Court decision, which decriminalized abortion in 1973 and was overturned in 2022, had a hold on us that was not simply the result of polarized abortion politics. Rather, Roe took on meanings far beyond its original purpose of protecting the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship. It forced us to confront questions about sexual violence, judicial activism and restraint, racial justice, religious liberty, the role of science in politics, and much more.

In this history of what the Supreme Court’s best-known decision has meant, Ziegler identifies the inconsistencies and unsettled issues in our abortion politics. She urges us to rediscover the nuance that has long resided where we would least expect to find it—in the meaning of Roe itself.

About the author: 

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. 

More information can be found here. 

BOOK: Sally SHELDON, Gayle DAVIS, Jane O'NEILL, and Clare PARKER, The Abortion Act 1967: A Biography of a UK Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 358 pp., ISBN 9781108496384, £95

 

(image courtesy: Cambridge University Press)

Book description: 

The Abortion Act 1967 may be the most contested law in UK history, sitting on a fault line between the shifting tectonic plates of a rapidly transforming society. While it has survived repeated calls for its reform, with its text barely altered for over five decades, women's experiences of accessing abortion services under it have evolved considerably. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this book explores how the Abortion Act was given meaning by a diverse cast of actors including women seeking access to services, doctors and service providers, campaigners, judges, lawyers, and policy makers. By adopting an innovative biographical approach to the law, the book shows that the Abortion Act is a 'living law'. Using this historically grounded socio-legal approach, this enlightening book demonstrates how the Abortion Act both shaped and was shaped by a constantly changing society.

Table of contents: 

1. Introduction
2. The Early Years
3. The Parliamentary Battle for Restrictive Reform
4. The Battle for Normalisation
5. The Battle for Legal Meaning
6. The Battle for Northern Ireland
7. The Parliamentary Battle for Modernising Reform
8. A Biography of the 'Great Untouchable'
Appendices
Bibliography
Index.

About the authors: 

Sally Sheldon is a professor of law at the University of Bristol and University of Technology Sydney, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, an editor of the journal Social & Legal Studies and Cambridge University Press's Law in Context series and a former trustee of the Abortion Support Network and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. She has published extensively in healthcare law and ethics. She was formerly a professor in Kent Law School, where she worked on the research for this book.

Gayle Davis is Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely in the history of medicine and reproductive health, including the recent co-edited volumes, Abortion Across Borders: Transnational Travel and Access to Abortion Services (2019) and The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History (2017).

Jane O'Neill is a social historian at the University of Edinburgh whose research interests include twentieth-century youth, gender, and sexual behaviour. She has published on the history of courtship, contraception and abortion in journals such as History and edited volumes including Students in Twentieth-Century Britain and Ireland.

Clare Parker is an historian who is currently based at the University of Adelaide and has worked at universities in the UK and Australia. She has published on the history of medicine and the politics of abortion and sexuality. She is also a consultant archivist currently working with the State Library of South Australia.

More information can be found here. 

BOOK: John CHRISTOPOULOS, Abortion in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021). ISBN 9780674248090, EUR 45.00.

 

(Source: HUP)

Harvard University Press is publishing a history of abortion in Renaissance Italy.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Italians maintained a fundamental ambivalence about abortion. Italians from all levels of society sought, had, and participated in abortions. Early modern Italy was not an absolute anti-abortion culture, an exemplary Catholic society centered on the “traditional family.” Rather, Christopoulos shows, Italians held many views on abortion, and their responses to its practice varied.

Bringing together medical, religious, and legal perspectives alongside a social and cultural history of sexuality, reproduction, and the family, Christopoulos offers a nuanced and convincing account of the meanings Italians ascribed to abortion and shows how prevailing ideas about the practice were spread, modified, and challenged. Christopoulos begins by introducing readers to prevailing ideas about abortion and women’s bodies, describing the widely available purgative medicines and surgeries that various healers and women themselves employed to terminate pregnancies. He then explores how these ideas and practices ran up against and shaped theology, medicine, and law. Catholic understanding of abortion was changing amid religious, legal, and scientific debates concerning the nature of human life, women’s bodies, and sexual politics. Christopoulos examines how ecclesiastical, secular, and medical authorities sought to regulate abortion, and how tribunals investigated and punished its procurers—or did not, even when they could have. Abortion in Early Modern Italy offers a compelling and sensitive study of abortion in a time of dramatic religious, scientific, and social change.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Christopoulos is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: The Meanings of Abortion

1. Abortion and Women’s Bodies

(Rosana and Giovanni)

2. Abortion and the Church

(Femia and Antino)

3. Abortion and the Law

(Maria and Superio)

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

 

More info here

BOOK: Mary ZIEGLER, Abortion and the Law in America Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). ISBN 9781108735599, £ 22.99

(Source: CUP)

CUP is publishing a new book on the history of abortion law in the United States since Roe v. Wade

ABOUT THE BOOK

With the Supreme Court likely to reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion decision, American debate appears fixated on clashing rights. The first comprehensive legal history of a vital period, Abortion and the Law in America illuminates an entirely different and unexpected shift in the terms of debate. Rather than simply championing rights, those on opposing sides battled about the policy costs and benefits of abortion and laws restricting it. This mostly unknown turn deepened polarization in ways many have missed. Never abandoning their constitutional demands, pro-choice and pro-life advocates increasingly disagreed about the basic facts. Drawing on unexplored records and interviews with key participants, Ziegler complicates the view that the Supreme Court is responsible for the escalation of the conflict. A gripping account of social-movement divides and crucial legal strategies, this book delivers a definitive recent history of an issue that transforms American law and politics to this day.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Ziegler, Florida State University

Mary Ziegler is Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University College of Law and one of the leading authorities on the legal history of abortion in America. She is the author of Beyond Abortion (2018) and the award-winning After Roe (2015). She often lends her expertise to mass media outlets across the world.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Roe v. Wade and the rise of rights arguments

2. The Hyde Amendment and its aftermath

3. Launching a quest to reverse Roe

4. Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the family, and equal citizenship

5. Contesting the relationship between abortion and health care

6. Partial-birth and who decides the costs and benefits

7. Polarization, religious liberty, and the war on women

Conclusion.

More info here

BOOK: Christabelle SETHNA and Gayle DAVIS, eds., Abortion Across Borders : Transnational Travel and Access to Abortion Services (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). ISBN 9781421427294, $59.95

(Source: Johns Hopkins University Press)

Johns Hopkins University Press has published a book on transnational travel and access to abortion services, which includes many contributions with a legal-historical angle.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Safe, legal, and affordable abortion is widely recognized as an essential medical service for women across the world. When access to that service is denied or restricted, women are compelled to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, seek backstreet abortionists, attempt self-induced abortions, or even travel to less restrictive states, provinces, and countries to receive care.

Abortion across Borders focuses on travel across domestic and international boundaries to terminate a pregnancy. Christabelle Sethna and Gayle Davis have gathered a cadre of authors to examine how restrictive policies force women to move both within and across national borders in order to reach abortion providers, often at great expense, over long distances and with significant safety risks. Taking historical and contemporary perspectives, contributors examine the situation in regions that include Texas, Prince Edward Island, Ireland, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Eastern Europe. Throughout, they take a feminist intersectional approach to transnational travel and access to abortion services that is sensitive to inequalities of gender, race, and class in reproductive health care.

This multidisciplinary volume raises challenging logistical, legal, and ethical questions while exploring the gendered aspects of medical tourism. A noticeable rollback of reproductive rights and renewed attention to border security in many parts of the world will make Abortion across Borders of timely interest to scholars of gender and women's studies, health, medicine, law, mobility studies, and reproductive justice.

Contributors: Barbara Baird, Niklas Barke, Anna Bogic, Hayley Brown, Lori A. Brown, Cathrine Chambers, Ewelina Ciaputa, Gayle Davis, Mary Gilmartin, Agata Ignaciuk, Sinéad Kennedy, Lena Lennerhed, Jo-Ann MacDonald, Colleen MacQuarrie, Jane O'Neill, Clare Parker, Christabelle Sethna, Sally Sheldon

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Christabelle Sethna

Part I. Flight Risks
1. Sherri Finkbine Flew to Sweden: Abortion and Disability in the Early 1960s
Lena Lennerhed
2. From Heathrow Airport to Harley Street: The ALRA and the Travel of Nonresident Women for Abortion Services in Britain
Christabelle Sethna
3. The Trans-Tasman Abortion Travel Service: Abortion Services for New Zealand Women in the 1970s
Hayley Brown

Part II. Domestic Transgressions
4. All Aboard the "Abortion Express": Geographic Variability, Domestic Travel, and the 1967 British Abortion Act
Gayle Davis, Jane O'Neill, Clare Parker, and Sally Sheldon
5. A Double Movement: The Politics of Reproductive Mobility in Ireland
Mary Gilmartin and Sinéad Kennedy
6. Tales of Mobility: Women's Travel and Abortion Services in a Globalized Australia
Barbara Baird
7. Don't Mess with Texas: Abortion Policy, Texas Style
Lori A. Brown
8. Trials and Trails: The Emergence of Canada's Abortion Refugees in Prince Edward Island
Cathrine Chambers, Colleen MacQuarrie, and Jo-Ann MacDonald

Part III. Democratic Transitions
9. Abortion Travel and the Cost of Reproductive Choice in Spain
Agata Ignaciuk
10. "The Import Problem": The Travels of Our Bodies, Ourselves to Eastern Europe
Anna Bogic
11. Abortion and the Catholic Church in Poland
Ewelina Ciaputa
12. Beyond the Borders of Brexit: Traveling for Abortion Access to a Post-EU Britain
Niklas Barke

Contributors
Index

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Christabelle Sethna is a professor in the University of Ottawa's Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies. She is the coauthor of Just Watch Us: RCMP Surveillance of the Women's Liberation Movement in Cold War Canada and a coeditor of Animal Metropolis: Histories of Human-Animal Relations in Urban Canada. Gayle Davis is a senior lecturer in the history of medicine at the University of Edinburgh. She is a coauthor of The Sexual State: Sexuality and Scottish Governance, 1950–80 and a coeditor of The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History: Approaches, Contexts and Perspectives.

More information here

CALL FOR PAPERS: The History and Politics of Abortion (paper collection)

CFP: The History and Politics of Abortion

An edited collection by Tracy Penny Light and Shannon Stettner

Women’s bodies have always been sites of struggle – over meanings and for control.  The most polarizing conflicts involve women’s reproductive autonomy.  Around the world women continue to fight for or to retain hard won abortion rights.  Women’s experiences with abortion are contested by and between the medical establishment, the state, churches, the media, and activists.  Further complicating these conflicts are issues of race, class, gender, and heteronormativity.  This collection seeks to publish works on the history and politics of abortion worldwide.  We invite theoretical, country-specific, and transnational comparative pieces.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

-Shifting (historical/political) meanings of abortion
-The place of women in abortion politics/history
-Historical constructions of the fetus
-“Pro-choice” and “pro-life” activism
-Reproductive justice movement
-The role of the state in abortion politics
- The role of the medical profession in abortion politics
-The influence of medical advancements on abortion politics/history
-Abortion and sexuality

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words and a one-page CV to Tracy Penny Light. Article abstracts due November 30, 2012.

Tracy Penny Light is Director of Women’s Studies at the University of Waterloo and Associate Professor in the Sexuality, Marriage, and Family Studies and History departments at St. Jerome’s University (University of Waterloo).  Her research explores the medical discourse on gender and sexuality in Canada and the United States in the twentieth century.  Her forthcoming book, Shifting Interests: The Medical Discourse on Abortion in English Canada, 1850-1969 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press) explores the ways that the medical profession has understood abortion practices in the past.  She has published articles on masculinity and the feminine ideal in Canada and the United States as well as on developing historical thinking in students.  She is also co-editing two forthcoming books: Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800-2000 (with Wendy Mitchinson and Barbara Brookes) and a book on feminist pedagogy in higher education (with Jane Nicholas and Renee Bondy).

Shannon Stettner recently defended her dissertation, Women and Abortion in English Canada: Public Debates and Political Participation, 1959-1970, at York University and is under contract to revise the manuscript for publication (Wilfrid Laurier University Press). The book explores women’s contributions to the abortion law reform debate of the decade.  She has published in the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History and is currently editing a volume of abortion narratives and think pieces entitled Voices on Choice(s): Reflections on Abortion in Canada.

(source: Legal History Blog)