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1 Introduction I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. —William Bennett, former Secretary of Education, responding to a caller on his radio show, September 29, 20051 The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not. —Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny, 1984 Like many people, I was slow to recognize reproductive rights as such. When I was about 8 years old, I sat down at the kitchen table in my working-class home in rural Kansas and wrote a letter to my state senator, Bob Dole, urging him to oppose abortion because it involved killing an unborn baby. I wrote with the moral certainty that a lot of children have at that age, supported by loving and devout Catholic parents and catechism teachers who reminded me at regular intervals that “Abortion is murder” and “Women who don’t take responsibility for their mistakes are just looking for an easy way out.” A few years later, I discovered that a local teenager was pregnant—and defiant. She did not marry her baby’s father, and she insisted on attending high school in spite of objections from some of the locals.2 I could imagine that raising a baby as a single teenage mother wasn’t easy, but I wondered, even then, whether it needed to be so hard. After I left home, and went off to college, I had friends who faced tough decisions about whether or not to 2 Introduction have or rear a child. They were not self-centered or irresponsible. Typically, they were all too aware of others’ judgments and the financial and social consequences their decisions would have, not only for themselves but also for any child they might bring into the world. My politics began to shift to the left in the 1980s as I met women who navigated life encumbered by limited resources and bleak prospects. As an intern at a county juvenile court, I encountered a 15-year-old girl who carted her two children in a red wagon nearly two miles to the courthouse where she was to answer charges of shoplifting chocolate chip cookies and a package of bologna. She felt bad for stealing the cookies, but she was not in the least remorseful for stealing the bologna to feed her kids. In graduate school in the early 1990s, I became aware of the women ensnared in the criminal justice system, including thousands of women with histories of substance abuse. I met a woman who was sentenced to 10 years for becoming pregnant while using cocaine even though she gave birth to a healthy son. Later, I came to know a woman who served a 20-year sentence during which she tried to sustain a relationship with her child. Her son, a toddler when she was arrested, was being raised a thousand miles away.3 Over the years, I saw more clearly how restricted a woman’s “choices” can be, particularly when she is isolated economically, socially, or geographically . These women exposed me to the influence of public institutions like schools, clinics, and the courts on women’s personal and reproductive lives. They also highlighted the problem of reducing reproductive rights to just the single right of a safe and legal abortion. As law professor Dorothy Roberts pointed out in her celebrated work Killing the Black Body, for women who are poor and black, reproductive rights are as often about the right to conceive, to be pregnant, to access good-quality reproductive health care, and to rear one’s children without unwarranted or harmful official interference as they are about the right to end a pregnancy.4 As I use the term here, “reproductive rights” include the basic rights of all women to have sex according to their own thoughts and feelings, free of discrimination, coercion, violence, fear, or shame. Reproductive rights include the right to enjoy freedom of movement (without being limited by the threat of violence) and to be free from illnesses or other conditions that might interfere with sex and reproduction. Women also have the...

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