A WOMAN'S LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE

A women’s studies professor explores how two 20th-century activist victories have shaped the battle over reproductive freedom in the U.S.

As she recounts, Kornbluh discovered that her lawyer mother, Beatrice, had fought to decriminalize abortion in New York in the late 1960s days before she died. The author’s research into the history of reproductive rights in New York led her to the full story of Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías. Kornbluh knew the doctor as her neighbor, but she learned that she was also “an effective activist, a female Puerto Rican physician at a time when that made her an extreme outlier, and eventually the first Latina head of the American Public Health Association.” The author chronicles how her mother and Rodríguez-Trías were significant figures in two complementary social movements that took place before and after Roe v. Wade. In the late 1960s, Kornbluh’s mother was part of a group of educated, mostly White women who worked with “risk-taking ministers, rabbis, doctors and lawyers” to force the New York legislature to pass the most liberal abortion law in the country. That law went on to become the Supreme Court’s guiding light when it decided in favor of abortion rights in 1973. But in the years that followed, it became clear to Rodríguez-Trías and other like-minded feminists that abortion rights did nothing to address the basic problem women, especially women of color, faced of “whether, when, and how to have children.” It only masked the racial and economic biases of the American medical establishment, which had a history of coercing women of color into sterilization while discouraging “relatively well-off” White women from getting the procedure. Both timely and engaging, this insightful study reveals that the battle for abortion rights must be considered only one part of a much larger, more complex struggle that needs to address the protection of the sexual freedom and choices of all women.

Necessary reading for anyone worried about this post-Dobbs world.