Policing Pregnant Bodies

This book is a masterpiece. Though the medical and legal surveillance of pregnant women's bodies is relatively recent, Crowther demonstrates how wombs have historically been considered dangerous places and how the policing of pregnant bodies today is an insidious extension of that train of thought. The explicit links that she draws between the present and the past are the brilliant foundation of this perceptive historical analysis.

There's a long history of showing the fetus as independent, with the body of the person carrying it as passive, or even hostile. This lively and readable introduction shows how historical metaphors of pregnancy can help us understand modern preoccupations with saving babies rather than supporting women.

A timely, important intervention that reveals the long histories of many of our modern ideas about reproduction. In our time of reproductive health crisis in the United States, this book illuminates the ways in which ideas about women as threats to fetuses or about inherent conflict between fetuses and women are neither natural nor inevitable.

While fetal monitors and ultrasounds seem to define pregnancy today, Crowther reveals that our ideas about the relationship between fetus and pregnant person are profoundly shaped by very old ideas about procreation. Incisive and elegant, this critical commentary is urgent reading in our current moment.

From Aristotle to 21st-century statehouses, Crowther excavates the embryologic origins of symbolics of the fetus and the pregnant body that now dominate medical, political, and popular discourse around abortion and pregnancy in the U.S. Essential reading for anyone interested in how a range of policies harm the well-being of babies and birthing people.

In this compelling, accessible history of embryology, pregnancy, and its interruption, Crowther reveals the development of ideas that have led to pregnant persons' rights to bodily autonomy being diminished, denied, even condemned. With nuance, Crowther puts past and present into dialogue to expose a history of insidious ideas that continue to shape our present.