Reproductive Politics

What really drives men to do what they do? Why Men Fake It uses the real-life stories of Dr. Morgentaler's patients to let us in on the secrets of men and to examine the current state of male sexuality in science and medicine as well as in relationships and popular culture. In this frank and open discussion of the subject, Dr. Morgentaler will make men and women alike question what we think we know about gender, motivation, sexuality, relationships, and, ultimately, the definition of a "man".

Rebecca Little and Colleen Long, childhood friends who grew up to be journalists, both experienced late-term loss, and together they take an incisive, deeply reported look at the issue, working to shatter taboos that have made so many pregnant people feel ashamed and alone.

Middle age doesn't have to be about hot flashes, irritable tempers, and no sex drive. Rigorously researched and engagingly written, Suzanne Somers' The Sexy Years is women's indispensable guide to life after 50. Making the case that the key to happiness lies in the replacement of lost hormones, Somers shares some of the benefits she had first-handedly experienced as a result: increased energy levels, improved sex drive, better weight management, and much more.

The second edition of this pathbreaking, widely taught book offers five new chapters, on breastfeeding and Black infant health; Black birthing during COVID; Black doulas rethinking birthing practices; the recent buildup of a US national movement; and expanding the global movement for sexual and reproductive wellbeing. Other chapters are updated throughout. Birthing Justice puts black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternal care system.

Human trafficking is not just something that happens in other countries. Nor is it something that just happens to "other people," such as runaways or the disenfranchised. Even kids in your own neighborhood can fall victim. But they don't have to.

Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today's anti-abortion movements is largely financed and planned by far-right extremists. Many of them are avowedly fascist and white supremacist, afraid of a "great replacement" of the world's white population by other races, who are working hard to reshape governments and policies across Europe, North America, and around the world. Much of this far-right organizing and funding network, however, has been overlooked by today's feminist and left movements.

Winner of the 2019 American Association for the History of Nursing Lavinia L. Dock Award for Exemplary Historical Research and Writing in a Book.

“Catchin’ babies” was merely one aspect of the broad role of African American midwives in the twentieth-century South. Yet, little has been written about the type of care they provided or how midwifery and maternity care evolved under the increasing presence of local and federal health care structures.

To Andy Rooney and the Greatest Generation, sex was only a rumor. But to an Indiana University zoology professor, wholesome American youth was in fact promiscuous and adulterous. Alfred Kinsey's bias-masquerading-as-research became accepted wisdom, thus tainting generations of Americans. Now, in a comprehensive and investigative fashion, Judith Reisman traces not only the effects of Kinsey's diabolical research, but describes those early, falsely accused generations in very different terms, because she lived through those times.

Certified life coach, licensed specialty-certified New Life Story® wellness coach, and sexual confidence coach, Erica Lemke-Pembroke is on a mission to help women feel sexy again and reclaim their sexual confidence. She created the Sexy Again Method based on her own experiences, which she uses to empower women in rediscovering this for themselves. In Feel Sexy Again, women learn how to:

In Essential Labor, Garbes explores assumptions about care, work, and deservedness, offering a deeply personal and rigorously reported look at what mothering is, and can be. A first-generation Filipino-American, Garbes shares the perspective of her family's complicated relationship to care work, placing mothering in a global context—the invisible economic engine that has been historically demanded of women of color.

The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe firsthand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering.

On June 24, 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the impact was immediate: by 2024, abortion was virtually unavailable or significantly restricted in 21 states. In Undue Burden, reporter Shefali Luthra traces the unforgettable stories of patients faced with one of the most personal decisions of their lives.

We're all used to encountering even the most hardcore porn from the comfort and privacy of our computer screens, but how many of us would go see it live? Thought Catalog editor Chelsea Fagan did, spending an evening in the world of live sex shows and hardcore pornography. Here, she gives us the guided tour to everything from rules about condoms to the pressure of facials, showing us a world that is at once completely familiar and something we've never quite seen before.

From evolution to the epidural and beyond, Tina Cassidy presents an intelligent, enlightening, and impeccably researched cultural history of how and why we're born the way we are. Women have been giving birth for millennia, but that's about the only constant in the final stage of the great process that is human reproduction. Why is it that every culture and generation seems to have its own ideas about the best way to give birth?

In a May 2024 Pew poll, more than two-thirds of Americans indicated they thought that in vitro fertilization (IVF) is good and should be accessible to anyone who wants it. Even among social conservatives—including the current U.S. administration—there is a push for wider accessibility for artificial procreation options. But is IVF truly the gift for infertile couples that it’s perceived to be?

Midwives in the United States live and work in a complex regulatory environment that is a direct result of state and medical intervention into women's reproductive capacity. In Birthing a Movement, Renee Ann Cramer draws on over a decade of ethnographic and archival research to examine the interactions of law, politics, and activism surrounding midwifery care.

Black women have higher rates of premature birth than other women in America. This cannot be simply explained by economic factors, with poorer women lacking resources or access to care. Even professional, middle-class Black women are at a much higher risk of premature birth than low-income White women in the United States. Dána-Ain Davis looks into this phenomenon, placing racial differences in birth outcomes into a historical context, revealing that ideas about reproduction and race today have been influenced by the legacy of ideas which developed during the era of slavery.

Birth control offers women the opportunity to prevent pregnancy, plan and space their births, or have no births at all. And yet, in the United States, half of all pregnancies remain unintended, and access to birth control is beset by inequities in education, access, and coverage. Birth Control: What Everyone Needs to Know will offer more than a user's guide to available means of contraception: it will examine how supported family-planning infrastructure impacts society as a whole.

On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision, asserting that the Constitution did not confer the right to abortion. This ruling, in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case, was the culmination of a half-century of pro-life activism promoting the idea that fetuses are people and therefore entitled to the rights and protections that the Constitution guarantees. But it was also the product of a much longer history of archaic ideas about the relationship between pregnant people and the fetuses they carry.

People of color have been having abortions since the dawn of time, yet our access is continuously under attack. In Liberating Abortion, award-winning abortion activist Renee Bracey Sherman and journalist Regina Mahone illustrate the long racist history that brought us to this moment, uncover the hidden figures who set the foundation activists and storytellers are building on today, and explain how abortion has been and remains essential to the health of our communities.