Policing the Womb

Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood

By: Michele Goodwin

Narrated by: Robin Eller

Policing the Womb brings to life the chilling ways in which women have become the targets of secretive state surveillance of their pregnancies.

Michele Goodwin expands the reproductive health and rights debate beyond abortion to include how legislators increasingly turn to criminalizing women for miscarriages, stillbirths, and threatening the health of their pregnancies. The horrific results include women giving birth while shackled in leg irons, in solitary confinement, and even delivering in prison toilets.

In some states, pregnancy has become a bargaining chip with prosecutors offering reduced sentences in exchange for women agreeing to be sterilized. The author shows how prosecutors may abuse laws and infringe women’s rights in the process, sometimes with the complicity of medical providers who disclose private patient information to law enforcement. Often the women most affected are poor and of color. Goodwin warns, however, poor women are simply the canaries in the coalmine as some legislators now claim that women’s constitutional rights equal that of embryos and fetuses.

In this book, Michele Goodwin brings to light how the unrestrained efforts to punish and police women’s reproduction has led to the United States being the deadliest country in the developed world for pregnant women.

©2020 Michele Goodwin (P) 2023 Blackstone Publishing

Fantastic book, important read

This is choc full of important information about the state of reproductive justice in the US

Revelation

I’ve been alarmed by the regression these last few years in women’s freedoms. It IS a war on women that shocks and alarms me. I’m 75 (very close to 76) and never had children so the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth have never been on my radar. But women’s rights used to be something I took for granted. Not anymore. I never realized how many men are afraid of strong women, or, it seems, women in general. Not just afraid, but appear to actually dislike women. How else could they be so cruel, indifferent, petty, dismissive, and selfish when forcing their personal ideas and attitudes on half our population? Having a penis, apparently, determines their status and right to subjugate the rest of humanity. Especially if that penis is white! There are realities and statistics presented in this book that I was unaware of, and I thank the author for these profound revelations. I not only listened to every word, but purchased the hard copy so t could review and pass on the information she has so eloquently gathered and shared.

AI Narrator

Please don’t use AI voices as narrators. They mispronounce words that a human narrator would pronounce correctly. When mispronunciation occurs, it takes a while for the brain to recognize the proper word, correct it then reconnect to the book.