Choice and Coercion
Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare
By Johanna Schoen
352 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 10 illus., 9 figs., 1 map, notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-5585-0
Published: March 2005 -
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-7649-7
Published: March 2006 -
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-7855-7
Published: March 2006
Gender and American Culture
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Awards & distinctions
A 2006 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
In this book, Schoen situates the state's reproductive politics in a national and global context. Widening her focus to include birth control, sterilization, and abortion policies across the nation, she demonstrates how each method for limiting unwanted pregnancies had the potential both to expand and to limit women's reproductive choices. Such programs overwhelmingly targeted poor and nonwhite populations, yet they also extended a measure of reproductive control to poor women that was previously out of reach.
On an international level, the United States has influenced reproductive health policies by, for example, tying foreign aid to the recipients' compliance with U.S. notions about family planning. The availability of U.S.-funded family planning aid has proved to be a double-edged sword, offering unprecedented opportunities to poor women while subjecting foreign patients to medical experimentation that would be considered unacceptable at home.
Drawing on the voices of health and science professionals, civic benefactors, and American women themselves, Schoen's study allows deeper understandings of the modern welfare state and the lives of women.
About the Author
Johanna Schoen is professor of history at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
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Reviews
"Schoen successfully reveals what has been a misunderstood history of the agency and coercion involved in the relationship between women's bodies and the state. This book is a valuable contribution to the history of medicine, public health and welfare, women's rights and the impact of state policy on individual women and their families in the United States and around the world."—Journal of American Studies
"Schoen has given us a well-documented twentieth-century history of the struggle over reproductive rights grounded in politics and culture, a richly nuanced sociological account drawing from interviews and original documents, and a passionate argument for the importance of securing the citizen's right to birth control."—American Journal of Sociology
"A striking corrective to simplistic misconceptions that reproductive control had only negative connotations for working-class or African American women who were subject to eugenic state sterilization policies. . . . Schoen has provided a thoughtful, rigorous, and original study of women's multifaceted interaction with state reproductive policy."—Journal of American History
"A must read for anyone interested in reproductive issues. . . . The reclamation of women's motivation in securing access to services, as well as the positive portrayal of some health and state officials, is a breath of fresh air."—Journal of Southern History
"Schoen analyzes how news reports can water down historical complexity and stifle further discussion, and how apologies can mislead the public into thinking that problems have been solved and impoverished women's reproductive rights are secure."—Journal of African American History
"This is an important study, one that rightfully places North Carolina's story squarely on the historical map."—American Historical Review
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