A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life is the story of the movements that transformed the politics of reproductive rights: the fight to decriminalize abortion and the campaign against sterilization abuse, at a time when sterilization was disproportionately proposed as birth control to Black, Latinx, and poor women.
Their victories occurred just before and after Roe v. Wade, and their histories cast new light on the case and the fate of reproductive rights and justice today. From dissident Democrats and members of a rising feminist movement who refashioned abortion laws, to progressive ministers and rabbis who led the nation’s largest abortion referral service, to Puerto Rican activists who introduced sterilization abuse to the reproductive rights agenda and Black women who took the cause global, A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life chronicles how activists changed the law and demanded reproductive justice.
The first in-depth study of a winning campaign to change a state’s abortion law, with firsthand accounts and previously unseen sources—including from her mother, who drafted New York’s law decriminalizing abortion, and across-the-hall neighbor, Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías, a Puerto Rican doctor and leader in the movement against sterilization abuse—Felicia Kornbluh shows how grassroots action overcame the odds—and how it might work today.
PAPERBACK AVAILABLE
1.16.2024
#1 Release in Women’s Politics
“[A] comprehensive, compelling chronicle of activists who fought to change New York’s abortion laws both before and after Roe V. Wade.”
-- New York Times
“An important handbook for today’s reproductive rights activists”
-- Leslie J. Reagan, author of When Abortion Was a Crime
"Eye-opening. . . Kornbluh makes public policy and legal history come alive by demonstrating the power of women's collective action. The result is an inspiring study of how progress happens."
--Publishers Weekly
MEET DR. KORNBLUH
Dr. Felicia Kornbluh (she/her) is a writer, activist, and professor who specializes in the histories of feminism, gender, social welfare, and reproductive politics. She is Professor of History at the University of Vermont, with appointments in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and Jewish Studies. She is the author or coauthor of three books, including the forthcoming A WOMAN’S LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice (Grove Press, 2023).
Kornbluh writes regularly for the scholarly and popular press, including for The American Prospect, Washington Post, and The Forward, and is a former member of the Vermont Commission on Women and the Board of Trustees of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. She serves at present as vice president of the board of Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund.
In the Summer of 2023, Felicia Kornbluh will be a Guest Professor in the History Department of the University of Teubingen in Germany, as a recipient of the Organization of American Historians Germany Residence Award
UPCOMING APPEARANCES
-
January 24, 2024
University of Chicago Law School
Workshop with interlocutor, Jane Dailey: “Regulation of Family, Sex, and Gender”
-
February 21, 2024
University of California-Berkeley “Modern Political History Seminar”
-
February 29, 2024
P & T Knitwear Bookstore Free and open to the public
