Abstract
Jeanne Flavin’s Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America represents a unique and comprehensive review of the ways women’s reproductive issues are marred by the legal system. Specifically, the text examines how the criminal justice system has become an agent of gendered and racialized social control, dictating and reinforcing historical-political conceptualizations of ideal womanhood and motherhood. As such, the book is aimed at examining patriarchal-based laws and social constraints that prohibit women from fully controlling their bodies when it comes to conception, pregnancy, and parenthood.
Rather than narrow the discussion of reproductive rights to abortion, as is typically the case, Flavin takes a much broader approach to the topic. From her framework, reproductive rights includes the totality of circumstances surrounding women’s reproduction, from getting and remaining pregnant (or not) to birthing and parenthood. Recognizing that the options for each woman vary, she also examines the social and economic circumstances surrounding women’s choices regarding reproduction. For the purposes of this book, these primarily include poverty, race, health, age, and victimization. This approach enables Flavin to highlight many policies and practices, either directly instigated by the criminal justice system or complacently supported by it, that often go unnoticed or are taken for granted. Moreover, in a thorough and careful analysis, Flavin aptly suggests that such control tactics are cumulative in nature. Once a practice or policy is implemented, it is rarely abandoned entirely. Instead, refinements are made that, whether well meaning or not, often exacerbate the reach of the law on women’s lives and bodies.
The book is organized into four parts. The first (“Beginning”) includes a chapter that presents a historical overview of reproductive rights. Recognizing that abortion is often seen as central to this topic, Flavin admittedly spends a good deal of time on the ways in which abortion was regulated throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. She then moves on to the connections between reproductive freedom and the eugenics movement, which sets up the critical lens through which she approaches the remainder of the book. This critical lens is focused on how some women’s reproductive rights are privileged over others, depending primarily on how closely one comes to ideal notions of womanhood. This premise underscores the examination of several topics throughout the remaining three sections of the book. These sections follow women’s reproduction in a logical manner, from the earliest stages (conception) to the latest (motherhood).
Part two (“Begetting”) focuses on the ways in which women’s choices to become pregnant have been restrained by the law in gendered, classed, raced, and aged ways. The three chapters of this section address such topics as forced sterilization, nonprocreative orders, contraception, abortion, neonaticide, and infant abandonment. Part three (“Bearing”) addresses debates about women’s capacities to maintain healthy pregnancies and includes two chapters that examine fetal protectionism and incarcerated women’s reproductive health, respectively. Part four (“Mothering”) examines the difficulties women have when parenting within a society that is unsupportive, and often hostile to their circumstances. The section includes two chapters that highlight mothering within the extremely difficult contexts of incarceration and domestic violence.
Flavin’s conclusion (“Being”) is a cogent summary of her main arguments and an impassioned plea for a more balanced and comprehensive approach to reproductive rights. The law, specifically as it is enacted through the criminal justice system, has overextended its reach in this arena, while any sort of meaningful support for women’s reproductive practices have been consistently and illogically eroded. Flavin persuasively asserts that the current policing of women’s reproductive rights impedes rights to privacy, as well as bodily integrity and sovereignty. As such, women’s capacity of enjoying full citizenship is threatened. In this way, reproductive rights is not only a woman’s or feminist issue, it is a human rights issue about which all should be concerned.
The comprehensiveness and conciseness of Flavin’s handling of reproductive issues is commendable, as is her attention to detail and tight, influential logic. The book is all the more attractive because of its cross-disciplinary synthesis of history, law, policy, research, and case examples. As such, its applicability stretches across various disciplines, including sociology, criminology/criminal justice, political science, social work, public health, and gender/women’s studies. Because it is so well conceived, organized, and written, the text will also appeal to a range of audiences, from advanced undergraduate students to well-seasoned scholars, as well as the general public.