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.
This timely book brings to light how the unrestrained efforts to
punish and police women's bodies have led to the United States being
the deadliest country in the developed world to be pregnant.