Coercion Surviving and resisting abortion bans

Kylie Cheung, 1998-

Book - 2025

"Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the horrors inflicted by abortion bans began immediately and haven't stopped. These laws have become a tool for abusers, as pregnant people face legal harassment, reproductive coercion, and life-threatening medical trauma. Through biting analysis, Kylie Cheung argues that these aren't unintended consequences, but deliberate acts of state-perpetrated violence inflicted on women and pregnant people, particularly those with the least resources and agency under capitalism and white supremacy. Capitalism has always consciously decided whose lives are expendable. This book is for everyone coming to terms with this fact in the era of the rollback of our bodily autonomy."-...-Publisher.

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Subjects
Published
London ; Las Vegas, NV : Pluto Press 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Kylie Cheung, 1998- (author)
Physical Description
vi, 192 pages ; 20 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-192).
ISBN
9780745350615
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • 1. The New Post-Dobbs Order
  • 2. Domestic Violence, Medical Violence, and Anti-Abortion Violence
  • 3. How Abusers Weaponize Pregnancy in the Legal System
  • 4. Reproductive Coercion
  • 5. The Criminalization of Survival and Pregnancy
  • 6. Trapped: Pregnancy in the Carceral System
  • 7. The Medicalization of Abuse
  • 8. The Mythology of Rape Exceptions
  • 9. How Liberalism Abandoned Reproductive Justice
  • Conclusion: Beyond Roe
  • Afterword
  • Notes
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this incendiary follow-up to Survivor Injustice, which drew parallels between abortion bans and domestic abuse, Jezebel staff writer Cheung surveys the "gruesome horrors" being inflicted upon women, children, pregnant people, and rape survivors in a post-Roe America. Cheung argues that, following the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, the state's abuser-like "control" over women's lives has tightened dramatically. As evidence, she points to the increased criminalization of miscarriages (treated as illicit abortions under the law), the widespread ignoring of "rape exceptions" to abortion bans in states that supposedly have them, the denying of free emergency contraception to rape victims because it allegedly counts as an abortifacient, and the apparent winding down of medical institutions' efforts to track and prevent maternal mortality. She profiles shocking cases of women and girls who have been deeply impacted by a rapidly changing legal and medical landscape--among them a 14-year-old denied her much-need osteoporosis medicine because it could theoretically induce miscarriage and an Idaho resident who suffered a shocking 19-day-long miscarriage as, despite "excruciating pain and severe blood loss," she was repeatedly turned away by medical providers who refused to remove the fetus. Clear-eyed and cutting, this disturbing litany of medical barbarisms calls into question the very notion that America is an advanced society, let alone a just one. (July)

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