A New York doctor was indicted by a grand jury in West Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Friday for prescribing an abortion pill that was taken by a teenager there.

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"While many claim that being a mom is the most important job in the world, in reality, motherhood in the United States is becoming harder. From pre-conception, through pregnancy and while parenting, women are held to ever-higher standards and finding themselves punished - both socially and criminally - for failing to live up to these norms. This book uncovers how women of all ethnic backgrounds and socio-economic statuses have been interrogated, held against their will, and jailed for a rapidly expanding list of offenses such as falling down the stairs while pregnant or letting a child spend time alone in a park, actions that were not considered criminal a generation ago. While poor mothers and moms of color are targeted the most, all moms are in jeopardy, whether they realize it or not. Women and mothers are disproportionately held accountable compared to men and fathers who do not see their reproduction policed and almost never incur charges for "failure to protect." The gendered inequality of prosecutions reveals them to be more about controlling women than protecting children. Using a reproductive justice lens, Caitlin Killian analyzes how and why mothers are on a precipice and what must change to prevent mass penalization and instead support mothers and their children."--

Legal scholar Mary Ziegler talks about the legal battles shaping reproductive rights across the U.S. — including the scope of abortion access and the fate of IVF. And we look ahead at two very different outcomes with the election. "I don't think in the past 50 years we've had an election where the stakes could be as high, simply because Roe v. Wade isn't there as a floor anymore," Ziegler says. Also, John Powers controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq's new novel, Annihilation. Subscribe to Fresh Air's weekly newsletter and get highlights from the show, gems from the archive, and staff recommendations.

"Fighting Mad is a book about what "reproductive justice" means and what it looks like to fight for it. Editors Krystale E. Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger bring together many of the strongest, most resistant voices in the country to describe the impacts of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision and what it means for abortion access and care. The essayists and change agents in Fighting Mad represent a remarkable breadth of expertise: activists and artists, academics and abortion storytellers, health care professionals and legislators, clinic directors and lawyers, and so many more. They discuss abortion restrictions and strategies to provide care, the impacts of criminalization, efforts to protect the targeted, shortcomings of the past, and visions for the next generation. Fighting Mad captures for the social and historical record the vigorous resistance happening in the early post-Roe moment to show that there are millions on the ground fighting to secure a better future"--

The modern Republican Party is the party of conservative Christianity and big business-two things so closely identified with the contemporary GOP that we hardly notice the strangeness of the pairing. Legal historian Mary Ziegler traces how the antiabortion movement helped to forge and later upend this alliance. Beginning with the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Buckley V. Valeo, right-to-lifers fought to gain power in the GOP by changing how campaign spending-and the First Amendment-work. The antiabortion movement helped to revolutionize the rules of money in US politics and convinced conservative voters to fixate on the federal courts. Ultimately, the campaign finance landscape that abortion foes created fueled the GOP's embrace of populism and the rise of Donald Trump. Ziegler offers a surprising new view of the slow drift to extremes in American politics-and explains how it had everything to do with campaign spending.

Controlling reproduction - who has children, how many, and when - is important to states, communities, families, and individuals across the globe. However, the stakes are even higher than might at first be appreciated: control over reproduction is an incredibly powerful tool. Contests over reproduction necessarily involve control over women and their bodies. Yet because reproduction is so intertwined with other social processes and institutions, controlling it also extends far into most corners of social, economic, and political life. Nancy Riley and Nilanjana Chatterjee explore how various social institutions beyond the individual - including state, religion, market, and family - are involved in the negotiation of reproductive power. They draw on examples from across the world, such as direct fertility policies in China and Romania, the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland and Brazil, racial discrimination and resistance in Mexico and the US, and how Japan and Norway use laws intended to encourage gender equality to indirectly shape reproduction. This engaging book sheds new light on the operations of power and gender in society. It will appeal to students taking courses on reproduction in departments of sociology, anthropology, and gender studies. -- Provided by publisher.