Reproduction Reconceived
Family Making and the Limits of Choice After Roe v. Wade
A Conversation with Author Sara Matthiesen
Moderated by Emily Thuma, Associate Professor, SIAS, UWT February 1 @ 4:00–5:15 p.m. We tend to associate Roe with the choice to not have children, but the landmark Supreme Court decision was equally transformative for Americans' understanding of family--having and raising children also became a choice. Reproduction Reconceived (University of California Press, 2021) shows how this redefinition occurred at the same time that different forms of inequality worsened, turning choice into more myth than reality for far too many. Incarceration, for-profit and racist healthcare, disease, and poverty were worsened by state neglect in the decades following Roe. And as different families' conditions deteriorated, the labor required to maintain familial ties proliferated. Ultimately, Sara Matthiesen offers an urgent historical account: of the labors families were made to expend to simply survive in the face of state neglect; and of the costs that pile up when family making is regarded as a private responsibility rather than a public good. “Compellingly argued and compulsively readable.”
— Melissa Murray, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law, New York University “A must-read for anyone who cares about the well-being of working families.”
— Premilla Nadasen, author of Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States Sara Matthiesen (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor of history and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at George Washington University.
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