When Abortion Was a Crime
When Abortion Was a Crime

Author: Leslie J. Reagan

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-02-22

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0520387422

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The definitive history of abortion in the United States, with a new preface that equips readers for what’s to come. When Abortion Was a Crime is the must-read book on abortion history. Originally published ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this award-winning study was the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with that monumental case in 1973. When Abortion Was a Crime is filled with intimate stories and nuanced analysis, demonstrating how abortion was criminalized and policed—and how millions of women sought abortions regardless of the law. With this edition, Leslie J. Reagan provides a new preface that addresses the dangerous and ongoing threats to abortion access across the country, and the precarity of our current moment. While abortions have typically been portrayed as grim "back alley" operations, this deeply researched history confirms that many abortion providers—including physicians—practiced openly and safely, despite prohibitions by the state and the American Medical Association. Women could find cooperative and reliable practitioners; but prosecution, public humiliation, loss of privacy, and inferior medical care were a constant threat. Reagan's analysis of previously untapped sources, including inquest records and trial transcripts, shows the fragility of patient rights and raises provocative questions about the relationship between medicine and law. With the right to abortion increasingly under attack, this book remains the definitive history of abortion in the United States, offering vital lessons for every American concerned with health care, civil liberties, and personal and sexual freedom.

Life on the Circuit with Lincoln
Life on the Circuit with Lincoln

Author: Henry Clay Whitney

Publisher:

Published: 1892

Total Pages: 772

ISBN-13:

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"Originally commenced as a pastime, and to please a circle of friends alone, success, in any degree, can only be hoped for, because of my vantage ground as an intimate and close friend of Mr. Lincoln, and because, by reason of such intimacy, of the novelty of some of the facts and deductions, and not, in any sense, by reason, but in spite of, its literary style or, rather, the lack thereof."--Preface.

What Parish Are You From?
What Parish Are You From?

Author: Eileen M. McMahon

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-11

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0813149274

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For Irish Americans as well as for Chicago's other ethnic groups, the local parish once formed the nucleus of daily life. Focusing on the parish of St. Sabina's in the southwest Chicago neighborhood of Auburn-Gresham, Eileen McMahon takes a penetrating look at the response of Catholic ethnics to life in twentieth-century America. She reveals the role the parish church played in achieving a cohesive and vital ethnic neighborhood and shows how ethno-religious distinctions gave way to racial differences as a central point of identity and conflict. For most of this century the parish served as an important mechanism for helping Irish Catholics cope with a dominant Protestant-American culture. Anti-Catholicism in the society at large contributed to dependency on parishes and to a desire for separateness from the American mainstream. As much as Catholics may have wanted to insulate themselves in their parish communities, however, Chicago demographics and the fluid nature of the larger society made this ultimately impossible. Despite efforts at integration attempted by St. Sabina's liberal clergy, white parishioners viewed black migration into their neighborhood as a threat to their way of life and resisted it even as they relocated to the suburbs. The transition from white to black neighborhoods and parishes is a major theme of twentieth-century urban history. The experience of St. Sabina's, which changed from a predominantly Irish parish to a vibrant African-American Catholic community, provides insights into this social trend and suggests how the interplay between faith and ethnicity contributes to a resistance to change.