A white performer in a fetus costume, black leather jacket and grey hoodie stands downstage in the spotlight, with glasses and a pasted-on mustache, speaking passionately.

Singing and Dancing Fetuses: Art, Life, and Abortion at “The Appointment”

A group of Buffalo Bills football players congregate on the field

On Football, War, and Trauma

Chain link fence and barbed wire against a cloudy sky.

Incarcerated and Infected: The Fragility of Our State Prison System During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abortion Care As Moral Work: Ethical Considerations of Maternal and Fetal Bodies, An Interview with Johanna Schoen

A pregnant woman stands in profile in front of a bombed out building.

Maternity at War: Introduction

A crowd of people, some holding signs that say STOP ABORTION BANS

A Return to the Abortion Handbook?

A brick building has sustained extensive danger, half bombed-out

Teaching about the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in US History Classrooms

What to Read in a Pandemic

Photo of a doctor's office.

Prenatal Testing and Counseling: The New Front of the Abortion Wars?

By Ginny Engholm

As everyone who reads this blog (or is on Facebook or Twitter) is by now well aware, the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Hobby Lobby case has dealt yet another powerful blow to women’s right to access contraceptives and manage their own health care, reproductive choices, and bodies. But a recent law—this one in Louisiana and regarding prenatal testing and counseling—poses yet another, but much less recognized, threat to women’s reproductive freedom. In May, Louisiana joined several other states (Massachusetts, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland) in passing a version of the Down Syndrome Information Act. This measure is part of the pro-information movement, which attempts to balance disparate groups and agendas within the Down syndrome community by bringing together both pro-choice and pro-life Down syndrome advocates in favor of providing women balanced, medically-accurate, and sensitive information about options when faced with a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. The act as intended requires doctors to give appropriate medical information about the diagnosis and the options. It also requires doctors to give referrals to genetic counselors and relevant support services when delivering a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome to a patient.

A Lego man standing in his office, seeming to be anxious

On the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough?: Interpreting Mental Illness

By Mary Elene Wood

A highway patrol officer straddles a woman who lies on her back by the side of a highway. His arm lifts high into the air, then, with what looks like substantial force, he strikes her in the face with his clenched fist. He does this over and over again. Early in July, news programs around the country quickly spread the story of a California Highway Patrol officer caught on videotape violently beating Marlene Pinnock, a 51-year-old homeless, presumably mentally ill, woman, along the side of a freeway in Los Angeles. The California Highway Patrol claimed that the officer was only trying to stop the woman from walking out into traffic, yet journalists across the U.S. decried, in one writer’s words, “the lack of training given to law enforcement officers to handle such people, even though officers all too often are society’s frontline mental health care providers.”