Drawing of the stages of development of a human embryo from gestation to just before birth.

Meanings and Materials of Miscarriage: How Babies in Jars Shaped Modern Pregnancy

I’m Not Crazy!: Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain

The Obstetrician Who Cried “White Privilege”

Overlook of a mountain scene, with a single person looking out at the landscape in a blue jacket.

My Story of 20 Weeks

100,000 Women in Trafalgar Square: Remembering The Forgotten Women’s March of 1979

The Pill Kills: Women’s Health and Feminist Activism

A Pot of Herbs, A Plastic Sheet, and Thou: A Historian Goes for a “V-Steam”

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.

The Slippery Slopes of Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby

The Boy Who Lived: Stillbirth and Life after Death