With Roe v Wade upended, the balance of power and authority among lawmakers, medical practitioners, and pregnant and birthing people is suddenly in flux. And at the center of the storm, the safety and autonomy of those carrying (and losing) pregnancies is in jeopardy. Historical investigations into troubled pregnancies and births, therefore, are salient and… Read more →
Lara Freidenfelds
Lara Freidenfelds
Writer
Pregnancy Test: An Interview with Karen Weingarten
Karen Weingarten is a regular contributor to Nursing Clio and Associate Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. She has just published a new book titled Pregnancy Test and is the author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880- 1940. Lara: How did you get interested in researching the history and culture… Read more →
Menstrual Advocacy Is Flowing and Flowering
When I was researching my first book, The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America (2009), one of the most frequent questions I got was a skeptical “why are you writing about that?” So when I started fielding frequent calls from reporters around 2015, it was a surprise. They had the impression that the world had… Read more →
The Family Roe and the Messy Reality of the Abortion “Jane Roe” Didn’t Get
I almost didn’t read The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager. When I saw the premise – a biography of Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade, and her family – I wasn’t immediately sure why I should care. I study the broad-scale social history of reproductive health and I had… Read more →
Babylost: An Interview with Monica Casper
Sociologist Monica Casper, who has written previously on fetal surgery, has published a new book called Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z. The book consists of a series of essays related to stillbirth and newborn death, arranged alphabetically by topic. Lara: In my research for The Myth… Read more →
A Love Letter to Intellectual Mothers
Marga Vicedo’s Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother is a love letter to intellectual mothers. And Vicedo’s warm and astute delivery exemplifies the blending of love and intellect Vicedo discerns in her subject, Clara Park. The book is centered around Park, whose odyssey of… Read more →
What Does It Mean to Have a “Real Choice” about Abortion?
What does it mean to have a “real choice” about abortion? I am writing this book review as the Supreme Court hears arguments over Mississippi’s law banning abortion after 15 weeks of gestation, and it could seem like the wrong time for arguing the subtleties of this question. Abortion may become flat-out illegal throughout the… Read more →
When Abortion Was a Necessary Sin
Anyone tempted to make facile arguments about abortion politics, on either side of the aisle, needs to read John Christopoulos’s new book, Abortion in Early Modern Italy. The book is beautifully written and the stories in it are jaw-dropping, with nearly tabloid-worthy details about individuals’ sex lives and relationships, though handled with appropriate respect. As… Read more →
Liberal Christians in the Making of Sex Education
In the 1960s conservative Christian leaders like Billy James Hargis and his “Christian Crusade” defined the culture wars over sex education as a battle between secular liberals who wanted to teach comprehensive sex ed in the public schools, and religious conservatives who demanded silence on the subject.[1] That framing has stuck in the cultural imagination…. Read more →
What About Men’s Reproductive Health?
In her latest book, GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health, sociologist Rene Almeling asks why all the public health messages about healthy childbearing seem to be aimed at women. What about the research that shows that men’s health is relevant to the condition of their sperm, and can profoundly affect the health of… Read more →