In this study, Parkin focuses on the money-making side of abortion care, specifically leaning into its use by eugenicists and population-control advocates; she also points out how abortion has historically made money for men. Unfortunately, in her desire to hammer home how bad eugenics is and how population-control is always eugenicist in its motives (it isn't), she misses the opportunities to show how other models of abortion and funding for abortion worked in the period before Roe. There's no index for this book yet, but my own searching showed almost nothing about the countless women-run networks of abortion facilitators and providers, very little about women-run mutual aid networks for funding, and nothing about the way organizations like Jane got wealthier women to lend and donate funds to pay for poorer women's abortions. If I hadn't read the author's acknowledgements, where she decries Dobbs, I'd have thought this was a book by someone seeking to vilify abortion access as a whole, rather than trying to expose some of its problematic history and the effects of that history. In addition, it's dry and dull, and slow reading--it reads like an unrevised dissertation, and could really use a solid edit for tone and pace.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It was interesting to see how the early proponents of abortion weren't looking out for women's bodily autonomy, but were motivated by population control and eugenics. I was also interested to see how many doctors and even clergy were involved in supporting women in seeking abortions when it was not easily available but starting to be legalized.

I think this is a very important topic right now, especially in the US as rights in many places are essentially being rolled back.

I did however find this book to be a bit convoluted and in some places lacked clear organization. It read less like a book for the general public and more like someone's university paper or dissertation. I struggled to make it through some of the chapters and almost didn't finish it.

I received an advanced copy of this book from netgalley. All opinions are my own.

This is such an important topic and this book offers new angles and insights about the history or abortion and the power that goes with that. The use of case studies makes a sometimes heavy and dry topic much more engaging and easy to relate to. I found the kindle version not very reader friendly, especially with all the foot notes, but this may be less of a problem in hard copy format.

This is a really informative read. I used to associate Roe v. Wade with bodily autonomy & a woman’s constitutional right to privacy, but Parkin’s arguments turned parts of my worldview upside down.

I had no idea, for example, that the first abortion advocates were motivated by fears of overpopulation & saw abortion as a form of positive eugenics and population control. It’s interesting that positive eugenics focuses on “good people” having “good offspring” but the economic costs of abortion meant that low-income women were often the ones unable to secure one… which seems contradictory to me, but I digress.

Also, I didn’t know that women of colour were often subject to/coerced into forced sterilisation, and that on the whole, women’s desperation for a disreputable procedure made them vulnerable to all sorts of abuse. There were some pretty stark similarities between pre-Roe abortions and Nazi eugenics policies, which is disturbing to say the least.

That said, I found the book unnecessarily long & repetitive in parts, and I wish there had been a brief primer on Roe v. Wade in the beginning. It would’ve better contextualised the statements about Roe throughout the book. Parkin also relies on heavily on hard facts and statistics, which are somewhat helpful but made it difficult to visualise the struggles women went through. It felt a bit like psychic numbing/cognitive overload, and I think her argument would’ve been more significant if I had tangible examples to empathise with.

I struggled to finish this. It may be partially the formatting of the ARC, but it was very disjointed and difficult to follow.

I haven’t finished the book yet, and I haven’t decided if I will, but I skimmed through the book towards the end, and I feel that I will like the last few chapters. I haven’t thread much yet, but while the topic is interesting, the way the book is written, feels dragged out in the beginning and almost too much and too much repetitive information fitted in two little space. It’s one of the books that reading seems to drag on and take forever. That being said, I don’t think it’s a bad book, but it’s just not the writing style that works for me and it feels too dry and too boring.