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Milner Library

Reproductive Justice

This guide empowers learners to engage with topics and issues relating to reproductive rights and justice

Selected Books

catalog link to The global gag rule and women's reproductive health : rhetoric versus reality

The Global Gag Rule and Women's Reproductive Health: Rhetoric Versus Reality

e-book and print (Floor 4 Shelves: HQ767.5.U5 R627 2018)

catalog link to Reproductive Justice

Reproductive Justice: An Introduction

Floor 4 Shelves: KF3760 .R67 2017

catalog link to Reproductive Politics

Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know

Floor 4 Shelves: HQ766.5.U5 S673 2013

catalog link to The Criminalization of a Woman's Body

The Criminalization of a Woman's Body

Floor 4 Shelves: K5181 .C75 1992

Catalog Record to When Abortion Was a Crime

When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973

e-book and print (Floor 4 Shelves: HQ767.5.U5 R378 1997)

Catalog Record for Birthing a Movement

Birthing a Movement: Midwives, Law, and the Politics of Reproductive Care

e-book and print (Floor 4 Shelves: KF2915.M5 C73 2021)

book cover image for Reproductive Rights

Reproductive Rights

Floor 4 Shelves: HQ766.5.U5 R476 2023

Select Films

A young Lakota woman looks up at a stormy gray sky as her blows around her face.

Young Lakota

2013
1hr 23min

In this award-winning documentary, Cecilia Fire Thunder- the first female President of the Oglala Sioux tribe, defies a proposed South Dakota law criminalizing all abortions, with no exceptions for rape or incest, by threatening to build a women's clinic on the sovereign territory of the reservation. She ignites a political firestorm that sets off a chain reaction in the lives of three young Lakotas on the Pine Ridge Reservation, forcing each of them to make choices that define who they are and the kind of adults they will become.

Illustration of a pregnant woman wearing a hoodie and text

Personhood: Policing Pregnant Women in America

2019
1 hr 19 min

Personhood tells a different reproductive rights story - one that ripples far beyond the right to choose and into the lives of every pregnant person in America. Like a moment from the chilling "Handmaid's Tale," Tammy Loertscher's fetus was given an attorney, while the courts denied Tammy her constitutional rights. In this timely documentary, we see her sent to jail, and then forced to challenge a Wisconsin law that eroded her privacy, her right to due process, and her body sovereignty. Through her story, Personhood reframes the abortion debate to encompass the growing system of laws that criminalize and police pregnant women. At the intersection of the erosion of women's rights, the war on drugs, and mass incarceration, Tammy's experience reveals the dangerous consequences of these little-known laws for American women and families.

Closeup image of a woman blindfolded with an American flag overlaid on top of a burning, bombed building.

Birthright: A War Story

2017
1 hr 40 min

In America today, a radical movement has tightened its grip on state power, seeking to control whether and how women bear children. In this crusade, pregnant women are subject to state control, surveillance, and punishment. Even women who don’t want an abortion face shocking risks—like the pregnant woman in Alabama who faced criminal charges for taking half a Valium. Or like the grieving woman in Nebraska who, already devastated by a bleak diagnosis at 22 weeks, was forced to continue an unviable and dangerous pregnancy because of a new "fetal pain" law. 

The film tells these stories of women caught up in a frightening new legal system, which criminalizes and physically violates women, threatens our lives, and challenges our constitutional protections.

Other Suggested Resources

Federal Sources

Suggested Keywords and Subject Terms

Below you will find a list of suggested subjects and keywords you can use to search for this topic. This is not a comprehensive list, just a way to get you started searching.

CINAHL Subject Headings: 

  • Patient Rights
  • Fetal Rights
  • Civil Rights
  • Right to Health
  • Women's Rights
  • Autonomy
  • Patient Autonomy
  • Professional Autonomy
  • Family Planning Policy
  • Reproductive Rights

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH): 

  • Reproductive Rights

  • Family Planning Policy

  • Involuntary Fertility Control

  • Personal Autonomy

  • Professional Autonomy

  • Relational Autonomy

  • Women's Rights

  • Paternalism

Additional Links