Cassia Roth, "A Miscarriage of Justice: Womens Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil" (Stanford UP, 2020)
Cassia Roth's new book\xa0A Miscarriage of Justice: Women\u2019s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2020) examines women's reproductive health in relation to legal and medical policy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the onset of republicanism in 1889, women's reproductive capabilities\u2015their ability to conceive and raise future citizens and laborers\u2015became critical to the expansion of the new Brazilian state. Analyzing court cases, law, medical writings, and health data, Cassia Roth argues that the state's approach to women's health in the early twentieth century focused on criminalizing fertility control without improving services or outcomes for women. Ultimately, the increasingly interventionist state fostered a culture of condemnation around poor women's reproduction that extended beyond elite discourses into the popular imagination.\nBy tracing how legal thought and medical knowledge became cemented into law and clinical practice, how obstetricians, public health officials, and legal practitioners approached fertility control, and how women experienced and negotiated their reproductive lives,\xa0A Miscarriage of Justice\xa0provides a new way of interpreting the intertwined histories of gender, race, reproduction, and the state\u2015and shows how these questions continue to reverberate in debates over reproductive rights and women's health in Brazil today.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law