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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent...should be required reading for all!
Review: I am fortunate to have picked up this book at a local feminist bookstore. This book taught me an abundant amount of information regarding the complex connections between reproduction, gender, and race in the United States. Starting with slavery, the author takes the reader all the way through to the present. Unfortunetly not much has changed since then. Society continues to control the reproduction of black women in order to keep the status quo of white male power structures alive and well. The most difficult chapter for me concerned the eugenics movement and forced sterilization. I knew this occurred but was not aware of how systematic it was. Who knows if doctors really stopped sterilizing black women without their consent in the 1970's as the author stated? I wouldn't be surprized if this practice continues. I had to have a couple drinks to process that chapter.No longer can I hide behind ignorance of these events.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful!
Review: Ms. Roberts did an excellent job in detailing the racism behind reproduction and family planning as it pertains to Black women. I heard of unauthorized sterilizations, but had no idea of how wide-spread such policies went nor that they are present in today's society. It seems that women, especially Black women can't get a fair break. I'll never understand how someone else can tell someone what to do with their body. Yet these same people refuse to put the same energy and money in education and real healthcare. We have to take this knowledge and educate our brothers and sisters so that it can stop.
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Summary: Needed account of reproductive history
Review: Roberts, a Rutgers law professor, examines the sociopolitical reproductive history of black women--concluding this group did and still faces disparate treatment in public policy. The combined impact of race/ethnicity, sex and ecconomic status govern black women's relation to their own bodies--and treatment from policymakers and medical personnel. While this premise has been previously examined by other scholars, Robert's contribution differs in legal analysis of the state/women relationship specifically as it applies to black women. She also faults fellow feminists for their ignorance, silence, and apathy towards black women's unique reproductive rights. Begining with a critique of the predominantley white pro-choice movement for preoccupation with white middle class women and the assumption reproductive access means the same thing for all groups, Roberts holds black women's fertility is only valued if a predominantley white society can find ways to benefit from it. She also notes that illegal abortion took the highest tolls on low-income black women who were unlikely to have the financial and political clout of rich white women to convince doctors to perform theraputic abortions in secret. At the same time, abortion should not be the sole issue of a truly progressive reproductive rights movement because coercive sterilization and contraceptive programs are also painful incidents in black women's reproductive history. The pro-choice movement should oppose reccent 'welfare reform victories' because of the destruction such punitative measures have on black communities. Although most recipients were and continue to be white, policy debates were flooded with inferred images of the black "welfare queen" to foster and exacerbate racial and class tensions within the most conservative industrialized nation in the world. Because anything else repeats the very conditions she is seeking to eliminate, a truly progressive reproductive policy supports the rights of all women to control their own bodies. Not enough to perform "multicultural" outreach, all feminist reproductive rights groups must fully intergrate a multi-pronged, class concious approach into their mission statement and policy objectives. This book is an indispensible text for a social science course on reproductive rights, law, and/or social policy, but should be read by all who are concerned about securing freedom for all.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing Book!
Review: We all know about the plight of black men in society, the mainstream white society doesn't know about the plight of black women and their role in demonizing us by controlling our reproductive capacities and by destroying black families. Black women have long been stereotyped as breeders of unwanted children, matriarchs, and amoral jezebels. It's time for society to stop seeing blacks as problems and to start finding solutions to the growing poverty, lack of insurance, and family breakdown among blacks by assisting them economically, not by punishing black women's reproduction. I want to thank Ms. Roberts for having the guts to say what was on her mind in her book.
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