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Caroline Fredrickson spoke about her book, Under the Bus, at Politics & Prose on Monday, August 17, 2015. For many workers, labor laws serve less as protection from discrimination or exploitation than as cracks to fall between. In this primer on labor rights, especially for women, who make up the majority of low-wage temporary and contract workers, Fredrickson, currently president of the American Constitution Society and former director of ACLU’s Washington legislative office, general counsel and legal director of NARAL, and special assistant to president Clinton for legislative affairs, distills the lessons from her long legal career, advising women how they can press for maternity leave, health insurance, and even minimum wage—rights employers are legally obligated to honor. |
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Mary Ziegler spoke about her book, After Roe, at Politics & Prose on Sunday, July 19, 2015. Today the abortion debate is either/or: pro-life or pro-choice. But as Ziegler, Stearns Weaver Miller Professor of Law at Florida State, reminds us, positions were not always this polarized. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with people closely involved in the fight over legalizing abortion in the 1960s and ‘70s, Ziegler takes us back to the first years after the Roe decision, presenting a wide range of arguments and perspectives surrounding the issue—which was not viewed solely in terms of a woman’s right to choose. Rather, activists of all stripes considered race and class as well as gender. |
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Katha Pollitt spoke about her book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, at Politics & Prose on Wednesday October 29, 2014. Forty years after the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, “abortion” is still a word that is said with outright hostility by many, despite the fact that one in three American women will have terminated at least one pregnancy by menopause. Even those who support a woman’s right to an abortion often qualify their support by saying abortion is a “bad thing,” an “agonizing decision,” making the medical procedure so remote and radioactive that it takes it out of the world of the everyday, turning an act that is normal and necessary into something shameful and secretive. Meanwhile, with each passing day, the rights upheld by the Supreme Court are being systematically eroded by state laws designed to end abortion outright.In this urgent, controversial book, Katha Pollitt reframes abortion as a common part of a woman’s reproductive life, one that should be accepted as a moral right with positive social implications. In Pro, Pollitt takes on the personhood argument, reaffirms the priority of a woman’s life and health, and discusses why terminating a pregnancy can be a force for good for women, families, and society. It is time, Pollitt argues, that we reclaim the lives and the rights of women and mothers. |
