A Woman's Life Is a Human Life

My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this urgent audiobook from historian Felicia Kornbluh reveals two movement victories in New York that forever changed the politics of reproductive rights nationally.

A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life is the story of the movements that transformed the politics of reproductive rights: the fight to decriminalize abortion and the campaign against sterilization abuse, at a time when sterilization was disproportionately proposed as birth control to Black, Latinx, and poor women. Their victories occurred just before and after Roe v. Wade, and their histories cast new light on the case and the fate of reproductive rights and justice today. From dissident Democrats and members of a rising feminist movement who refashioned abortion laws, to progressive ministers and rabbis who led the nation’s largest abortion referral service, to Puerto Rican activists who introduced sterilization abuse to the reproductive rights agenda and Black women who took the cause global, A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life chronicles how activists changed the law and demanded reproductive justice. The first in-depth study of a winning campaign to change a state’s abortion law, with firsthand accounts and previously unseen sources—including from her mother, who drafted New York’s law decriminalizing abortion, and across-the-hall neighbor, Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías, a Puerto Rican doctor and leader in the movement against sterilization abuse—Felicia Kornbluh shows how grassroots action overcame the odds—and how it might work today.