Personhood

“Personhood is a field guide to the seemingly boundless tactical resourcefulness of the anti-abortion movement.”—Margaret Talbot, New Yorker“A leading historian of abortion looks beyond the reversal of Roe v. Wade to the future battleground of reproductive rights.”—New York Times Book Review“No one alive knows more about U.S. abortion history than Mary Ziegler. Her fair-minded and sincerely empathetic treatment of abortion opponents is a hallmark of her scrupulous scholarship.”—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Liberty and Sexuality and Bearing the Cross“If supporters of reproductive rights believed that Roe v. Wade was the endgame, Mary Ziegler offers a powerful, and disturbing, history showing that the long campaign for fetal personhood has even grander ambitions. Ziegler, one of the nation’s premier historians of abortion, offers the definitive account of the concept of fetal personhood—past, present and future.”—Julian Zelizer, Princeton University“This book contributes forcefully to public conversations by showing that American anti-abortion efforts have aimed, ever since the 1960s, to establish fetal personhood in the U.S. Constitution. Ziegler traces the patience, flexibility, creativity, and (often) opportunism of successive anti-abortion leaders in synching their justifications for fetal rights to the politics of the moment—with significant bearing on larger conceptualizations of equality. No other work is as shrewd in probing the wider effects of the successive parallels invoked by activists intending to illuminate the deprivations suffered by the fetus lacking constitutional rights.”—Nancy F. Cott, author of Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home between the Wars“Mary Ziegler continues to establish herself as one of the most prolific and important scholars of abortion in the United States. Her detailed and meticulously researched account of the anti-choice personhood movement and its implications is as informative as it is frightening.”—Kimberly Mutcherson, editor of Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten

Mary Ziegler is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, and author of six books on the law, history, and politics of abortion and American conservatism. She lives in Sausalito, CA.