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Intimate Politics: Fertility Control in Global Historical Perspective book cover

1st Edition

Intimate Politics Fertility Control in Global Historical Perspective

Edited By Cassia Roth, Diana Paton Copyright 2025
216 Pages
by Routledge

216 Pages
by Routledge

216 Pages
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This book places the intimate experience of fertility control at the heart of political and social approaches toward women’s bodies. Across the globe, women have always controlled their fertility through intimate efforts ultimately tied to larger political processes and gendered power dynamics. Women’s biological reproductive capabilities have been contested sites of power struggles, shaping... Read more

Introduction

Cassia Roth and Diana Paton

 

Part I: Concepts and Categories

 

1. Fertility control in ancient Rome

Rebecca Flemming

 

2. Who’s in control? Varying and changing translations of ‘birth control’ in Japan

Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci

 

Part II: Law, Medicine, and Religion

 

3. ‘Performing public piety:’ Infanticide and reproductive agency in Reformation Spain

Nazanin Sullivan

 

4. The many meanings of aborto: Pregnancy termination and the instability of a medical category over time

Elizabeth O’Brien

 

5. Debates on family planning and the contraceptive pill in the Irish magazine Woman’s Way, 1963–1973

Laura Kelly

 

Part III: States and Families

 

6. Bringing the law home: Abortion, reproductive coercion, and the family in early twentieth-century China

Ling Ma

 

7. In the family way: Incest, fertility control, and the power of the patriarchal family in Brazil

Cassia Roth

 

Part IV: Imperial Power and Local Realities

 

8. ‘It is impossible to judge the extent to which the crime is prevalent’: Infanticide and the law in India, 1870–1926

Daniel J. R. Grey

 

9. Embodied sources: abortion, medicine, and the law in early twentieth-century British Guiana

Juanita De Barros

 

 Afterword: Governing reproduction

Laura Briggs

Biography

Cassia Roth is Associate Professor in the Department of Society, Environment, and Health Equity at the University of California, Riverside, USA. She is the author of A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil and articles in Gender & History, Journal of Women’s History, Slavery & Abolition, Medical History, and História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, among others. She has an MPH in Epidemiology and a PhD in History. 

Diana Paton is William Robertson Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh. Her books include No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870, and The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World.

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