Reproductive Politics

Back in January 1995 in Los Angeles, California, a Singaporean pornstar named Annabel Chong took cultural rebellion to an extreme, on terms that had never been negotiated before. She was filmed having sex with a long receiving line of men, servicing them 251 times over a ten-hour period to set a new world record: The World’s Biggest Gangbang.

Women make over 80% of healthcare decisions in the U.S., yet only 4% of all medical research and development is focused on women's health issues. From periods and childbirth to menopause, female pain has been normalized, as society shrugs and says "Welcome to being a woman," instead of coming up with better solutions. But it doesn't have to be this way. In The Vagina Business, award-winning journalist Marina Gerner, Ph.D. takes an eye-opening look at the innovators challenging the status quo to deliver the healthcare solutions women need.

"Un manuel sur la sexualité féminine et une jouissance décorrélée de la fécondation. Drôle, percutant, l'ouvrage a aussi une visée politique. Car l'égalité sexuelle participe du combat pour l'égalité tout court. Aux orgasmes, citoyennes !" - Aurélie Marcireau, "Le Nouveau magazine littéraire". Libérée, la sexualité des femmes d'aujourd'hui ? On serait tenté de croire que oui. Pourtant, plus de 50 % d'entre elles se disent insatisfaites, que ce soit à cause d'un manque de désir ou de difficultés à atteindre l'orgasme.

On June 24, 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the impact was immediate: by 2024, abortion was virtually unavailable or significantly restricted in 21 states. In Undue Burden, reporter Shefali Luthra traces the unforgettable stories of patients faced with one of the most personal decisions of their lives.

From evolution to the epidural and beyond, Tina Cassidy presents an intelligent, enlightening, and impeccably researched cultural history of how and why we're born the way we are. Women have been giving birth for millennia, but that's about the only constant in the final stage of the great process that is human reproduction. Why is it that every culture and generation seems to have its own ideas about the best way to give birth?

This comprehensive manual for understanding and preparing for the looming changes to reproductive rights law explains how to get the healthcare you need - by any means necessary. Activist and writer Robin Marty guides listeners through various worst-case scenarios of a post-Roe America and offers ways to fight back, including how to acquire financial support, how to use existing networks and create new ones, and how to, when required, work outside existing legal systems.

In Essential Labor, Garbes explores assumptions about care, work, and deservedness, offering a deeply personal and rigorously reported look at what mothering is, and can be. A first-generation Filipino-American, Garbes shares the perspective of her family's complicated relationship to care work, placing mothering in a global context—the invisible economic engine that has been historically demanded of women of color.

After 20 years of private obstetrics and gynecological practice, there’s nothing Dr. Jackie Walters hasn’t seen. And now, in her new audiobook, the widely-adored OB-GYN invites you to put your feet in the stirrups and investigate. Whether she’s covering libido, contraceptives, labiaplasty, or fertility, Dr. Jackie educates listeners with her characteristic grace and pragmatism. Both funny and informative, she brings you on a quest through the female reproductive system - answering all the burning (and itching, and smelling...) questions you’ve always been afraid to ask.

The second edition of this pathbreaking, widely taught book offers five new chapters, on breastfeeding and Black infant health; Black birthing during COVID; Black doulas rethinking birthing practices; the recent buildup of a US national movement; and expanding the global movement for sexual and reproductive wellbeing. Other chapters are updated throughout. Birthing Justice puts black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternal care system.

A Harvard-trained obstetrician-gynecologist, a prominent blogger, and author of the classic How Your Baby Is Born delivers a timely, important, and sure to be headline-making exposé that shines a light on the natural parenting movement and the multimillion-dollar industry behind it.

The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe firsthand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering.

A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experience. She can be alternately sweet, tart, bubbly, or mellow. She can be maternal and playful, bossy and submissive, strong and soft. The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long as she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of life.

Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today's anti-abortion movements is largely financed and planned by far-right extremists. Many of them are avowedly fascist and white supremacist, afraid of a "great replacement" of the world's white population by other races, who are working hard to reshape governments and policies across Europe, North America, and around the world. Much of this far-right organizing and funding network, however, has been overlooked by today's feminist and left movements.

Pictures of half-naked girls and women can seem to litter almost every screen, billboard, and advertisement in America. Pole-dancing studios keep women fit. Men airdrop their dick pics to female passengers on planes and trains. This pornification of our society is what Bernadette Barton calls "raunch culture". Barton explores what raunch culture is, why it matters, and how it is ruining America. She exposes how internet porn drives trends in programming, advertising, and social media, and makes its way onto our phones, into our fashion choices, and into our sex lives.

Empapado de sinceridad y humor, este audiolibro emplea herramientas feministas para analizar la forma en la que la sociedad moldea, censura y limita el deseo y el placer de las mujeres. María del Mar narra cómo las mujeres están luchando por reivindicar el derecho al placer y por demostrar que el sexo, la imagen corporal y la alimentación son arenas de disputa política. La autora habla en este libro de nudes y dick pics, de masturbación y de pornografía, narra la violencia y describe desórdenes alimenticios.

At the turn of the 20th century, American women began to reject Victorian propriety in favor of passion and livelihood outside the home. This alarmed authorities, who feared certain "over-sexed" women could destroy civilization if allowed to reproduce and pass on their defects. Set against this backdrop, The Unfit Heiress chronicles the fight for inheritance, both genetic and monetary, between Ann Cooper Hewitt and her mother, Maryon.

Tracing the path to the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade and the continuing battle for women's rights, Blumenthal examines, in a straightforward tone, the root causes of the current debate around abortion and repercussions that have affected generations of American women. This eye-opening audiobook is the perfect tool to facilitate difficult discussions and awareness of a topic that is rarely touched on in school but affects each and every young person. It's also perfect for fans of Steve Sheinkin and Deborah Heiligman.

Middle age doesn't have to be about hot flashes, irritable tempers, and no sex drive. Rigorously researched and engagingly written, Suzanne Somers' The Sexy Years is women's indispensable guide to life after 50. Making the case that the key to happiness lies in the replacement of lost hormones, Somers shares some of the benefits she had first-handedly experienced as a result: increased energy levels, improved sex drive, better weight management, and much more.

Midwives in the United States live and work in a complex regulatory environment that is a direct result of state and medical intervention into women's reproductive capacity. In Birthing a Movement, Renee Ann Cramer draws on over a decade of ethnographic and archival research to examine the interactions of law, politics, and activism surrounding midwifery care.

Birth control offers women the opportunity to prevent pregnancy, plan and space their births, or have no births at all. And yet, in the United States, half of all pregnancies remain unintended, and access to birth control is beset by inequities in education, access, and coverage. Birth Control: What Everyone Needs to Know will offer more than a user's guide to available means of contraception: it will examine how supported family-planning infrastructure impacts society as a whole.