The Real Issue behind the Abortion Debate
An op-ed by Jeanne Flavin in the San Francisco Chronicle

Panicked teenagers are prosecuted for abandoning or killing their newborns, but are not guaranteed comprehensive sexuality education or reproductive health services. Poor women are pressured not to procreate and urged to undergo sterilization. Women who are addicted to illicit drugs risk arrest for carrying their pregnancies to term. And more than 30 years after Roe, women still face barriers to obtaining a safe and affordable abortion including clinic violence and attempts to criminalize medically necessary procedures.

In Our Bodies, Our Crimes, Jeanne Flavin argues that, not only has the states control of womens bodies become more intrusive and more pervasive, it has also become invisible and taken for granted. This important work is framed around several vivid case studies, each taking place at a different time in the reproductive cycle. Through these disturbing examples, Flavin describes how the criminal justice system regulates women and their reproductive behavior from conception to childrearing. Flavin shows how by restricting some womens access to abortion as well as obstetric and gynecologic care, for instance, or failing to support the efforts of incarcerated women and battered women to rear their children, the law and the criminal justice system establish what a good woman or a fit mother should look like and how conception, pregnancy, birth, child care, and socialization should take place. With a stirring conclusion that calls for broad-based measures that strengthen womens economic status, choice-making, autonomy, sexual power, and healthcare, Our Bodies, Our Crimes is a battle cry for all women in their fight to be fully recognized as human beings. At its heart, this book is about the freedom to be a healthy woman and a valued member of society independent of how or even whether she reproduces.