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Be Fruitful and Multiply examines the moral justification offered by Anglican leaders for their support for eugenic, pronatalist, and neo-Malthusian schemes in the United Kingdom during the interwar period. These religious leaders often comprehended their efforts to control fertility within the context of a broader struggle over competing conceptions of human purpose in English society, and regularly justified their efforts on the grounds that fertility-manipulation schemes served to align procreative behaviors with “Christian” conceptions of human purpose. The shared moral logic of Anglican leaders helps to explain the pervasive interest in birthrate patterns, along with the enduring appeal of fertility-manipulation schemes, amongst middle- and upper-classes during the first half of the twentieth century. This book also sheds light on how population concerns led to the liberalization of church positions on marriage and sexuality, and illuminates how Anglican leaders sought to maintain moral influence in the face of the perceived large-scale rejection of Christian moral teachings.

Antebellum America saw a great upsurge in abortion, driven in part by the rise of the pharmaceutical industry. Unsurprisingly, the practice became increasingly visible in the popular culture and literature of the era, appearing openly in advertisements, popular fiction, and newspaper reports. One figure would come to dominate national headlines from the 1840s onward: Madame Restell. Facing public condemnation and mob attacks at her home for her dogged support of women’s reproductive rights, Restell built an empire selling her powders, pills, and services along the Eastern Seaboard.

Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne undoubtedly knew of Restell’s work and would go on to depict the incompatibility of abortion and nationalism in their writings. Through the thwarted plotlines, genealogical interruptions, and terminated ideas of Poe’s Dupin trilogy and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance, these authors consider new concepts around race, reproduction, and American exceptionalism. Dana Medoro demonstrates that their work can be usefully read in the context of debates on fetal life and personhood that circulated in the era.

The home pregnancy test is a technology that can be purchased in drug stores, gas stations, and online, and the results are often casually posted to social media. But, as sociologist and attorney Joan Robinson argues, no technology is as simple as it appears. In Whose Hands traces this test from its origin story in a lab to its day-to-day existence in the hands of users, showing that mundane technologies matter, especially when they are used as tools of surveillance and self-surveillance. The book is the result of Robinson's fourteen-year exploration of the social life of the home pregnancy test, and it describes the breadth and beauty of people's messy reproductive lives today. Based on archival and legal research as well as interviews with home pregnancy test users, it shows how even those technologies that we use because they're convenient can be tools of shame, surveillance, and control. 
 

Despite intense political debate, attitudes on abortion were remarkably stable for decades. However, after the 2022 Dobbs decision, Americans’ opinions began to change. Not Going Back explores the shifts in public opinion on this hot-button issue from the landmark passing of Roe v. Wade in 1973 through the 2024 election and into 2025.

The authors ask, “What role do Americans want their government to play in protecting, regulating, or restricting abortion access?” and, “How will changing attitudes on abortion reshape American politics?” They offer cohesive, theoretically grounded explanations for both the continuity and the change in Americans’ attitudes on this contentious topic. Using national data, they take a deep dive into the personal experiences and social forces behind these changes.

Not Going Back ends with an examination of the consequences of these changes for election outcomes. While there has been a striking reversal in the prioritization of abortion as an issue among Democrats and Republicans, the full impact of this shift in thinking will be influenced by future policies, court decisions, and party reactions.

Planning Quechua Families: Indigenous Reproduction and the Peruvian State examines how reproductive health is shaped by a history of colonial power, state intervention, and social upheaval. This ethnography is centered on the experiences of Indigenous women in the Andes. The book situates contemporary family planning within the legacy of forced sterilizations and political violence during the era of Shining Path terrorism. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Rebecca Irons brings together the perspectives of both Quechua women and the health-care workers who serve them, offering a nuanced account of how reproductive services are experienced, negotiated, and contested in rural clinics.

The book explores how reproductive health is embedded within broader processes of social change, including “Incanization,” shifting ideas of citizenship, and efforts to integrate marginalized communities into the Peruvian nation. Irons demonstrates how Indigenous understandings of kinship, health, and identity intersect with state policies and biomedical practices, revealing forms of violence that are often less visible but deeply consequential. 

By placing Indigenous reproductive experiences within a wider cultural and political context, Planning Quechua Families provides a critical perspective on how power operates through intimate aspects of life in the contemporary Andes.

This volume focuses on Sanger from her groundbreaking overseas advocacy during the interwar years through her postwar role in creating the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The documents reconstruct Sanger's dramatic birth control advocacy tours through early 1920s Germany, Japan, and China in the midst of significant government and religious opposition to her ideas. They also trace her tireless efforts to build a global movement through international conferences and tours. Letters, journal entries, writings, and other records reveal Sanger's contentious dealings with other activists, her correspondence with the likes of Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sanger's own dramatic evolution from gritty grassroots activist to postwar power broker and diplomat.

A powerful documentary history of a transformative twentieth-century figure, The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 4 is a primer for the debates on individual choice, sex education, and planned parenthood that remain all-too-pertinent in our own time.

Honorable Mention, Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2025

Honorable Mention, Women’s Forum Book Prize, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, 2024

As the predominant form of birth control in Soviet society, abortion reflected key paradoxes of state socialism: women held formal equality but lacked basic needs such as contraceptives. With market reforms, Russians enjoyed new access to Western contraceptives and new pressures to postpone childbearing until economically self-sufficient. But habits of family planning did not emerge automatically—they required extensive physician retraining, public education, and cultural transformation. In Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture, author Michele Rivkin-Fish examines the creative strategies of Russians who promoted family planning in place of routine abortion. Rather than emphasizing individual rights, they explained family planning’s benefits to the nation—its potential to strengthen families and prevent the secondary sterility that resulted when women underwent repeat, poor-quality abortions. Still, fierce debates about abortion and contraceptives erupted as declining fertility was framed as threatening Russia’s demographic sovereignty.

Although Russian family planners embraced a culturally meaningful liberalism that would rationalize public policy and reenchant relations, nationalist opponents cast family planning as suspicious for its association with the individualistic, “child-free” West. This book tells the story of how Russian family planners developed culturally salient frameworks to promote the acceptability of contraceptives and help end routine abortion. It also documents how nationalist campaigns for higher fertility denounced family planning and ultimately dismantled its institutions. By tracing these processes, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture demonstrates the central importance of reproductive politics in the struggle for liberalizing social change that preceded Russia’s 2022 descent into war, repression, and global marginalization.