A battle cry for all women in their fight to be fully recognized as human beings.

Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association; Sex and Gender Section
2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
An important work documenting how the criminal justice system polices women's reproductive capacity
The intense policing of women’s reproductive capacity places women’s health and human rights in great peril. Poor women are pressured to undergo sterilization. Women addicted to illicit drugs risk arrest for carrying their pregnancies to term. Courts, child welfare, and law enforcement agencies fail to recognize the efforts of battered and incarcerated women to care for their children. Pregnant inmates are subject to inhumane practices such as shackling during labor and poor prenatal care. And decades after Roe, the criminalization of certain procedures and regulation of abortion providers still obstruct women’s access to safe and private abortions.
In this important work, Jeanne Flavin looks beyond abortion to document how the law and the criminal justice system police women’s rights to conceive, to be pregnant, and to raise their children. Through vivid and disturbing case studies, Flavin shows how the state seeks to establish what a “good woman” and “fit mother” should look like and whose reproduction is valued. With a stirring conclusion that calls for broad-based measures that strengthen women’s economic position , choice-making, autonomy, sexual freedom, and health care, 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 right of a woman to be a healthy and valued member of society independent of how or whether she reproduces.

"Bolstered by quotes and firsthand accounts, Flavin delivers eye-opening reports on topics including abortion rights, infant abandonment and battered women, detailing little-noticed or taken-for-granted policies that restrict and remand women. Written in a flowing academic style, Flavins attention to historical detail and unfailing moral compass make her progressive reexamination of womens rights thorough and convincing." - Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"In Our Bodies, Our Crimes, Flavin traces the life-and-death power that the little-examined patriarchal assumptions informing our common life can haveespecially among poor, nonwhite women. Flavin . . . supplies a sobering primer on the laws and social constraints that keep women from fully controlling their bodies. The case studies she surveys in Our Bodies, Our Crimes make it painfully clear that the freedom to decide how and when to reproduce is, for a huge swath of American women, just as important as the much more fervidly discussed question of how and when women can choose not to reproduce." - Bookforum

"Flavin's book shows how American women, especially those who are poor or incarcerated, face societal pressure, stigma and even legal procedures in attempts to force them to become the "right" kind of mothersif they are deemed worthy of motherhood at all." - Conscience: The Newsjournal of Catholic Opinion

"Highly recommended." - Choice

"Our Bodies, Our Crimes, Jeanne Flavins thorough examination of the criminalization of female reproduction in America, is dense yet provocative." - make/shift