Published in 2025
376 pages
8 hours and 21 minutes
Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis School of Law, is one of the leading historians of the US abortion debate and the author of 4 books, including Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment (Yale, 2022), Abortion and the Law in America (Cambridge, 2020), and the award-winning After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate. She speaks frequently with the media, including the Atlantic, Fox News, MSNBC, the New Republic, New York Times, NPR, and the Washington Post, She lives with her family in California.
What is this book about?
The next phase of the war over reproduction in America
What’s next for the battle over abortion? Mary Ziegler argues that simply undoing Roe v. Wade has never been the endpoint for the antiabortion movement. Since the 1960s, the larger goal has been to secure recognition of fetuses and embryos as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, a step that the modern antiabortion movement argues would make liberal abortion laws unconstitutional.
Personhood chronicles the internal struggles and changing ideas about race, sex, religion, war, corporate rights, and poverty that shaped the personhood struggle over half a century. The book explores how Americans came to take for granted that fetal personhood requires criminalization and suggests that other ways of valuing both fetal life and women’s equality might be possible. Ziegler ultimately shows that the battle for personhood has long been about more than abortion: it has aimed to overhaul the regulation of in vitro fertilization, contraception, and the behavior of pregnant women; change the meaning of equality under the law; and determine how courts decide which fundamental rights Americans enjoy. This book is necessary listening for anyone seeking to understand the era launched by the reversal of Roe.
