Abortion in the American Imagination

KAREN WEINGARTEN is an assistant professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Biopolitics of Abortion as the Century Turns2. The Inadvertent Alliance of Anthony Comstock and Margaret Sanger: Choice, Rights, and Freedom in Modern America3. The Eugenics of Bad Girls: Abortion, Popular Fiction, and Population Control4. Economies of Abortion: Money, Markets, and the Scene of Exchange5. Making a Living: Labor, Life, and Abortion RhetoricEpilogue: 1944 and BeyondNotesWorks CitedIndex

"This absorbing, well-argued book presents a compelling survey of late-19th- and early-20th-century literary and cultural documents that reflected and shaped attitudes toward abortion. Weingarten offers fascinating readings of well-known works...and studies them alongside less-known works...and various films. In addition to providing illuminating close analyses of particular scenes in these works, Weingarten carefully contextualizes contemporary politics. Highly recommended."— Choice"Weingarten provides a rich analysis of literary representations of abortion and the problem of pitting 'life' against 'choice' that will appeal to scholars of literature, reproductive cultures and politics, and feminists situated across the disciplines."— Alys Eve Weinbaum, author of Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Trans-Atlantic Modern Thought"The lucidity and vibrancy of its major claims make Abortion in the American Imagination a first-rate book. Weingarten provides a fascinating reconception of modernist and contemporary battles with abortion and offers a huge contribution to this critical topic."— Dale M. Bauer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign"In a time when there are daily threats to women's reproductive rights, Weingarten's Abortion in the American Imagination is prescient and needed, reminding us all to question our discursive assumptions about a notoriously divisive issue."— American Studies