"Blaming Mothers is gripping and powerful. It is also chilling as Linda Fentiman unmasks societys penchant for shaming and punishing mostly young, poor women. She reveals subtle but profound gender and racial biases that pervade public discourse and drive prosecutors and judges to unfairly punish pregnant women and mothers. I strongly recommend this captivating book. It is beautifully written, weaving together vivid stories of womens lives and impeccable scholarship. Anyone concerned about gender, children, and poverty will have to read Blaming Mothers." - Lawrence O. Gostin,Founding O'Neill Chair in Global Health Law, Georgetown University "In Blaming Mothers, Linda Fentiman considers why mothers in the U.S. are so often regarded as hazardous to their childrens health. In such areas as breastfeeding, lead poisoning, and childhood diseases like measles, Fentiman explains the psycho-social origins of much mother blaming, contrasting it with the scientific bases of actual health risk. Blaming Mothers connects the dots across policy areas to provide a comprehensive answer to what can be done to improve childrens health when Mom is properly relocated to the sidelines. This is a wonderful book not only for those in medicine, public health, child welfare, education, and law but also for mothers and their families, that is, for everyone." - Carol Sanger,Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law, Columbia Law School "Professor Linda Fentiman offers a probing analysis of a society and its government that blames mothers for various social ills and conditions that plague American society and that intervene during pregnancy and motherhood.. Professor Fentiman carefully studies this phenomenon and exposes the undercurrents of classism and racism that correspond to it. She explains how the pernicious nature of poverty creates impacts that result in significant health harms, including higher rates of lead poisoning and asthma among low income children of color. Sadly, in those instances too, mothers are blamed--sometimes civilly and criminally, making it risky to be a poor mother in America." - Michele Bratcher Goodwin ,Chancellor's Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine "Advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars in sociology, psychology, womens studies, and law will find it informative, stimulating of much discussion, and empowering.Blaming Mothersis...filled with an incredible amount of diverse information in the form of facts and examples, tightly interrelating the fields of law, psychology, and sociology" (PsycCritiques)