Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America [Paperback]

Dangerous Pregnanciestells the largely forgotten story of the German measles epidemic of the early 1960s and how it created national anxiety about dying, disabled, and dangerous babies. This epidemic would ultimately transform abortion politics, produce new science, and help build two of the most enduring social movements of the late twentieth century--the reproductive rights and the disability rights movements. At most a minor rash and fever for women, German measles (also known as rubella), if contracted during pregnancy, could result in miscarriages, infant deaths, and serious birth defects in the newborn. Award-winning writer Leslie J. Reagan chronicles for the first time the discoveries and dilemmas of this disease in a book full of intimate stories--including riveting courtroom testimony, secret investigations of women and doctors for abortion, and startling media portraits of children with disabilities. In exploring a disease that changed America,Dangerous Pregnanciespowerfully illuminates social movements that still shape individual lives, pregnancy, medicine, law, and politics.

Leslie J. Reaganis Professor of History, with affiliations in gender and women's studies, law, media and cinema studies, and medicine, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author ofWhen Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States 1867-1973(UC Press) and coeditor ofMedicine's Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health, and Bodies in American Film and Television.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Epidemics, Reproduction, and the Fear of Maternal Marking

One. Observing Bodies
Two. Specter of Tragedy
Three. Wrongful Information
Four. Law Making and Law Breaking in an Epidemic
Five. If Unborn Babies Are Going to Be Protected

Epilogue: From Anxiety to Rights

Notes
Bibliography
Index