A reading list to inform and educate
The long anticipated June 24, 2022 Supreme Court ruling, which signals a profound shift in the laws governing access to abortion, is deeply concerning for many in the MIT Press community. The decision overturns nearly 50 years of legal precedent and could pave the way for other fundamental rights to be removed.
As a mission-driven organization, we take seriously our obligation to use our voice as an academic publisher to spread knowledge, fight misinformation, and empower change. We believe all people should have the right to make informed and evidence-based decisions about their private lives, healthcare, and futures.
We are sharing the following reading list in the hopes that it will help inform and educate at this critical time. If there are additional resources you would like to see added here, please let us know via our contact page. You can also learn more by following a selection of MIT Press authors who have researched in the area of reproductive rights on Twitter.
Peer-reviewed articles from our journals publishing partners:
- Linda Greenhouse, “Public Opinion & the Supreme Court: The Puzzling Case of Abortion,” Daedalus (2012) 141 (4): 69–82.
- Linda Greenhouse, “The Supreme Court & Science: A Case in Point,” Daedalus (2018) 147 (4): 28–40.
- Susan S. Silbey, “The Courts in American Public Culture,” Daedalus (2014) 140–156.
- Jeffrey Rosen, “Can the Judicial Branch be a Steward in a Polarized Democracy?” Daedalus (2013) 142 (2): 25–35.
- Geoffrey R. Stone, “The Supreme Court in the 21st Century,” Daedalus (2013) 142 (2): 36–48.
- Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat, Jonathan Gruber, Phillip B Levine, Douglas Staiger, “Abortion and Selection,” The Review of Economics and Statistics (2009) 91 (1): 124–136.
- Laurent Bouton, Paola Conconi, Francisco Pino, Maurizio Zanardi, “The Tyranny of the Single-Minded: Guns, Environment, and Abortion,” The Review of Economics and Statistics (2021) 103 (1): 48–59.

Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate by Christine Overall
In contemporary Western society, people are more often called upon to justify the choice not to have children than they are to supply reasons for having them. In this book, Christine Overall maintains that the burden of proof should be reversed: that the choice to have children calls for more careful justification and reasoning than the choice not to. Arguing that the choice to have children is not just a prudential or pragmatic decision but one with ethical repercussions, Overall offers a wide-ranging exploration of how we might think systematically and deeply about this fundamental aspect of human life. Writing from a feminist perspective, she also acknowledges the inevitably gendered nature of the decision; the choice has different meanings, implications, and risks for women than it has for men.

Choosing Down Syndrome: Ethics and New Prenatal Testing Technologies by Chris Kaposy
The rate at which parents choose to terminate a pregnancy when prenatal tests indicate that the fetus has Down syndrome is between 60 and 90 percent. In Choosing Down Syndrome, Chris Kaposy offers a carefully reasoned ethical argument in favor of choosing to have such a child. Arguing from a pro-choice, disability-positive perspective, Kaposy makes the case that there is a common social bias against cognitive disability that influences decisions about prenatal testing and terminating pregnancies, and that more people should resist this bias by having children with Down syndrome.

Fertility and Public Policy: How to Reverse the Trend of Declining Birth Rates edited by Noriyuki Takayama and Martin Werding
In 2050, world population growth is predicted to come almost to a halt. Shortly thereafter it may well start to shrink. A major reason behind this shift is the fertility decline that has taken place in many developed countries. In this book, experts discuss the appropriateness and effectiveness of using public policy to influence fertility decisions. Contributors discuss the general feasibility of public interventions in the area of fertility, analyze fertility patterns and policy design in such countries as Japan, South Korea, China, Sweden, and France, and offer theoretical analyses of parental fertility choices that provide an overview of a broad array of child-related policy instruments in a number of OECD and EU countries.

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy
Meet the Smart Wife—at your service, an eclectic collection of feminized AI, robotic, and smart devices. This digital assistant is friendly and sometimes flirty, docile and efficient, occasionally glitchy but perpetually available. She might go by Siri, or Alexa, or inhabit Google Home. She can keep us company, order groceries, vacuum the floor, turn out the lights. A Japanese digital voice assistant—a virtual anime hologram named Hikari Azuma—sends her “master” helpful messages during the day; an American sexbot named Roxxxy takes on other kinds of household chores. In The Smart Wife, Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy examine the emergence of digital devices that carry out “wifework”—domestic responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to (human) wives. They show that the principal prototype for these virtual helpers—designed in male-dominated industries—is the 1950s housewife: white, middle class, heteronormative, and nurturing, with a spick-and-span home. It’s time, they say, to give the Smart Wife a reboot.

Fertility Technology by Donna J. Drucker
In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman’s uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology surveys this history in all its medical, practical, and ethical complexity, and offers a look at state-of-the-art fertility technology in various social and political contexts around the world.

Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance edited by Sophie Hamacher and Jessica Hankey
The tracking of our personal information, activities, and medical data through our digital devices is an increasingly recognizable field in which the lines between caretaking and control have blurred. In this age of surveillance, mothers’ behaviors and bodies are observed, made public, exposed, scrutinized, and policed like never before. Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance gathers together the work of fifty contributors from diverse disciplines that include the visual arts, legal scholarship, ethnic studies, sociology, gender studies, poetry, and activism to ask what the relationship is between how we watch and how we are watched, and how the attention that mothers pay to their children might foster a kind of counterattention to the many ways in which mothers are scrutinized.