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Article: Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.
- Article from:
- The Women's Review of Books
- Article date:
- June 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Old City Publishing, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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by Dorothy Roberts. New York: Pantheon, 1997, 384 pp., $26.00 hardcover.
What does the recent media frenzy over the Midwestern couple who gave birth to septuplets have to do with political inequality, class bias and racism? What does it mean to live in a country where affluent white women disproportionately use expensive technologies to overcome infertility, but poor black women disproportionately undergo surgery, in thousands of instances without their knowledge, to prevent them from giving birth? Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts addresses these and other troubling questions in Killing the Black Body. Her harrowing stories of the treatment of black mothers reveal the ...