Book Talk: Felicia Kornbluh

“How to Win a War on Women: My Mother, Her Neighbor, and the Fate of Reproductive Rights and Justice”

Kornbluh will offer an overview of the main arguments of her recent book, A WOMAN’S LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice (Grove, 2023).  The work explores three questions: How did liberal and radical feminists, and allies, change the law to increase abortion access – first in New York and then nationally? How did a different group of feminists and allies change the law to control sterilization abuse? And how did the coalitions that enabled these changes conflict with one another, generating years of debate over “reproductive rights” and “reproductive justice” approaches to feminist politics?  She will explore these questions by telling the histories of the book’s two touchstones, her late mother, Beatrice Kornbluh Braun, attorney and member of the National Organization for Women, who played a key role in abortion decriminalization, and Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías, her late next-door neighbor in New York City, who spearheaded the campaign to stop doctors and social workers from pressuring women to have sterilization surgeries and laid the groundwork for today’s movement for Reproductive Justice.

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Chair: Estelle Freedman, Stanford Law School