| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare. By Johanna Schoen. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xviii, 331 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2919-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5585-5.)

Johanna Schoen makes a subtle and important argument suggesting that state-sponsored reproductive policy had a complex effect on the ability of American women to control their personal fertility. She writes that the

state alternately offered and denied poor women access to birth control, sterilization, and abortion, and women negotiated with their physicians as well as with health and welfare officials in their attempts to control their reproduction. (p. 2)

While the state provided greater personal control over reproduction for women by making contraceptives available to the poor, for many of those same women, choices about reproductive control often had to be negotiated so that "poor women were rarely able to gain access to these technologies [birth control, sterilization, and abortion] on their own terms" (p. 3).

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