| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States. By Rickie Solinger. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. xiv, 290 pp. Cloth, $25.00, ISBN 0-8090-9702-8. Paper, $14.00, ISBN 0-8090-2860-3.)

For over a decade, beginning with Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade (1992), Rickie Solinger's impassioned scholarship has deepened our understanding of the politics of reproductive rights in the twentieth-century United States. Solinger believes that the United States needs to establish and provide a legal system that insures and protects women's reproductive rights (p. 64). Her central argument in this book is that the focus on reproductive "choice" transformed a fundamental human right to reproductive control into a consumer option. The result has been to perpetuate class and racial inequities, to make motherhood increasingly into a privilege of the wealthy classes, to vilify economically disadvantaged women who choose to be mothers, to promote the commodification of children, and to erase critical scrutiny of the system forcing birth mothers to give up their babies for adoption. While the women's movement focused on reproductive choice as liberation from the tyranny of biology, Solinger reminds us of the detrimental consequences for all women, but especially for the poor.

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