Booksmith and Mother Jones are very pleased to host a virtual event with Mary Ziegler for her new book Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present. She'll be in conversation with Mother Jones reproductive rights reporter Becca Andrews.

Free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order a copy of Abortion and the Law in America here. We're currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.

With the Supreme Court likely to reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion decision, American debate appears fixated on clashing rights. The first comprehensive legal history of a vital period, Abortion and the Law in America illuminates an entirely different and unexpected shift in the terms of debate. Rather than simply championing rights, those on opposing sides battled about the policy costs and benefits of abortion and laws restricting it. This mostly unknown turn deepened polarization in ways many have missed. Never abandoning their constitutional demands, pro-choice and pro-life advocates increasingly disagreed about the basic facts. Drawing on unexplored records and interviews with key participants, Ziegler complicates the view that the Supreme Court is responsible for the escalation of the conflict. A gripping account of social-movement divides and crucial legal strategies, this book delivers a definitive recent history of an issue that transforms American law and politics to this day.

Mary Ziegler is the Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University College of Law. Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Garrow has called her “the premier historian of abortion in the post-Roe era.” She teaches and writes on the legal history of reproduction and constitutional law, family law, and sexuality. Her latest book is Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge University Press 2020). Her first book, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Harvard, 2015), was the winner of the 2014 Harvard University Press Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize for best first manuscript in any discipline. She often serves as commentator in leading mass media outlets across the world, including The Atlantic, The BBC, the Boston Globe, CNN, the Guardian, MSNBC, NBC, The New York Times, NPR, PBS News Hour, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Becca Andrews is a reporter at Mother Jones. A Southerner, she most often writes about the Southeast, gender, and culture. Before joining Mother Jones as an editorial fellow, she wrote for newspapers in Tennessee. Her work has also appeared in Slate, Marie Claire UK, and USA Today. Her first book, No Choice, on the dwindling access to abortion in the United States, is forthcoming from Hachette’s Public Affairs imprint.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.