Links from the show:
About my guest:
Mary is one of the world’s leading authorities on the legal history of the American abortion debate. She often shares her expertise with news outlets in the United States and around the world.
Her new book, Roe: The History of a National Obsession, published by Yale University Press in January 2023. Less than a year after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the book considers why Americans have been preoccupied with Roe even after commentators across the ideological spectrum criticized it and the law moved beyond it. The many meanings of Roe show that it obsessed for Americans beyond the polarized politics of abortion. Dueling ideas of Roe, related to sexual violence, the role of courts in democracy, the politics of science, race and much more, exposed the inconsistencies and unsettled issues in our abortion politics. This history allows us to rediscover the nuance in the U.S. abortion debate that has long resided where we would least expect to find it—in the meaning of Roe itself.
Ziegler’s latest book, Dollars for Life: The Antiabortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment, was published by Yale in the summer of 2022. Dollars for Life traces how the battle to reverse Roe v. Wade changed the rules of campaign finance, doomed the GOP establishment, and made fundamental changes to American democracy.
Mary’s first three books offer a kaleidoscopic view of the history of American abortion law and politics. Her first, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, published by Harvard University Press in 2015, mines the history of the decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark abortion decision, Roe v. Wade. After Roe won the Thomas J. Wilson Prize from Harvard University Press for best first manuscript.
Her second book, Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Fight for Privacy, published by Harvard University Press in 2018, studies the forgotten legacy of Roe in debates about sexual liberty, gay and lesbian rights, the treatment of the mentally ill, consumer rights, data privacy, and the right to die.
In March of 2020, Cambridge University Press published her most recent book, Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present. Abortion and the Law offers a comprehensive legal history of the abortion debate, from the recognition of a right to choose to the likely undoing of Roe today. The book documents a consequential shift in the terms of the abortion debate—toward claims about the basic facts—that only deepened polarization.
She is also the author of Reproduction and the Constitution, which Routledge published as part of its seminar series in 2022. She is currently editing the Research Handbook on International Abortion Law for Elgar Press. Her new project, a legal history of the fight for constitutional fetal personhood, is under contract with Yale.
A native of Butte, Montana, Mary is a graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School. She lives in California with her family.
Roe: The History of a National Obsession