View article

Beginning her survey with a perhaps too extensive history of the excesses of slave breeding,[Roberts' Killing] fixes the abuses of slavery as the beginning of a continuous assault on the reproductive rights of black women. Most of this is familiar ground to scholars of nineteenth-century American and African-American history. Her ability to connect past abuses with current debates on reproductive and abortion rights is, however, a refreshing addition to contemporary feminist legal discourse around foetal rights, reproductive rights, and the role of the state in determining women's control over their bodies.