"What this book demonstrates convincingly is that there can be no economic progress in any country that denies women basic human rights, and that women cannot exercise their human rights if they cannot determine when to have sex, whether or when to marry, and how many children they have. Ms. Goldberg's message is that the repression of women lies at the heart of all oppressive societies." —Susan Jacoby (The Age of American Unreason)
"We know how to radically improve women's lives around the world: give them education, power, and the liberty to control their own bodies. We also know something even more important: that improving women's lives in this way makes the whole world a better place--healthier, more prosperous, and more secure. Michelle Goldberg's sweeeping saga about how this consensus came about, and the tragic impediments to putting it into practice, may be the most important book you'll ever read about the future of the human race." —Rick Perlstein (Nixonland)
In this work of investigative journalism by the author of the New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming, Goldberg exposes the global war on women’s reproductive rights and its disastrous and unreported consequences for the future of global development.
Women’s rights are often treated as mere appendages to great questions of war, peace, poverty, and economic development. But as networks of religious fundamentalists, feminists, and bureaucrats struggle to remake sexual and childbearing norms worldwide, the battle to control women’s bodies has become a high-stakes enterprise, with the United States often supporting the most reactionary forces.
Goldberg shows how the emancipation of women has become the key human rights struggle of the twenty-first century. The Means of Reproduction travels through four continents, examining issues such as abortion, female circumcision, and Asia’s missing girls to show how the battle over women’s bodies has been globalized and how, too often, the United States has joined sworn enemies such as Iran and Sudan in an axis of repression. Reporting with unique insight from both the rarefied realm of international policy and from individual women’s lives, Goldberg elucidates the economic, demographic, and health consequences of women’s oppression, which affect more than half the world’s population.
