Professor Ziegler's Book Draws Broad Media Coverage

Professor Mary Ziegler’s book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction was released April 22 by Yale University Press and has generated extensive coverage from top media outlets including the New Yorker, New York Times, The Guardian and PBS.

In a long review published April 14 in the New Yorker, writer Margaret Talbot called Ziegler’s book “cogent” and explored its argument that overturning Roe v. Wade has never been the larger goal of the anti-abortion movement. Rather, it has been to secure recognition of fetuses and embryos under the 14th Amendment.  

The New York Times included Personhood as a book to watch in its April 17 print edition. On April 23, The Guardian published an interview with Ziegler headlined “How the idea of charging women with murder infiltrated the anti-abortion movement.”

As story noted, Ziegler has long seen the fight for fetal personhood as the through-line in the anti-abortion movement’s centuries-long history. In recent years, with Roe gone, she grew convinced the movement was no longer willing to pull punches in that fight.

“The trajectory has been more and more punitive, more focused on saying: ‘Justice for the fetus means punishing a larger group of people that encompasses not just doctors, but people who assist them, and potentially abortion seekers themselves,’” Ziegler told The Guardian.

Ziegler also spoke about the book on PBS News Hour, KQED’s Forum and Capital Public Radio’s Insight with Vicki Gonzalez. 

Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law Mary Ziegler is an expert on the law, history, and politics of reproduction, health care, and conservatism in the United States from 1945 to the present.