A&M-SA Research Guides: Reproductive Rights Research Guide: Reproductive Rights

Websites, Articles, Court Cases, and Newspapers

Looking for information about personal reproductive health in Texas?

Planned Parenthood can help with questions about sexuality, birth control, family planning, sexually transmitted diseases, and more.

Know your rights. The US Government's Reproductive Rights website will help you understand what your rights are in Texas and across the USA.

The Texas Tribune (News Magazine) has a series of articles that will help inform you of current abortion laws in Texas.

Supreme Court Docket Search
The Supreme Court’s docket system contains information about cases, both pending and decided, that have been filed at the Court. The docket provided here contains complete information regarding the status of cases filed since the beginning of the 2001 Term.
Govtrack - Abortion cases
Use this page to browse bills in the U.S. Congress related to the subject Abortion, as determined by the Library of Congress.
Center for Reproductive Rights
The Center for Reproductive Rights works to protect and advance abortion rights around the world by removing restrictive laws and policies, promoting measures to improve access to safe and legal abortion, and countering efforts to undermine access to abortion care.
WomenWatch
Directory of UN resources on gender and women's issues
CDC Reproductive Health
CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health is the focal point for issues related to reproductive health, maternal health, and infant health.
State Legislation Tracker: Major Developments in Sexual & Reproductive Health
Up-to-date information on legislation relating to reproductive rights in the USA.
The Office on Women's Health
The Office on Women's Health (OWH), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), works to improve the health and sense of well-being of all U.S. women and girls. OWH serves as the focal point for women's health activities across HHS offices and agencies and leads HHS efforts to ensure that all women and girls achieve the best possible health.

Academic Search Complete (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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A valuable and comprehensive scholarly, multidisciplinary database with full-text peer-reviewed journal articles, monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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This resource provides scholarly full-text journals focusing on many medical disciplines. Coverage of nursing and allied health is particularly strong.
MEDLINE (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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Provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more. Created by the National Library of Medicine.
JSTOR Arts & Sciences I-XV (JSTOR) This link opens in a new window
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Coverage of humanities disciplines including history, language & literature, art & art history, education, philosophy, classical studies, and music. Also includes a digitized group of rare 19th and early 20th century American Art periodicals.
SocINDEX with Full Text (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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A comprehensive and high-quality sociology research database encompassing the broad spectrum of sociological study.

Westlaw Campus Research (Thomson Reuters) This link opens in a new window
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Westlaw Campus Research contains the full text of court opinions, statutes, and regulations from state and federal governments. Westlaw Campus Research is powered by WestSearch, which dramatically improves searching and the ability to find the most relevant information quickly. Westlaw Campus Research is a premier research service for legal, news, and business-related information, making it a great resources for law, business, and criminal justice students.
Primary features include:
• Analytical sources like American Jurisprudence 2d
• American Law Reports
• Black's Law Dictionary
• 800+ law reviews and journals
• Primary law sources like USCA, CFR, Federal Register and all federal, state and Supreme Court cases
• Newspapers, magazines, trade journals, and company information
Nexis Uni (LexisNexis) This link opens in a new window
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Use this database to search through more than 15,000 sources for U.S. and world news. Look up legal cases including U.S. Supreme Court decisions as old as 1790, find company information, state profiles, legal reviews, state legal research and more.
HeinOnline Academic (HeinOnline) This link opens in a new window
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This database contains information on US law and government as well as constitutions from around the globe.

Links to Business and Legal Aspects of Sports and Entertainment (BLASE); Democracy in America; Gun Regulation and Legislation in America; History of Supreme Court Nominations; Immigration Law & Policy in the U.S.; and Reports of U.S. Presidential Commissions and Other Advisory Bodies: A Bibliographic Listing.
Legal Collection (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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Offers information centered on the discipline of law and legal topics such as criminal justice, international law, federal law, organized crime, medical, labor & human resource law, ethics, the environment, and much more.

Texas Tribune: Abortion News
The latest abortion news from The Texas Tribune.

Access World News (NewsBank) This link opens in a new window
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Research diverse perspectives, topics and trends that align with curricular areas such as Political Science, English, Sociology, Humanities, Business, International Studies and more. Features reliable, credible information from a wide variety of international, national and local news sources. Also available remotely 24/7 on any device.
New York Times All Access Digital Pass (The New York Times Company) This link opens in a new window
Search and browse The New York Times from 1851-present. Users must go through the library’s link to register for an account. Once registered, an account is valid for one year and may be used to access The New York Times website directly.
Creating an Account with the New York Times:

On the New York Times page, click on the Create Account link.
You must use your university email when registering. For example:
- John.Doe@jaguar.tamu.edu for students.
- jdoe@tamusa.edu for faculty and staff.
You will have access to the New York Times for one year.
Questions? Call the University Library at 210-784-1500.

New York Times Abortion News
Use this link once you have created your New York Times Account for quick access to abortion and reproductive rights news.

Newspaper Source Plus (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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This database contains a full-text collection of newspapers, news magazines, newswires, articles, and television and radio news transcripts from global sources such as AP, NPR, CNN International, CBC (Canadian), Xinhua (China), and more.

Select Books

Global Contestations of Gender Rights by Alexandra Scheele (Editor); Julia Roth (Editor); Heidemarie Winkel (Editor)
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9783837660692
Publication Date: 2022-06-21
Across the globe, a growing number of social movements, such as demonstrations in support of equal civil status or reproductive freedom and against sexualized violence, show that women's and gender rights are highly contested. Against the backdrop of a long history of unequal rights implementation, the contributors to this volume deal with the questions of why and in which ways gender equality has become contested in various political contexts. Local case studies examine the relevant structural, institutional, and socio-cultural causes of the global challenges to equality. This book follows an interdisciplinary approach and unites scholars from law, linguistics, cultural studies, history, social sciences, and gender studies in diverse contexts.
The Politics of Reproduction by Modhumita Roy (Editor); Mary Thompson (Editor)
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780814255582
Publication Date: 2019-10-21
The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism uniquely brings together three sites of reproduction and reproductive politics to demonstrate their entanglement in creating or restricting options for family-making. The original essays in this collection--which draw from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives--are attentive to neoliberalism's reshaping of economies and intimacies to better understand the politics of reproduction. By looking at particular instances (surrogacy in Mexico, forced sterilization in Peru, and racialized biopolitics in post-Katrina Mississippi, among other sites), The Politics of Reproduction focuses on the effects of a radically altered economic landscape on individual choice-making. As a whole, the volume critically engages the question of choice to better understand the costs of a political and ideological climate that encourages, even demands, individual solutions to intractable social problems. Whose choices are amplified in the use of new biomedical technologies and assisted reproduction? Why and how are we discouraged from understanding the economic motivations behind the "choice" to surrender a baby for adoption or to become a surrogate or to seek an abortion? Attentive to the historical, cultural, and ideological conjunctures of reproductive politics, The Politics of Reproduction makes a distinctive contribution to feminist analyses of the specific challenges posed by neoliberalism to reproductive possibilities, politics, and justice in the contemporary moment.
Policing the Womb by Michele Goodwin
Call Number: HQ766.5.U5 G65 2020
ISBN: 9781107030176
Publication Date: 2020-03-12
Policing the Womb brings to life the chilling ways in which women have become the targets of secretive state surveillance of their pregnancies. Michele Goodwin expands the reproductive health and rights debate beyond abortion to include how legislators increasingly turn to criminalizing women for miscarriages, stillbirths, and threatening the health of their pregnancies. The horrific results include women giving birth while shackled in leg irons, in solitary confinement, and even delivering in prison toilets. In some states, pregnancy has become a bargaining chip with prosecutors offering reduced sentences in exchange for women agreeing to be sterilized. The author shows how prosecutors may abuse laws and infringe women's rights in the process, sometimes with the complicity of medical providers who disclose private patient information to law enforcement. Often the women most affected are poor and of color. This timely book brings to light how the unrestrained efforts to punish and police women's bodies have led to the United States being the deadliest country in the developed world to be pregnant.
Reproductive Rights in the Age of Human Rights by Alisa Von Hagel; Daniela Mansbach
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9781137539526
Publication Date: 2016-08-04
This book traces the development of the discourse used by the pro-life movement since the 1970s, and its relationship to public policy efforts at the state and federal level. The pro-life movement's successes, both in legislative efforts to limit access to abortion as well changing the public's perception of the pro-life movement, is surprising given American's continued support of some level of access to abortion. Using a multi-method approach, the authors argue that these successes are a result of a dynamic and responsive movement, which has adapted both its discourse and public policy efforts since Roe v. Wade. With the Hobby Lobby ruling in 2014, the movement has successfully created its newest strategy, integrating claims of religious liberty to protect individuals and corporate entities. The book's examination of the pro-life strategy highlights its current and future impact on human rights, reproductive rights, and right-wing politics.

Select Films

Leona's Sister Gerri
Publication Date: 1995
EONA'S SISTER GERRI tells the dramatic story of Gerri Santoro, a mother of two and the "real person" in the now famous photo of an anoymous woman on a motel floor, dead from an illegal abortion. Reprinted thousands of times on placards, and in the media, this grisly photo became a pro-choice icon. Should the media have used this image? What circumstances led to Gerri's tragic death? Powerfully addressing issues of reproductive rights and domestic violence, this video is a moving portrait of Gerri Santoro's life and society's response to her death.
Personhood
Personhood tells a different reproductive rights story - one that ripples far beyond the right to choose and into the lives of every pregnant person in America. Like a moment from the chilling "Handmaid's Tale," Tammy Loertscher's fetus was given an attorney, while the courts denied Tammy her constitutional rights. In this timely documentary, we see her sent to jail, and then forced to challenge a Wisconsin law that eroded her privacy, her right to due process, and her body sovereignty. Through her story, PERSONHOOD reframes the abortion debate to encompass the growing system of laws that criminalize and police pregnant women. At the intersection of the erosion of women's rights, the war on drugs, and mass incarceration, Tammy's experience reveals the dangerous consequences of these little-known laws for American women and families.
The Abortion Divide
Inside the fight over abortion through the stories of women struggling with unplanned pregnancies. Drawing on a landmark FRONTLINE film from the 1980s, a look at both sides of the divide in a community still embroiled in the conflict.
I Had an Abortion
Underneath the din of politicians posturing about "life" and "choice" and beyond the shouted slogans about murder and rights, there are real stories of real women who have had abortions. Each year in the US, 1.3 million abortions occur, but the topic is still so stigmatized it{u2019}s never discussed in polite company. Powerful, poignant, and fiercely honest, I HAD AN ABORTION tackles this taboo, featuring 10 women including famed feminist Gloria Steinem who candidly describe experiences spanning seven decades, from the years before Roe v. Wade to the present day.
Jane: An Abortion Service
This fascinating political look at a little-known chapter in women's history tells the story of "Jane", the Chicago-based women's health group who performed nearly 12,000 safe illegal abortions between 1969 and 1973 with no formal medical training. As Jane members describe finding feminism and clients describe finding Jane, archival footage and recreations mingle to depict how the repression of the early sixties and social movements of the late sixties influenced this unique group. Both vital knowledge and meditation on the process of empowerment, this documentary showcases the importance of preserving women's knowledge in the face of revisionist history.
Birthright: A War Story
Looks at the recent movement across the United States to limit access to abortion services and other rights formerly held by pregnant women. Featured cases: a woman in Nebraska, who, following a diagnosis 22 weeks into her term, was forced to carry an unviable pregnancy to term; a woman in Alabama who is facing criminal charges for taking half a valium during her pregnancy.
Moyers & Company : the Crusade Against Reproductive Rights
Bill Moyers speaks with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards about new state abortion regulations, Supreme Court rulings in the Hobby Lobby case, and on abortion buffer zones.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License and is adapted from Tulane University Libraries' Reproductive Rights Library Guide.

Reproductive Rights Research Guide

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Library Information

Websites, Articles, Court Cases, and Newspapers

Select Books

Select Films

Permissions