Ebook: Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America

Dangerous Pregnancies tells the much-forgotten story of the German measles epidemic of the early 1960s and how it created national anxiety about dying, disabled, and "dangerous" babies. This epidemic would ultimately transform abortion politics, produce new science, and help build two of the most enduring social movements of the late twentieth century--the reproductive rights and the disability rights movements. At most a minor rash and fever for women themselves, if they contracted German measles, also known as rubella, during pregnancy, it caused miscarriages, infant deaths, and serious birth defects in the newborn. Award-winning writer Leslie J. Reagan for the first time chronicles the discoveries and dilemmas of this disease. From the early twentieth century, when expectant mothers feared that watching a movie might deform their children to the media's horrified response to thalidomide babies to the use of comic books to convince mothers to vaccinate their children against rubella, Reagan reveals the depth of our fear of disability. Full of intimate stories of anxiety and activism, Dangerous Pregnancies includes riveting courtroom testimony, secret investigations of women and doctors for abortion, and startling media portraits of children with disabilities. In exploring a disease that changed America, Dangerous Pregnancies powerfully illuminates social movements and revolutionary changes that still shape individual lives, pregnancy, medicine, law, and politics.