City Lights in conjunction with Mother Jones (https://www.motherjones.com) present "Defending Choice: Roe vs. Wade and the Battle to Preserve Women’s Reproductive Rights." This event was originally broadcast via Zoom, hosted by Peter Maravelis, and moderated by Becca Andrews of Mother Jones Magazine with Jenny Brown, Dr. Katherine Brown, Joshua Prager, and Mary Ziegler.

You can purchase copies of the panelists' books directly from City Lights here:

"Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment" - by Mary Ziegler: https://citylights.com/dollars-for-life-anti-abortion-movemen/

"Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now" - by Jenny Brown: https://citylights.com/praxis/without-apology-abortion-struggle-now/

"The Family Roe: An American Story" - by Joshua Prager: https://citylights.com/north-america/family-roe-amer-story/

Becca Andrews is a reporter at Mother Jones. A Southerner, she most often writes about the Southeast, gender, and culture. Before joining Mother Jones as an editorial fellow, she wrote for newspapers in Tennessee. Her work has also appeared in Slate, The New Republic, Wired, and Jezebel, among others. Her first book, "No Choice," on the dwindling access to abortion in the United States, is due out in October 2022 from Hachette’s Public Affairs imprint.

Jenny Brown was a leader in the fight to get the morning-after pill over the counter in the US and a plaintiff in the winning lawsuit. She is co-author of the Redstockings book "Women’s Liberation and National Health Care: Confronting the Myth of America." While editor at Labor Notes magazine, she coauthored "How to Jump-Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers." She writes, teaches, and organizes with the feminist group National Women’s Liberation and is the author of "Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work." Verso Books published her book "WITHOUT APOLOGY: The Abortion Struggle Now."

Dr. Katherine Brown is a general obstetrician-gynecologist and is fellowship-trained in family planning at UCSF. She provides full-scope reproductive healthcare. She is a passionate advocate for reproductive health, choice, and justice. Her research focuses on exploring and improving the reproductive health experiences of Black women.

Joshua Prager, a former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal, has written about historical secrets—revealing all from the hidden scheme that led to baseball’s most famous moment (Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World”) to the only-ever anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer Prize (a photographer he tracked down in Iran). His work, described by George Will as “exemplary journalistic sleuthing,” has shed new light on our cultural touchstones. So does his new book, "The Family Roe," illuminating unknown stories and people behind Roe v. Wade, and enabling the public, for the first time, to see the abortion debate in America in its full social and personal context. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Mary Ziegler is the Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University College of Law. She specializes in the legal history of reproduction, the family, sexuality, and the Constitution. In the spring of 2022, she is visiting at Harvard Law School. Her most recent book, "Abortion and the Law in America: A Legal History, Roe v. Wade to the Present," was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, and received positive reviews in outlets from the Washington Post to the Christian Science Monitor. Her new book, "Dollars for Life: The Antiabortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment," was published by Yale University Press in June of 2022. She also has a forthcoming book with "Routledge, Reproduction and the Constitution." Her next project, What Roe Means: A History, will be published by Yale in 2023.

This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation: citylights.com/foundation