Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Activism

Abortion Alone Is Not Justice

Successful reproductive politics must tackle all the challenges that those who want children face

June 29, 2022 • by Laura Briggs

We need a feminist movement that will stand up for conditions that facilitate life and well-being for all of us, because the situation of women, queer, and trans people—especially those of color—is a crisis that makes abortion necessary....

The Right

Creeping Fascism

The Texas law attacking reproductive justice is the antithesis of both law and democracy

September 8, 2021 • by Laura Briggs

_____ Is there any other phrase for the events that have activated the Texas abortion law other than “creeping fascism”? First, the ban itself is essentially an anti-law, designed to promote vigilantism. In itself, that’s not surprising. S.B. 8 is the culmination not just of numerous state-level laws that have narrowed abortion ...

History

Taking Children

An excerpt from Taking Children: A History of American Terror by Laura Briggs

June 8, 2020 • by Laura Briggs

The past stalks the present, the ghost in the machine of memory. This is why history writing matters; it gives us ways to understand the specters already among us and to assemble tools to transform our situation. Things change; the epidemic of child taking in the context of mass incarceration ...

Race

White Women are Not My People

“White women” is a demographic category — not a political group

July 31, 2019 • by Laura Briggs

I recently got asked to sign a public letter in which I was supposed to pledge “as a white woman” that now that I had watched Ava DuVernay’s film series “When They See Us,” I would object to Linda Fairstein (who oversaw the prosecution of the Central Park Five as ...

Feature

How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics

An Excerpt from Laura Briggs’ latest book

September 12, 2017 • by Laura Briggs

The Subprime Trump’s presidency has sometimes been portrayed as a historical earthquake, radically discontinuous from what came before. Who could have predicted that at a time of rising employment rates, white U.S. Americans would vote in economic resentment of the Democratic Party? How could one foresee a hostile takeover of the ...