A uthor Jane Smiley rightly observed that pregnancy is the most public of conditions. Check-out-counter magazines flash baby bumps as routinely as they offer ten-minute meals. Whether it’s Angelina Jolie or Bristol Palin, bump watch is rampant. Yet abortion, which in my experience of three decades on the frontlines of the reproductive justice movement is as much a part of making families as childbirth, rarely elicits so forthright a mention. The wildly popular movie Juno boasts hip, smart dialogue that glosses over the reality that a young woman’s life is unalterably changed by a pregnancy, no matter what option she chooses. The film Knocked Up reinforces the narrative that all a woman needs to find her bliss is any jerk of a man to get her pregnant and take her away from a meaningless high-powered professional life (abortion, meanwhile, is hardly mentioned–literally: The film referred to it euphemistically as "smashmortion").

But if the realities of abortion are often overlooked, its potency as a political weapon for the right has never been stronger, despite well-deserved euphoria that Americans–thanks to an eight percent female-tilted gender gap–elected a pro-choice president, and additional pro-choice members of Congress, and defeated three anti-choice ballot initiatives. Today, nearly half a century since the birth control pill arrived in 1960, contraception was legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut decision in 1965, and pre-viability abortion was legalized by Roe v. Wade in 1973, the purposefulness of pregnancy among most women in America is sure evidence that many victories have been won. Yet these very victories carried within them the seeds of their own demise, for they were not grounded in women’s moral and legal agency for which the law should provide protection equal to men’s–the right to one’s own life–but in a right never deemed an absolute value by the Court or the court of public opinion, the right to privacy.

Paradoxically, those very personal freedoms to make childbearing decisions privately had to be won through the political process. That’s how the state of a woman’s uterus has become the most public of political battlegrounds. Griswold and Roe didn’t end the fight for dominance over women’s sexual and procreative lives; they started a new round. Look no further than the stringently anti-choice Sarah Palin to see how the right’s assault on reproductive privacy hoists even its own zealous advocate on its petard. Mother Palin insisted we respect her family’s privacy concerning her Down Syndrome baby and her 17-year-old daughter’s "choice" to continue her pregnancy and marry her high school boyfriend, even as Candidate Palin campaigned on the draconian Republican platform to strip other women of their childbearing choices.

Like water on porous stone, the right has slowly eroded the vulnerable legal protections of Griswold and Roe. A cascade of more than 30 post-Roe Supreme Court decisions–starting with 1980’s Harris v. McRae (upholding the Hyde Amendment’s prohibition on Medicaid abortion coverage) through Planned Parenthood v. Casey (allowing legislatures to restrict abortion in any way that does not create an "undue burden")–laid a smooth path for 2007’s Gonzales v. Carhart decision, which upheld the first ever federal abortion ban (misnamed the Partial Birth Abortion Act). The Roberts Court reversed the often-reaffirmed precedent that women’s health is paramount in abortion law, and it used anti-abortion code language to signal that it will likely allow states and Congress to limit women’s reproductive rights. Even Barack Obama’s presidency cannot soon change the reality that the lower federal courts are now dominated by anti-choice judges, and the Supreme Court stands one unreliable Anthony Kennedy vote away from eviscerating Roe entirely; the oldest justices, most likely to retire to make way for Obama appointments, are those in the pro-choice bloc.

Roe has been de facto, if not technically, overturned. Carhart’s language drips with such disrespect for women that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg charged it "reflects ancient notions about women’s place." But those ancient notions are alive and well today.

This year, emboldened by this juridical trend, abortion foes in Colorado moved to their endgame, proposing a state ballot initiative to create personhood rights for fertilized eggs from the moment of fertilization, flouting the medical definition of pregnancy (implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterus) and making this fertilized egg more important in the law than the woman upon whose body it is wholly dependent. It would have outlawed not just abortion but also most hormonal birth control and IUDs, since they can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting. (The proposal was soundly defeated, owing in part to fissures among anti-choice groups.)

The egg debate has a silver lining. After decades of defending Roe, the Women’s Movement must now face the question it so has long avoided: the value of a woman and her life. Roe was a meaningful and necessary advance, but its grounding in privacy rights portended that it could not stand forever. It is well past time for the women’s movement, not just policy makers, to set a bold new agenda based on justice and human rights and secure the policies and social support that make rights meaningful.

Within this bleak political context, society’s perverse focus on women’s reproductive capacity makes the subtitle of Jeanne Flavin’s book Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America ring very true. The book’s exploration of what lies beneath the baby-bump fixation from a feminist perspective could not be more timely. It’s easy to get mired in debates about abortion techniques, the fetus, or who is "fit" to be pregnant or to mother in the first place. But in reality, the argument, as Ginsburg pointed out, has always been about whether women will have an equal place in the world, and who controls the means of reproduction. Flavin’s book pushes the reader to peel back layers of rhetoric and lay bare what’s at stake for all women in this seemingly endless debate.

The book’s major sections are organized in reproductive terms: "Begetting," "Bearing," "Mothering." Flavin documents how the maltreatment of women through judgments placed on their reproductive capacity, though frequently reduced in common parlance to the single word "abortion," actually extend on a continuum from pre-conception through motherhood. This is an important framework within which to ask why such scrutiny, so often translating to oppressive gender-based policies and intrusion upon women’s bodily integrity, has pervaded our history.

To convince readers that "the patriarchal regulation of motherhood" deems a woman’s value to society to come mainly from her sexuality and reproductive capacity, Flavin uses the criminal justice system’s most extreme examples as measure and metaphor. "Our formal systems of criminal justice and public welfare," she writes, "maintain invidious distinctions between bad women and girls and good ones, welfare recipients and workers, offenders and mothers." The chapter titled ‘Liars and Whiners’: Incarcerated Women’s Right to Reproductive Health" tells one horrendous story after another, of legs shackled together during delivery, tubal pregnancy misdiagnosed as constipation or pelvic inflammation resulting in near death of the inmate, a delay of 18 months between breast cancer diagnosis and starting chemotherapy. Flavin documents the system’s poor reproductive health care practices, especially the lack of preventive care for pregnant women, as a case study of how society devalues women, punishing rather than supporting their reproductive capacity, and in the process harming the fetuses and children the system is supposedly protecting. She also illustrates, with powerful numbers, the system’s inherent racism: Black women are more than twice as likely as Hispanic women and over three times more likely than white women to be incarcerated, and thus more likely to be subjected to deficient reproductive health care.

Few women have been to prison, to be sure. But the criminal justice system merely magnifies the disrespect for women’s ownership of their own bodies that permeates society as a whole: lack of access to basic reproductive health care, including contraception and screening for reproductive cancers for millions of uninsured women; barriers to finding and getting a safe abortion, especially if you are young, poor, or live in one of the 87 percent of counties that have no abortion providers; insurance plans that still don’t cover contraception; and the Supreme Court’s assumption that women are incapable of determining when they should carry a pregnancy to term so the state should decide for them. No other civil right is divisible by popular will. Americans either have the right to freedom of religion or they don’t. We don’t vote on this state by state. Why is it so different when it comes to women’s rights to their own bodily integrity?