Since its publication in January 2020, A Miscarriage of Justice has garnered positive reviews and scholarly recognition.
The book won the 2021 Murdo J. MacLeod Prize from the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association.
The book was also named a 2021 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Reviews, a division of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the American Library Association (ALA). You can hear me speak about my book with Patrícia Marcos on the New Books Network.
Select Reviews:
“A Miscarriage of Justice tells the stories of women that attempted to, and sometimes succeeded in, making decisions about their reproductive bodies in the face of a patriarchal state. With remarkable research, Roth situates women’s reproductive lives and deaths within the larger context of nation-making based on racial and gendered inequality that continued to shape Brazilian society for decades.” — 2021 Murdo J. MacLeod Prize Committee
“This beautifully written, meticulously researched, and brilliantly argued study of Brazilian women’s experiences with abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and infanticide in the early decades of the twentieth century would have been welcome at any time, but never more so than now.” — Barbara Weinstein, New York University (Social History of Medicine)
“Cassia Roth’s lively and well-researched book is a welcome addition to this literature [on reproduction]…The continuing criminalization of fertility control, and the hundreds of women who die as a result of these restrictions each year, make the history that Roth reconstructs deeply relevant down to the present.” — Nara Milanich, Barnard College (H-Net Latin America)
“O que Roth (2020) propõe, entretanto, não é exatamente um livro apenas sobre o poder dessas instâncias. A autora apresenta o funcionamento de uma complexa engrenagem de vigilância sobre a reprodução nas classes populares e proporciona uma valiosa contribuição à historiografia da área, por realizar uma análise que leva em conta os aspectos cotidianos das práticas de aborto e infanticídio, como também analisa as gravidezes e os partos, eventos justapostos da realidade de mulheres do passado.” — Isabela de Oliveira Dornelas, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos)
“This remarkable book interrogates the dialogue between local and global histories of medical and legal sciences and is sure to become required reading in the fields of Latin American and gender history.” — Sueann Caulfield, University of Michigan (book cover)
“Told with care and from a place of deep empathy, the heartbreaking stories in Miscarriage of Justice bring Brazilian women back into their own history, which has been told about them, but rarely through and with them.” — Leila A. McNeill (Lady Science)