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Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America
by Shefali Luthra
An urgent investigation into the experience of seeking an abortion after the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the life-threatening consequences of being denied reproductive freedom.
On June 24, 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the impact was immediate: by 2023, abortion was virtually unavailable or significantly restricted in 21 states. In Undue Burden, reporter Shefali Luthra traces the unforgettable stories of patients faced with one of the most personal decisions of their lives.
Outside of Houston, there's a 16-year-old girl who becomes pregnant well before she intends to. A 21-year-old mother barely making ends meet has to travel hundreds of miles in secret for medical treatment in another state. A 42-year-old woman with a life-threatening condition wants nothing more than to safely carry her pregnancy to term, but her home state's abortion ban fails to provide her with the options she needs to make an informed decision. And a 19-year-old trans man struggles to access care in Florida as abortion bans radiate across the American South.
Before Dobbs, it was a common misconception that abortion restrictions affected only people in certain states but left one's own life untouched. Since the fall of Roe, a domino effect has cascaded across the entire country. As the landscape of abortion rights continues to shift, the experiences of these patients—who crossed state lines to seek life-saving care, who risked everything in pursuit of their own bodily autonomy, and who were unable to plan their reproductive future in the way they deserved—illustrate how fragile the system is, and how devastating the consequences can be.
A revelatory portrait of inequality in America, Undue Burden examines abortion not as a footnote or a political pawn, but as a basic human right, something worthy of our collective attention and with immense power to transform our lives, families, and futures.
What are you reading this week? (11/07/2024)
I am reading Undue Burden by Shefali Luthra. It's about the women's health care crisis. The author will be at our Texas Book Festival next weekend.
-Anne_Glasgow
"An eye-opening and chilling look at the strain the U.S. reproductive healthcare system is undergoing in a post-Roe world… Luthra's vivid and compassionate storytelling unveils an interconnected web of desperate individuals and heroic helpers who are only just barely within reach. It's an urgent wake-up call." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Vivid portrayals of lives disrupted and freedom denied." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Luthra's well-researched, compelling book will appeal to anyone who is interested in the human cost of reproductive rights in America."
—Booklist
"Moving and deeply informative in highlighting the ways in which access to abortion is a basic human right, Undue Burden focuses on the consequences of limiting access to reproductive justice. The fall of Roe is a public health crisis with an impact we are still struggling to grasp. Shefali Luthra humanizes those burdened by the changes in the law while making excellent points about the shortsightedness of lawmakers pandering to the mob who want to control instead of serve their constituents who actually need access to reproductive care. As an indictment of our societal failure to protect the lives and liberty of those with uteruses, Undue Burden does the heavy lifting of research so that even the most apolitical reader can understand the risks to us all."
—Mikki Kendall, New York Times bestselling author of Hood Feminism
"Undue Burden reframes the battle over abortion to a national human rights crisis that threatens everyone's welfare and freedom instead of a niche cultural issue. By telling the gripping stories of pregnant people desperately seeking abortions across the country and the advocates who courageously fight for expanded access to care, Shefali Luthra makes plain Dobbs's devastating repercussions for our health, autonomy, and equality—and highlights the potential for change. Undue Burden is a compelling, urgent call for reproductive justice."
—Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body
"For decades, access to abortion has been our nation's most vigorously attacked human right—a battle that Shefali Luthra has chroncled with a rigor and an empathy matched by few others. In the pages of Undue Burden, Luthra explores the war on abortion rights through the stories of the real people whose rights are threatened and lives forever altered by the powerful political movement that has spent decades working to overturn the right to terminate a pregnancy. The history told within these pages is sweeping, the characters moving, and the message urgent. This is a book that meets our moment, painting a portrait that vividly underscores the stakes of our times."
—Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of American Whitelash
This information about Undue Burden was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Shefali Luthra has covered national health policy for the past decade, most recently at The 19th. Her coverage of abortion rights has been cited in Congressional testimony and Supreme Court briefings and in 2023 received an Online Journalism Award. Luthra's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and more. She lives in Washington, D.C.
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