Book Review: Giving up baby: Safe haven laws, motherhood, and reproductive justice

Abstract

Reviews the book, Giving up baby: Safe haven laws, motherhood, and reproductive justice by Laury Oaks (2015). The book critically interrogates from a feminist lens the discourses, ideologies, and social and political practices that led to the institution of Safe Haven Laws (SHL) in the United States. Oaks exposes how SHL and its surrounding sociopolitical, cultural, and economic discourses have shaped and produced binaristic constructions of motherhood as good and bad mothers. The aim of the book is to critique SHL and to reconceptualize infant abandonment within a reproductive justice framework instead of applying a criminal justice lens to the social issue. What stands out in the book is the author's detailed tracing of how practices and attitudes related to abortion, infant abandonment, and infanticide are socially, culturally, religiously, and historically situated. Although the book is grounded in the social and political climate of the United States, it is still relevant to in its description of how good/bad parenting is constructed and the heightened surveillance of certain marginalized families in child welfare programs across Canada. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)