Join us Thursday, March 6th from 2-3:30pm in the UCEN Lobero Room for the launch of  UCSB Political Science Professor Alison Brysk's new book, Abortion Rights Backlash: The Struggle for Democracy in Europe and the Americas. The launch will feature UCSB Sociology Professor Catherine Taylor as a disccusant. Light freshments will be served. 

In Abortion Rights Backlash, Alison Brysk shows how threats to reproductive rights stem from a gendered political struggle over declining democracy, national identity, and widening inequality due to globalization. Formerly dominant groups facing social and economic crisis promote reactionary ideologies built around patriarchy, race, and religion as they seek to control population politics. Brysk demonstrates that this is a global phenomenon, comparing the divering experiences of the politics of abortion in Ireland, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, and The United States (California vs. Texas). Timely and pathbreaking it its global perspective and feminisit analysis, Abortion Rights Backlash transforms our understanding of human rights, the future of democracy, and the struggle for gender justice worldwide.