Cassia Roth, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2020).

In A Miscarriage of Justice, Cassia Roth traces the reproductive lives of women in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro and their entanglements with patriarchy, law, race, science and medicine, nationhood, and statecraft. The book draws on diverse sources—medical records, court cases, police reports, gossip, public health data, novels, and newspapers—to offer a feminist history of reproduction anchored in the lives and experiences of women. Roth explores the ever-shifting conceptions and delimitations of women’s roles and bounded freedoms in Brazilian society during these decades: their ability to conceive and raise future citizens, their limited citizenship, and their liability in cases of stillbirth, miscarriage, infanticide, and abortion. Although regulating the reproductive lives of its citizens was never an explicit goal of the Brazilian government, the logic and politics of the State merged the private lives with public interests and created a convoluted, often contradictory institutional arrangement with a direct impact on women’s lives.

Anchored in policies, debates, and ideas regarding reproductive lives in Rio de Janeiro, Roth explores a wide range of topics: urbanization, the politics of gossip, the professionalization of medicine, the communication channels between states and citizens, the making of the urban police force, the racial legacies of slavery, eugenics and nationhood. Yet the book rarely loses its focus and remains centered on how these processes had concrete, physical consequences in how they planned their lives and families. Legal and medical knowledge cemented into regulations and practices, which shaped the way police forces, judges, and even neighbors thought about fertility control. Law, medicine, and policy were not abstract intellectual endeavors: they were matters of life and death. 

Thorny topics often require risky methods, and representing the suffering, pain, joy, and all the impossible choices women made in these situations is no easy task. Roth makes an extraordinary effort to keep her imagination and empathy at bay while describing the cases she draws from, yet the tension between writing history and denouncing injustice remains. The book's apparent weakness becomes its main strength: to show the impossibility of separating the writer’s moral impulses from what is at stake in her pages. In the introduction, she says “In relation to infanticide, then, I have found it helpful to think about women’s actions through the anthropological theory of cultural and moral relativism.” Yet when it comes to her own judgment, “acknowledging that infanticide was a logical response to scarcity and violence does not mean it was ‘right’” (pp. 24-25). Understanding is not the same as condoning, but it begs the question: is activism just another form of judgment?

A Miscarriage of Justice portrays the thrust of what, as many authors argue, lies at the core of politics: the control over bodies. Besides the obvious relevance of the topic today with the rise of religious conservatism in the Americas, the book offers broader insights into the history of cities, nationhood, and statecraft. Women’s reproductive lives reveal many of the contradictory forces at work in the making of modern states—the will to subjugate bodies, to limit citizenship, yet to keep everybody involved.