Birth Control Books That I Couldn’t Write Without

What they’d be, if I could only choose three

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If I could conjure a writing workspace, it would look just like this picture: an open book with a leaf as a bookmark (ha), a coffee mug with a luscious latte waiting to make me happy, and sparkles strategically floating in my environment to evoke a sense of majesty. In reality, the only things usually floating around me when I write are the piles of notes that I sling around like a madwoman as I draft.

Luckily, while I can’t have real magic when writing, I can benefit from the wizardry (read, brilliance) that produced three of the books that have been most instrumental in my own work. There are many books to choose from, but the ones that I most cherish are those that gifted me with key ideas and approaches, not just information. They proved immediately useful to my work and serve as touch-points to guide my writing into the future.

For uncovering hidden ideologies:

I can’t imagine a researcher in the field who wouldn’t consider Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, one of their top choices. The challenge she issued to question racist ideologies and practices that subjugate black women and rob them of their reproductive freedom serves as a constant reminder to…