Summary
Anti-Dobbs: An Interdisciplinary Polemic "is a responsible book, a voice that speaks from authenticity, a brave voice without filters, with raw realities and overwhelming strength. A book that has a level of rawness that makes us question our arrival in the world. It is a wake-up call, and for those of us who are awake and if being human belongs to us, the question ‘what are we going to do about it?’ is brutal. I want to do something about it."
—Mónica Salmón, clinical psychotherapist and best-selling author.
"With this book, author Omar Swartz offers a deep dive into the issues surrounding the abortion debate in America after the devastating Dobbs decision of the Supreme Court. Swartz does a masterful job at providing a comprehensive context for the debate and the decision. He exposes a profound, systemic hatred of women, and attempts to utterly control them by the dangerous right-wing culture warriors, that has now actually moved to the level of state-supported misogyny. Women have died now, since the Dobbs decision, because medical personnel fear being jailed for carrying out the Hippocratic Oath they solemnly took to become doctors. Women have a powerful, compassionate, and knowledgeable champion against the ravages of right-wing misogyny and cruelty in author Swartz. He offers here an incisive, well-researched argument in support of protection for women at levels even beyond the deeply troubling issue of abortion. These right-wing culture warriors will not carry the future, in part thanks to the noble efforts of this brilliant author."
—Sharon Coggan, author of Sacred Disobedience: A Jungian Analysis of the Saga of Pan and the Devil.
"Arguably, the greatest contribution of this work is that it helps to provide support and analysis across fields with its synthesis of ideas and arguments. While there have been other studies to examine the political or social aspects of Dobbs, none that I am aware of have so eloquently blended legal analysis with historical foundations and religious and social critiques to provides a much fuller picture of Dobbs itself, and also how it fits into the overall lack of equality faced by women in the United States."
—From the reviewers’ report.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Dedication
- CONTENTS
- PREFACE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- INTRODUCTION
- CHAPTER 1 A CRITIQUE OF JUDICIAL PHILOSOPHY
- CHAPTER 2 LIBERAL AND RADICAL FEMINISM REVISITED
- CHAPTER 3 THE PROFOUND MISOGYNY OF THE COMMON LAW TRADITION WITHIN AND OUTSIDE OF COVERTURE
- CHAPTER 4 CHRISTIANITY, AND THE PATRIA POTESTAS POWER OF THE HUSBAND/FATHER/STATE IN THE COMMON LAW TRADITION
- CHAPTER 5 ABORTION RESTRICTIONS ARE ANTI-WOMEN
- CONCLUSION
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- INDEX
Omar Swartz
Anti-Dobbs
An Interdisciplinary Polemic
PETER LANG
New York - Berlin - Bruxelles - Chennai - Lausanne - Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2024046967
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG
ISBN 9783034353878 (hardback)
ISBN 9783034353885 (ebook)
ISBN 9783034353892 (epub)
DOI 10.3726/b22499
© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne
Published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, USA
info@peterlang.com—www.peterlang.com
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilization outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
About the author
Omar Swartz is an interdisciplinary scholar with a JD from Duke University and a PhD in Communication from Purdue University. He has authored or edited 14 books and more than 120 essays, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and reviews. He teaches courses on Law and Diversity in U.S. History, Constitutional Law, and the First Amendment.
About the book
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, rooted in an unarticulated patriarchy in the Supreme Court’s historical narrative, represents an untimely expression of deeply religious and conservative hostility towards women. Anti-Dobbs: An Interdisciplinary Polemic offers a contrasting viewpoint, asserting that abortion prohibitions are inherently anti-woman and that no valid arguments for restricting abortion exist without demeaning women. The abortion issue is a shadow cast by the law over a more fundamental question: the status and recognition of women as human beings and equal citizens. The book argues that expansive abortion rights are fundamental to women’s equality and asserts that Dobbs was profoundly wrong, both legally and morally. Based on over 20 years of the author’s experience teaching a course entitled “Law and Diversity in U.S. History,” the work is a critical response and a polemic advocating for the equality of women who have been reduced by the Supreme Court to little more than “fetal containers.”
Anti-Dobbs: An Interdisciplinary Polemic “is a responsible book, a voice that speaks from authenticity, a brave voice without filters, with raw realities and overwhelming strength. A book that has a level of rawness that makes us question our arrival in the world. It is a wake-up call, and for those of us who are awake and if being human belongs to us, the question ‘what are we going to do about it?’ is brutal. I want to do something about it.”
—Mónica Salmón, clinical psychotherapist and best-selling author.
“With this book, author Omar Swartz offers a deep dive into the issues surrounding the abortion debate in America after the devastating Dobbs decision of the Supreme Court. Swartz does a masterful job at providing a comprehensive context for the debate and the decision. He exposes a profound, systemic hatred of women, and attempts to utterly control them by the dangerous right-wing culture warriors, that has now actually moved to the level of state-supported misogyny. Women have died now, since the Dobbs decision, because medical personnel fear being jailed for carrying out the Hippocratic Oath they solemnly took to become doctors. Women have a powerful, compassionate, and knowledgeable champion against the ravages of right-wing misogyny and cruelty in author Swartz. He offers here an incisive, well-researched argument in support of protection for women at levels even beyond the deeply troubling issue of abortion. These right-wing culture warriors will not carry the future, in part thanks to the noble efforts of this brilliant author.”
—Sharon Coggan, author of Sacred Disobedience: A Jungian Analysis of the Saga of Pan and the Devil.
“Arguably, the greatest contribution of this work is that it helps to provide support and analysis across fields with its synthesis of ideas and arguments. While there have been other studies to examine the political or social aspects of Dobbs, none that I am aware of have so eloquently blended legal analysis with historical foundations and religious and social critiques to provides a much fuller picture of Dobbs itself, and also how it fits into the overall lack of equality faced by women in the United States.”
—From the reviewers’ report.
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
DEDICATION
For Rui, the love of my life.
PREFACE
It is fair, in reading a book like this one on a controversial topic such as abortion, perhaps the most controversial topic in the United States today, to know something about the writer. For authority, I point to George Orwell who, in an autobiographical essay observed, “I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development.”1 This point is particularly salient for critical (or, in this case, polemical) scholarship, the type of writing that aspires, in Orwell’s words, “to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should drive after.”2 Orwell was a master of this type of writing, and an inspiration for me and many others who have some ideas about how to make the world a better place. All my education, all my reading, writing, and teaching have been directed toward that goal.
***
I am the son and only child of a single mother with only a lackluster secondary school education. I know that my mother was a poor and uninspired student because, after she died at the age of 81, I learned that she had a hoarding disorder. Of course, I suspected that something was wrong with her. When I was growing up, my mother was a “pack rat” who had an idiosyncratic collection of public street signs, old magazines and newspapers, and a bizarre array of knickknacks, tchotchkes, and fetishes, as well as innumerable succulents and other plants packed into our small apartment. Much later when I was in college and graduate school, my mother managed to buy an old house where she lived alone with her cats, and the “collecting” continued unabated. The disposal company that came to clear her house told me that, on a 5-point hoarding scale, my mother was a 4.5. I am sharing this because, while I was working through the physical rubble (and literal garbage) that was my mother’s life, I came across her junior high and high school report cards and class assignments. Few things I have experienced have been as uncanny as reviewing those sad and depressing documents. When I asked my mother’s lifelong friend (whom she knew from junior high school) about the grades, she told me that my mother “was no scholar.”
Details
- Pages
- XVI, 184
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783034353885
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783034353892
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783034353878
- DOI
- 10.3726/b22499
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2025 (January)
- Keywords
- American Legal History Feminism Critical Scholarship Misogyny Patriarchy Abortion Culture Wars Common-Law Tradition Constitutional Interpretation Constitutional Law Catharine A. MacKinnon Patria Potestas Fetal Containers Coverture Sexism Secularism Stare decisis Supreme Court White Male Supremacy Equal Rights Amendment
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2025. XVI, 184 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
