Criminalizing Motherhood and Reproduction

Michelle Hughes Miller (University of South Florida, USA)

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English

Routledge
30 July 2025

Social issues & processes; Gender studies: women; Crime & criminology; Criminology: legal aspects; Criminal justice law

In this book, motherhood and reproduction are identified as sites of legal, political, and ideological surveillance, regulation, and criminalization. Collectively, this rich and diverse edited volume builds on cross-disciplinary frameworks and an attention to differences among mothers to analyze multiple ways that mothers and pregnant women face culture, policy, or practices that may criminalize their identities or their actions.

Several themes cross the volumes’ six chapters, from the importance of and problems related to socialized expectations of what “good mothers” should do – for incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and never incarcerated mothers alike – to the role of state actors and everyday informal interactions in enforcing these expectations, particularly against marginalized, Black, Brown and young mothers in open-air prisons. Conflicts between motherhood ideologies and state control dominate many women under carceral motherhood. Nation-states are also implicated in these analyses, particularly in the European Union, where nation-states outsource abortion across and within geopolitical borders, making migration a contested strategy for pregnant women. Yet despite the criminalizing of motherhood and reproduction described in the text, women and mothers are also found to be resilient, choosing their identities and their actions.

Criminalizing Motherhood and Reproduction will be a key resource for researchers, scholars and practitioners in the fields of feminist criminology and motherhood studies, criminology and criminal justice, women’s studies, gender studies, child and youth studies and sociology. It was originally published as a special issue of Women & Criminal Justice.

Edited by: Michelle Hughes Miller (University of South Florida USA)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 178mm,
ISBN: 9781032696744
ISBN 10: 1032696745
Pages: 100
Publication Date: 30 July 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Further / Higher Education , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Michelle Hughes Miller is Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of South Florida, USA. As a feminist criminologist, she analyzes cultural and systemic responses to “bad” mothers and responses to violence against women. Along with multiple publications, she co-edited Bad Mothers: Representations, Regulations and Resistance (2017).