Cassia Roth examines women's reproductive health in relation to legal and medical policy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Analyzing court cases, law, medical writings, and health data, Roth argues that the increasingly interventionist state (post abolition of slavery in 1888 and the onset of republicanism in 1889) fostered a culture of condemnation around poor women's reproductive practices. By tracing how legal thought and medical knowledge became cemented into law and clinical practice, how obstetricians, public health officials, and legal practitioners approached fertility control, and how women experienced and negotiated their reproductive lives, Roth provides a new way of interpreting the intertwined histories of gender, race, reproduction, and the state—and shows how these questions continue to reverberate in debates over reproductive justice and women's health in Brazil today.
Cassia Roth is associate professor of history and Latin American & Caribbean Studies at the University of Georgia. She also serves as director of graduate studies in history. Prior to her position at UGA, she was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar at Fiocruz in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Her book, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil was published in 2020 (Stanford University Press). It won the Murdo J. MacLeod Prize from the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association and the Choice Outstanding Academic Title from the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals, and her article “From Free Womb to Criminalized Woman: Fertility Control in Brazilian Slavery and Freedom,” won the 2018 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Article Prize.
She teaches courses on Brazilian history, gender history, slavery, and medicine. She is currently completing her Master’s in Public Health with a focus on epidemiology and global health.
Food for Thought: Podcast with Cassia Roth
