Viruses and Reproductive Injustice

Viruses and Reproductive Injustice is a vital history of the Zika epidemic in Brazil. An impressively synthetic accounting of the biomedical investigations into the mosquito-borne virus and its inequitably embodied burdens on pregnant women and their children, the book is robustly empirically grounded, sophisticatedly situated in the historiographic literature, and politically searing.

For medical historian Ilana Löwy, Brazil's Zika epidemic is shadowed by prior health emergencies. She shows how poor women's continual lack of contraception, safe abortion, and anti-infection resources made microcephalic babies and "self-sacrificing mothers" highly visible, while those who wanted to end their pregnancies became invisible. This passionate and clear analysis of reproductive injustice champions reproductive justice for all.

Viruses and Reproductive Injustice is a riveting and luminous account of the powerful forces that redefined Zika in Brazil as a problem of care. With exceptional nuance, Löwy provocatively shows how authorities and scientists perpetuated "embodied injustice" by making privilege invisible. This is a must-read for anyone interested in what a collective response to injustice should entail.

A riveting exploration of the complex recent history of Zika epidemic in Brazil that only a scholar as intellectually versatile as Ilana Löwy could have written; it illuminates the fraught entanglement of emergent viruses, public health, reproductive politics, and social inequality in the 21st century, reminding readers of the spurious allure of tidy narratives about health and society.