368 pages | 21st May, 2024 | Non-fiction | Politics
Kirkus Prize Finalist
A Time Best Book of 2024
An urgent investigation into the experience of seeking an abortion after the fall of Roe v. Wade and the life-threatening consequences of being denied reproductive freedom.
“A superbly reported account… Undue Burden focuses on the stories of those who are attempting to navigate an unraveling healthcare system while pregnant. Luthra brings their voices to life, and she locates her subjects in their larger contexts—socioeconomic, political, religious, historical—thereby exposing how abortion bans disproportionately harm the most vulnerable…The stakes could not be higher… Undue Burden provide[s] a preview of a nationwide catastrophe that we still have the opportunity, one can hope, to prevent.”
Washington Post
“Indispensable… An impeccably researched, clearheaded and frankly terrifying assessment of just how grave the situation in post-Roe America is… Whatever your gender, race, religious background or political preferences, Luthra’s Undue Burden should be on your required reading list.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Luthra calls the end of Roe a ‘public health crisis,’ and it is one… She also effectively uses public health data to highlight disproportionate racial impacts of abortion bans… But it is when discussing abortion as a human right that Luthra makes her most powerful points: about the limitations of Roe, which was ‘never enough to ensure that everyone could easily, safely access legal abortions’; the injustices of legislation like the 1977 Hyde Amendment, under which no federal health insurance dollars can be used to pay for abortions; and the vulnerable and marginalized individuals in this country who have always been left behind, or left out entirely, in conversations about ‘choice…’ Luthra rightly criticizes a tendency in the national debate ‘to speak about abortion in only the starkest terms…’ In Undue Burden, she resists such simplistic storytelling.”
New York Review of Books
“Packed with recent on-the-ground reporting… Shefali Luthra sympathetically documents the harrowing human consequences of curtailing the right to abortion.”
Financial Times
“A poignant and dramatic look at the stakes of losing Roe and a compassionate assessment of the human toll wrought by Dobbs.“
Ms. Magazine
Shefali Luthra has covered national health policy for the past decade, most recently at The 19th. Her coverage of abortion rights has been cited in Congressional testimony and Supreme Court briefings and in 2023 received an Online Journalism Award. Luthra’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and more. She lives in Washington, D.C.
US: Doubleday Books
Audio: PRHA