New Book on Feminist Health Care in the 70s

AK Press, the Anglo-American libertarian socialist publishing house, is taking pre-orders for a new book by Angela Hume.  The new title, called "Deep Care", explores the radical feminist health movement of the seventies and eighties.  From the self-help movement sprang a constellation of licensed feminist clinics, community programs to promote reproductive health, even the nation’s first known-donor sperm bank, all while fighting the oppression of racism, poverty, and gender violence. The movement’s drive to keep abortion accessible also led to the first clinic defense mobilizations against anti-abortion extremists trying to force providers to close their doors.   
Deep Care follows generations of activists and health workers who orbited the Women’s Choice Clinic in Oakland from the early 1970s until 2010, as they worked underground and above ground, in small cells and broad coalitions and across political movements with grit, conviction, and allegiances of great trust to do what they believed needed to be done—despite the law, when required. Grounded in interviews with activists sharing details of their work for the first time, Angela Hume reveals this critical, under-recognized story of the radical edge of the abortion movement. These lessons are more pertinent than ever following the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision and the devastation to abortion access nationwide.   Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History, is among those with praise for Hume's work, saying " Deep Care draws on the deep wisdom of those who have been long in the struggle to defend bodily autonomy and radical self-determination. To transmit that knowledge across the generations is itself an act of revolution. Read this book—but more importantly, use this book. We all need to be down for the cause, more deeply now than ever".  For each copy of the book ordered from AK Press or a participating progressive bookstore through the US,  the publishers will donate $2 to Keep Our Clinics, a network of independent abortion clinics in the US.