| Sumario: | The writers argue that recent alterations in access to contraceptives and infertility treatments in the state of Illinois, and across the U.S., have heightened the class cleavages in access to reproductive health care benefits in the U.S., and they attempt to uncover how this unequal distribution came about. Using data from government testimonies, public documents, and telephone interviews, they found that poor women have broad access to contraceptive coverage but little access to infertility treatment, whereas working- and middle-class women have increasingly broad coverage of infertility treatments but scarce coverage of contraceptives. They conclude that although the extreme measures of the eugenics movement are less frequently demonstrated, class differences in access to reproductive services result in an equally dualistic, albeit unstated, fertility policy in the U.S.: encouraging births among working- and middle-class families and discouraging births among the poor, especially those on Medicaid.
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