Roth presents a feminist history of reproduction that centres the lives and deaths of women in the understanding of the past tracing multiple reasons behind women's reproductive decisions over time. She historicizes the legal, medical and personal trajectory of reproduction in Brazil. Roth also traces how legal thought and medical knowledge became cemented into law and policy, how those prescriptions were implemented in the police precincts and hospital rooms (of Rio de Janeiro), and how women experienced and negotiated those institutional constraints on a daily basis.

She shows that Brazilian reproductive negotiations are part of a larger global history of modern state formation. The nature of reproductive health with fertility control is under-explored, and Roth is helping explore it. Roth departs from other legal studies of gender and sexuality because of Brazil's laws. She adds herself to the scholars who keep fertility control from the influence of poverty on pregnancy and motherhood.

Analyzing the medical, legal, social and political to understand women's reproductive experiences Roth shows women's reproductive lives on a continuum. She defines reproductive health as a range of events and practices. Roth approaches women's reproduction from three angles: law, medicine, and women's experiences. The book does not extend to child raising and kinship influences on childrearing beyond biological reproduction; only to pregnancy, childbirth, and fertility control. She uses reproductive practices or events to refer to biological reproduction (pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth, childbirth, and abortion).

Roth argues that infanticide investigations highlight the centrality of women's reproduction to Brazil's expanding state apparatus and political agenda in the 20th century. Medical and legal prescriptions on childbirth and fertility control alongside embodied experiences of gendered laws and inequality reveal an expanding interventionist Brazilian state. The centrality of women's reproduction in transitional political regimes resonates in and out of Brazil. The state allocates unequal citizenship through women's bodies and women's reproductive experiences is the key to understanding institutionalization of inequality in Brazil. Roth examines the connection between bodily experiences, state policy (from many angles) and scales of inquiry (home, community, nation).

Roth's book was great. There were some graphic stories and photos within the book, but it all adds to the argument. Roth's conclusion is women's reproductive lives were a focus of an expanding state after abolition, the beginning of republicanism and the strengthening of the federal government. The state restricted access to citizenship by reinforcing gender and racial hierarchies.