Crafting Choice: Abortion Politics and Handwork in the U.S. represents the first known inquiry into how people deploy publicly engaged handcraft campaigns as a means for abortion-political action. Whether crafters turn to yarn as a platform to fight for reproductive justice or to limit abortion access, this work takes a holistic approach to study how liberals and conservatives choose yarn as a political-activation tool in a Democracy. As a comprehensive investigation grounded in the shifting legality of abortion through two monumental U.S. Supreme Court decisions (including Roe v. Wade in 1973 and Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022), this book explains why efforts at persuasive handcrafting galvanize people around abortion politics, and what impacts craftwork serves an ever-polarized American public. While “craftivism” is typically regarded as a tool of the left, with the whimsical and often tongue-in-cheek campaigns, this book also offers rare consideration of how those on the political right are actively engaged in their own craftivism efforts with abortion.

Hinda Mandell, Ph.D., is professor in the School of Communication at RIT in New York, where she is the director of the university's journalism program. Mandell is editor of Crafting Dissent; co-curator and co-editor of Crafting Democracy; co-editor of Nasty Women and Bad Hombres; author of Sex Scandals, Gender and Power in Contemporary American Politics; and co-editor of Scandal in a Digital Age. Her writing been published in Politico, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The LA Times, Craft Research, the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, and the Journal of Feminist Scholarship.