Where To Start

M.E. Wright’s books share a connected world, but there’s no single place you have to begin.

Start with The Fatherhood Mandate to enter the story at the beginning, or jump into Exit Strategy and the By Her Hand trilogy. Either path will bring you into the same world from a different direction.

The Unborn Child Protection Act

How is freedom lost? It’s the question at the heart of M.E. Wright’s Unborn Child Protection Act series, which follows the passage and expansion of a law that steadily reshapes medicine, families, and personal freedom through the lives of ordinary people caught in its reach.

By Her Hand

What does it take to reclaim freedom once it’s been lost? It’s the question at the heart of M.E. Wright’s By Her Hand series, which follows women confronting the systems that have reshaped their lives and deciding what they’re willing to do about them.

The Fatherhood Mandate

What happens when becoming a father is no longer a choice?

Sam Maxwell's life changes overnight when he learns he's about to become a father under laws that leave him with no legal say in the future of his child. As the government reaches further into his family's private decisions, he must confront questions about fatherhood, responsibility, and choice that no one should ever have to face.

The Fatherhood Mandate introduces the world, the legal system, and the people whose lives are forever changed by the Unborn Child Protection Act.

The Motherhood Mandate

The same crisis. A different perspective.

The Motherhood Mandate returns to the same events through Rylee's perspective. What begins as an unexpected pregnancy becomes a fight to maintain control over her own body, future, and identity as the law strips away one choice after another.

Together, The Fatherhood Mandate and The Motherhood Mandate tell one complete story from two perspectives, revealing how the same crisis transforms two lives in very different ways.

A Ward of the State

What happens when laws outlive their intended consequences?

Set in 2042, A Ward of the State explores the unintended consequences of the Unborn Child Protection Act through the first generation raised under it. Laws written years earlier to control pregnancy and reproduction have reshaped families, institutions, and childhood itself in ways their architects never anticipated.

Expanding the World

These companion works grew out of the original premise of the Unborn Child Protection Act series. Some were created while M.E. Wright was writing the novels, as questions emerged about how Wisconsin’s 1997 Act 292 could expand and what that expansion would mean beyond the characters at the center of the books. Together, they offer a broader look at the laws, institutions, and lives shaped by the world that followed.

Thin Blue Lines

How does a woman end up detained because she might be pregnant?

Thin Blue Lines traces the laws, court decisions, political choices, and escalating enforcement that lead directly to Rylee Williams’s detention in The Motherhood Mandate. Blending real events with the fictional Unborn Child Protection Act timeline, it shows how quickly the line between reproductive policy and criminal enforcement can disappear.

Exit Strategy

When your body becomes evidence, escape becomes strategy

Mackenzie Williams uses a business trip to Portugal as cover to evade America’s reproductive surveillance, only to uncover an underground political network working to reshape American society.

Preorder opens September 15, 2026!