[2] As a young adult in the 1980s, her mother suffered from Granulomatosis with polyangiitis and was treated by Anthony Fauci, who had just become the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
[2] While there, she published her first book titled Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers' Letters to the Children's Bureau, 1915–1932 through the Rutgers University Press in 1986.
The book was a collection of letters from women around the United States detailing motherhood difficulties, including death and diet, between World War I and the end of the 1920s.
[5] In 2017, Ladd-Taylor published Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century through the Johns Hopkins University Press.
The book focused on the history of Eugenics in the United States as depicted in institutional and medical records, court cases, newspapers and professional journals.