What It Means to Build Beyond 'Roe'

In Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, he wrote that “abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” But that's just not true, according to authors Renee Bracey Sherman, a reproductive justice activist and founder of We Testify, and Regina Mahone, a journalist and senior editor at The Nation.

For as long as people have been getting pregnant, they've been having abortions. In their new book Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve, Bracey Sherman and Mahone dedicate an entire chapter to the delightful history of herbal abortions—in ancient Egypt, the Greek and Roman Empires, imperial China, African nations, Indigenous tribes, across Latin America, and pretty much anywhere or any time period you can think of, including the colonial United States. Thomas Jefferson and his daughter wrote letters about her decision to help her cousin procure one; Benjamin Franklin details homemade abortion methods in one of his books.

Explicit abortion bans and criminalization, Bracey Sherman told Jezebel, are a far newer invention in this country than abortion—both an invention of racist panics about the white birth rate and a conspiracy to control the bodies and lives of communities of color. “Everyone was having abortions freely until the institutions of colonialism, capitalism, policing—all rooted in white supremacy, all one and the same," she said.

Liberating Abortion is simultaneously an introduction to a movement, and a call for seasoned reproductive rights and justice advocates to familiarize ourselves with often erased or white-washed histories and reimagine what’s possible. Today, activists and politicians center their abortion-related demands around restoring Roe, which was a precedent that still left thousands without convenient and affordable abortion access.

Bracey Sherman says the book is “a love letter to people who have abortions, about what you all deserve, our history as a community and diaspora, what we can build toward together—it’s about seeing yourself in history, so you can see yourself today, and the way forward.” Without Roe, we’re presented with a blank slate, an opportunity to establish a new framework for bodily autonomy and reproductive justice. But slogans like “Restore Roe” mean we’re fighting for crumbs. According to Bracey Sherman and Mahone, history tells us—shows us—that there’s a better way.

An abortion history lesson you won't get in school

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were no clear laws governing abortion, and abortion providers of varying levels of expertise set up shop across the country. Explicit restrictions and eventual bans on abortion only started to materialize in the early 20th century, in large part because of racialized fear-mongering about unsafe abortions. Bracey Sherman and Mahone pored through hundreds of headlines and news clippings from that time period, which centered around salacious stories often about Black women dying from botched, back-alley abortions provided by Black abortion providers who faced arrest and incarceration for these outcomes. In North Carolina, a Black woman named Virginia King found herself in and out of jail for providing abortion services that led to at least two deaths in the early 1920s.

But fatal outcomes from medical procedures were more common during the 19th century, period. Until roughly 150 years ago, doctors didn’t even know they should be washing their hands between operations. “Like, Dr. Pepper and Coca-Cola were seen as medicine during this period,” Bracey Sherman said. "Of course, people were dying from abortions—they were dying from everything."

This contributed to a cultural understanding in the early 1900s of abortion as dangerous, criminal, and, crucially, contained within Black communities. All of this intersected with rising tides of Christian nationalism, xenophobia, and white birth rate panics, as well as increased investments in policing. “Over and over, the throughline we kept seeing was whenever Black and brown people were getting free or gaining new rights, or there was more immigration, that’s when you’d see a backlash toward abortion,” Bracey Sherman said. “That was the pattern. That’s what we’re seeing today, with talk of birthright citizenship, the border, abortion bans at the same time. It’s connected—if you don't have control over your own body, you don't have control over anything, and they will use that to destroy everything else.”

From left to right: Bracey Sherman, the cover of Liberating Abortion, and Regina Mahone

In their book, Bracey Sherman and Mahone also walk us through the path that 20th-century reproductive rights activists and white feminists embarked on to win Roe in the 1970s. Initially, they sided with then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan to win legalized “therapeutic” abortions exclusively for people with specific emergency circumstances, should they sufficiently convince a medical board. Most of the activism during this period centered on stories of palatable white women who were being forced to travel to Mexico for abortion care.

In some ways, we’re seeing this play out again today. Bracey Sherman and Mahone observe that the abortions that make national headlines these days are those of white women with wanted pregnancies who faced medical emergencies and were denied urgent care under their state's abortion bans. These stories matter, but, as the two write in the first pages of Liberating Abortion, history warns us against what happens when we center one acceptable, sympathetic type of abortion: "If we recreate the same system, we will get the same outcome."

"We're not going back," but we can learn from the past

After Roe was established, it didn’t take long for its limited protections to be scaled back by subsequent Supreme Court rulings that targeted poor women of color. Harris v. McRae (1980) allows restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortion; Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) allows states to enact a range of politicized, often economic restrictions on abortion so long as they don't pose an "undue burden" or create insurmountable barriers to abortion access—but the court doesn't define what an "undue burden" is, leaving the door wide open for a number of restrictive laws that hit vulnerable communities the hardest. 

In September, I attended a talk Bracey Sherman gave about the book. At one point, she discussed the message that's become Vice President Kamala Harris’ central campaign slogan: The pithy, undeniably powerful “We’re not going back.” But there are some things Bracey Sherman wishes we would go back to, she said. As Liberating Abortion details, historically, the movements for civil rights and reproductive justice worked closely under the leadership of Black women, many of whom had abortions themselves. Contrary to anti-abortion activists’ racist invocations of abortion as “Black genocide” and a sin worse than slavery, Martin Luther King Jr. hailed community organizing efforts to free a Black abortion provider from jail as a model for activism. There was a deep understanding that bodily autonomy and human dignity were impossible without the right to abortion (and abortion on demand, at that).

For instance, Bracey Sherman and Mahone include the story of Rosie Jimenez, a 27-year-old single mother living in Texas when Roe was passed in 1973. But in 1976, Congress enacted the Hyde Amendment, a policy attached to the federal budget that prohibits federal funding for abortion. That meant Jimenez, who had previously relied on Medicaid to safely access abortion care, now couldn’t afford an abortion from a reputable clinic, so she turned to a local, unlicensed abortion provider. The abortion she received resulted in a fatal infection and she died days later.

Today, Jimenez is remembered as the first woman to die as a direct consequence of Hyde. But in Liberating Abortion, Bracey Sherman and Mahone write about the  white-washing of Jimenez’s death by liberal reproductive rights activists and mainstream journalists. “We learned for the first time while writing this that that was Rosie’s third abortion, and we were surprised—not that she had multiple abortions, because many people who have abortions have multiple, but because that’s never told in her story,” Bracey Sherman said. Too often, she explained, storytelling about Jimenez fixates on a gory death and zooms in on a singular policy instead of a systemic issue. (In Jimenez's case, the for-profit health system.)

Bracey Sherman stressed that anti-abortion leaders were ultimately unmoved by Jimenez's death. “The anti-abortion movement knows people die from their laws. They don’t care,” she said. Attempts to appeal to their humanity, amplifying only the most objectively tragic stories while concealing the rest, all to fight for scraps won't work.

So, instead, we should think bigger, Bracey Sherman argues.

In the late 1960s, women marched with an "Abolish All Abortion Laws Now" banner. Via Getty Images

In Liberating Abortion, Bracey Sherman and Mahone write about the inextricability of the movements for abolition and reproductive justice. Abolition, after all, includes but isn’t exclusive to defunding the police—it’s about imagining where those resources could go, instead. Similarly, reproductive justice isn’t just about lifting abortion bans, it’s about imagining equitable access to abortion and all reproductive care, access to all of the resources we need to parent or not parent in safe, healthy environments.

In one chapter, Bracey Sherman and Mahone discuss the history of the Janes, a group of women who ran an underground abortion access network in Chicago for years before Roe. The women operated a hotline for people seeking their services, opened their homes for illegal abortions, and drove clients to and from appointments, risking life in prison in the process. They asked that clients pay what they could, which was sometimes nothing. Often enough, clients didn’t know how far along they were in their pregnancies; the Janes sometimes disagreed about at what point it was too late to offer abortion procedures, and sometimes they agreed it was no longer possible. But they never imposed arbitrary gestational limits and always had conversations about individual circumstances. 

There’s a lot we can learn about a model of care like this—where cost isn't a barrier to health care, where abortion isn't arbitrarily restricted, where communities took care of each other. 

“Too few reproductive rights organizations are also calling for a national health system, or universal basic income, or socialist policies that go hand in hand with liberating abortion,” Bracey Sherman said. “So, I do want to ‘go back’ in that way—to get back to the radical roots we used to have as a movement, instead of this vague idea of supporting people having kids when they’re ‘ready’ without a conversation about what that means.”

Throughout Liberating Abortion, a range of difficult, nuanced conversations coexist with surprising humor and levity, small but impactful jokes sprinkled throughout, colorful and intimate details about abortion stories and experiences. Even as the book reckons with the gravity of our post-Roe reality and all its uncertain terrain, Bracey Sherman and Mahone manage to write with a pervading tone of optimism—even joy. “There's no way we can get out of this extraordinarily difficult moment we’re in without dreaming,” Bracey Sherman told me. We deserve better than the current post-Dobbs landscape, and part of building toward better, “is articulating, dreaming about what 'better' is.”