‘Liberating Abortion’ Requires A True Retelling Of History

When most people in the U.S. think of the history of abortion, they think about white women like Margaret Sanger, a nurse who opened America’s first birth control clinic and founded an organization that later became Planned Parenthood.

Fewer people think about Mildred Campbell, a Black midwife from Washington, D.C., who provided abortions in the late 1800s. Or Marie Leaner and Sakinah Ahad Shannon, two Black members of the Jane Collective, a group that provided abortions to women in the late 1960s and early 1970s before federal abortion protections existed. Or Toni Bond, one of 12 “founding mothers” who created the framework of reproductive justice in the 1990s.

Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone are hoping to change that with their new book, “Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve.” Bracey Sherman and Mahone offer a more complete history of abortion in the book, which includes many of the women of color who were so critical to the movement but whose names were erased by whitewashed media tropes and racist arbiters of history.

“In so many ways, the media has this history of cosigning the racist, sexist, misogynistic tropes about Black women and other people of color,” Mahone told HuffPost. “This book is our platform to right those wrongs. We’re writing our experiences back into the history of abortion.”

Bracey Sherman, a biracial Black woman, and Mahone, a Black woman, have both had abortions and understand how isolating it can be to not see oneself reflected in the abortion stories that media and history choose to tell. Bracey Sherman has been working toward writing this book throughout her long career in reproductive justice, during which she founded the abortion storytelling organization We Testify. And Mahone, a journalist who has covered the intersections between race, class and reproductive rights, is keenly aware of who typically gets to tell abortion stories.

“Something our book agent … said to us that really stuck with us throughout the writing of the book was: ‘To tell the story of abortion, you have to tell the story of Black women in America. Anything less than that is incomplete,’” Bracey Sherman said. “And that is the position that we have taken, that you’ve actually never heard the full story of abortion.”

HuffPost spoke with Bracey Sherman and Mahone about the women of color who built the reproductive justice movement of today, why police and abortion can never coexist and how the criminalization of reproductive health is killing women.

Why did you write this book?

Renee Bracey Sherman: I wanted to rewrite history to make sure that we gave flowers to the people who have come before us. I wanted to make sure that people of color are heard and seen. The reason I started doing abortion storytelling work was because I was floored that the majority of people who have abortions are people of color, and yet that was not who we were seeing on television and film or in leadership within the abortion-rights movement or the abortion stories that were being elevated.

But what became challenging is that I would read lots of books on the history of abortion, and race was never part of the conversation. Or the conversation always focused on certain people in history, like Margaret Sanger or [19th century abortion provider] Madame Restell. While we do talk about them in our book, we point out that those two white women are not the only people who were doing abortions at that time. We wanted to say, look, here’s a whole cast of characters that you didn’t know because your history book is incomplete.

In your introduction, you write that the post-Roe v. Wade moment we’re in right now “feels uniquely complicated for people of color. For us, access to most things has always been disparate and challenging. People of color are the canaries in the coal mines; whatever bad happens, happens to us first.”

I can’t stop thinking about the ProPublica reporting that found two women from Georgia were the first known people to die from abortion bans after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Abortion-rights advocates warned for years that women would die from abortion restrictions, and now it’s happened to Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, two Black mothers.

Regina Mahone: This is history playing on repeat. The similarities to their stories and what we include in our book are astounding.

Candi Miller was afraid to go to the doctor because she was afraid she could be charged with a crime under Georgia’s abortion ban after self-managing her abortion. Now her three children are left without a mother. Amber Thurman took abortion medication at a clinic out of state, and Georgia doctors later delayed her lifesaving care when she had complications. She left behind a 6-year-old son.

Rosie Jimenez’s 4-year-old daughter was left without a mother after she died in 1977 because of the Hyde Amendment. Rosie died after seeking an illegal abortion because the clinic where she got her previous abortion turned her away, because she couldn’t afford to pay for the procedure. Under the Hyde Amendment [enacted in 1977], Medicaid no longer covered the procedure. So she went to an illegal provider and died from septic shock.

One of the parallels in these stories is how, on their deathbeds, Amber and Rosie told their relatives, “Make sure to take care of my child.” That is the reality that we’ve been living — and not since 2022, but for decades. And it’s because, in part, we haven’t dismantled the health care system, because we do not prioritize people over profits, people over policies that don’t make sense for people’s health care.

It was recently reported by the group Pregnancy Justice that at least 210 pregnant people faced criminal charges for pregnancy-related conduct from mid-2022 to mid-2023 — “the highest number of pregnancy-related prosecutions documented in a single year.”

What role does criminalization play in the history of abortion and moving forward?

Bracey Sherman: We need to abolish the police in order to liberate abortion, and these cases prove why. People are afraid to get health care or ask questions because they’re afraid of being arrested. There’s just no way abortion and policing can coexist. So long as you have people who have the authority to arrest you for the outcomes of your pregnancy, no one is safe.

One of the things that feels important is understanding this history of criminalization and why it’s here. It’s not just “oh, well, we want to make abortion a crime because we don’t like it, and we want people to stop getting abortions.” Sure, that’s a piece of it. But when you get deeper into it, it’s about this desire to control populations of people that you do not believe should have or be in power.

When we look at early criminalization, it is because they wanted to make sure that Black and brown people did not have the ability to be midwives and earn a living. For Indigenous folks and formerly enslaved people, they didn’t want them to be able to practice medicine and care for themselves and their communities, to be able to own their own bodies and decide if, when and how to have children. The only way they could control them was through criminalization.

It’s this way of keeping people down and unsafe and unable to feel like they can build community. There’s a lot of antidotes to abortion stigma, but one of the big ones is community. When you look at the larger history of criminalization and the history of abortion, and the ways in which we lost our ancient methods and our ancestors’ traditions, the goal of the people trying to break that up was to destroy communities. And what’s hard and frustrating is that in the last couple thousand years, not much has changed.

You discuss the “flattening” of abortion stories to make them more media-friendly. You write: “Those who died deserve not to have their death – their stories – exploited and mangled for political gain. They deserve to have their memories live on with those who loved them, not flattened to make a point about the barriers to abortion that we already know about.”

I think ProPublica did an amazing job telling Thurman’s and Miller’s stories, but I’d love to talk about why holistic abortion storytelling is so important — especially now, during such a critical election year when abortion is at the forefront.

Bracey Sherman: It’s complicated, right? I’m so excited to see that abortion is being given the platform that it is within this election cycle, which is something abortion should have had rightfully 10, 15 years ago. But because of stigma, it didn’t. It’s wild that we had to lose abortion rights in order for people to pay attention.

I also think that Amber and Candi deserve to be remembered not solely based on how they died, but also how they lived. I had held off on posting about them because I wanted to make sure that people in our movement had made contact with the families. Because that quote you read is from a section about Gerri Santoro [a woman who died from an unsafe abortion in 1964; Ms. Magazine later published a graphic police photo of her dead body without identifying her].

The Ms. Magazine leaders were sort of like, “Well, she was an anonymous person,” as if that was the reasoning to post a photo of her naked body. Using people as martyrs for a cause while not respecting who they actually were, that flattens their stories. You take out how they lived. You sanitize them. I think it’s really important that we don’t do that this time around. We need to engage with the whole story.

To your point, even though Jimenez is a relatively well-known figure in the reproductive justice world, I still learned a lot about her story that I hadn’t known before. I did not know she had had multiple abortions, that she was one of 12 siblings, or that she was saving up to go to college before she died from an unsafe abortion. I really didn’t know much about her as a person outside of how she died.

Mahone: When abortion stories are flattened, we often then miss the underlying point. We retold Rosie’s story because we need to dismantle health care. That’s the only way that we give Rosie and her death justice. We should not be denying people health care coverage because they had an abortion or a miscarriage.

Bracey Sherman: Political circles are not highlighting stories of people who just wanted abortions, either because their family is complete or because they don’t want children or they don’t want children yet, whatever their reasons are. That feels like extremely unfinished business, and it’s so apparent during this election cycle.

You both shared your abortion stories in the book. But Regina, you also shared your experience with parenting. Why was it important to you to include parenting in a book about abortion?

Mahone: The majority of people who have abortions already have a child or children. I’m a parent who’s had an abortion. I also had a miscarriage and I’ve given birth to two children, including one child who has a disability. For a lot of people, the child care crisis was apparent during COVID, but parents are dealing with this crisis on a daily basis. It’s one of many systemic failures that we write about, and I am currently experiencing the direct failures of these systems. One example I always talk about is school hours, which make no sense because they don’t correspond with the workday. My kid’s in school from 9 to 3, but I have to work from 10 to 6. How do we make that make sense?

In the book, I talk about my son being denied being in a day care because he wasn’t walking. This was not a thing that I knew existed. My husband and I made changes in our life to be able to afford day care because that was our plan for child care, and then we’re told, “Oh, you can’t send your son to day care.” And we’re like, “Well, what are we supposed to do now?” These systems simply do not work for working parents.

Toward the end of the book, Renee, you wrote about an interaction with your mom where you discovered she had had an abortion — something you two had never discussed despite your work in abortion care. What was that like?

Bracey Sherman: It was kind of wild that I was walking around saying, “Everyone loves someone who’s had an abortion,” and I did not realize that one of the people that had abortions in my life, that I loved, was my own mother. What she and I talked about that day, and then in the subsequent interview in the book, is the power of being able to talk about your experiences and turn to people in your family for support. I think we might make assumptions about the people in our lives; I certainly did.

When I testified before Congress, I said that I didn’t realize that abortion made my life possible — not just in a figurative way of this life that I have because I had an abortion, but literally my life because my mother was able to decide if, when and how to become a parent. Same as Regina.

It’s really upsetting to realize that this stigma was thriving in my family. I didn’t even realize how much of a hold it had on us until then. I thought I grew up in a pro-choice family that was supportive of abortion until I needed one and didn’t feel like I had anyone to go to. My hope in including that story and ending the book with it is to show that we’ve lived through this ourselves and talking about abortion can bring generational healing.

What do you want readers to take away from your book?

Bracey Sherman: I’m going to borrow a quote from Laura Kaplan, who was the author of “The Story of Jane,” and we interviewed her for our book. She was so clear that she doesn’t like when the women of Jane [Collective] are talked about as if they’re heroes. She said it feels like it makes people feel like you have to be a hero in order to make change, but they were just regular people who wanted to make a difference.

When we looked back in history for research for this book, there were people like Mildred Campbell. She wasn’t this, like, extraordinary person. She was just a woman who quote-unquote ran an inn that women stayed at, and she made a difference in people’s lives.

My hope is that people will read our book and be inspired by the long generations of people who were not some huge superheroes who made change.

Mahone: I really hope that people read the book and come away with an understanding that it does take all of us — not one candidate, not one elected official — to change how we see abortion. We can’t rely on whoever becomes president to show up or not show up for us; we have to continue to do that work collectively.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

“Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve” is available for purchase Tuesday.