A new book: Liberating Abortion

A galvanizing history of abortion that recenters people of color and argues that we must liberate abortion for all

Oct 15, 2024

People of color have been having abortions since the dawn of time, yet our access is continuously under attack. In Liberating Abortion, award-winning abortion activist Renee Bracey Sherman and journalist Regina Mahone illustrate the long racist history that brought us to this moment, uncover the hidden figures who set the foundation activists and storytellers are building on today, and explain how abortion has been and remains essential to the health of our communities.

Liberating Abortion will take you back to the basics of sex education, detailing the traditions of abortion over centuries, while examining how society makes us feel about our experiences. You'll find rigorous research, never-before-heard stories, and eye-opening interviews with over 50 people of color who've had abortions, including activists, actresses, television writers, politicians, and the two Black members of Jane, the Chicago feminist service that provided abortions before Roe.

Can you tell us why you decided to write Liberating Abortion?

Renee: When I had my abortion, I saw abortion discussed on the news and depicted on television, but it was very rare to see people who looked like me as part of the conversation. I felt so lonely. This continued when I started working in the abortion movement and people would show photos from history or talk about the stories of how abortion was legalized and every story focused on the white women making it possible, but left out the contributions of Black and Brown people. I knew we were part of that history, but it pained me to not see us reflected or celebrated. So when Regina and I thought about writing a book, we wanted to explore the full history of abortion, separate from the Roe decision, separate from abortion bans, colonization, and white supremacy. We wanted to write a book about what it has taken to liberate abortion over 6,500 years, how our ancestors have had abortions, and illustrate what people of color are doing right now to change the conversation and build a better future. We wanted to give readers an entryway into this history and a way forward to building something better, no matter what the political circumstances are.

The core of Liberating Abortion is abortion stories of people of color. You interviewed over 50 people of color who’ve had abortions, both about their abortions and their expertise. Why was this perspective central to your book?

Renee: During a canoe ride at a summer camp in 2018, Regina and I were talking about how we connected over our abortions and how we both felt really lonely during our experiences because we didn’t know others who looked like us or had experiences like ours who we could talk to. But bonding over our abortions brought us together as writers and as Black women who had abortions. As we would write about our abortions and share our stories, we were able to build deeper connections with others and it opened our eyes to the vast diversity of people who have abortions today and throughout history. We wanted to bring those stories to all of the readers so they feel connected to a long history of people who have abortions, as well as to the stories of the people we interviewed in the book, and in their own communities.

Abortion is about people being able to choose their futures and families. We can’t tell the story of abortion without centering it on people who have abortions at that center.

Liberating Abortion is grounded in reproductive justice, a framework that differs from the traditional reproductive rights activism people might be familiar with. Can you talk about what reproductive justice is, how you came to this framework, and why it was important to ground the book in this particular perspective?

Renee: Reproductive justice is our guiding principle. It is a beautiful and visionary framework that 12 Black women created 30 years ago this past June that calls on us to broaden our understanding of abortion rights and bodily autonomy. We retell the story of the creation of the framework through an interview with Dr. Toni Bond. She detailed how they were at a meeting in Chicago and while many white reproductive rights leaders were thinking about challenging then-President Clinton’s rightward drift on abortion and touting of messaging like “safe, legal, and rare,” they weren’t also challenging his plans to promote “welfare-to-work” policies that would punish low-income families and harm people in poverty by taking away social safety net programs. They wanted to push for a reproductive platform that not only included the right to not have a child, but also supported people in having children and being able to raise their children in safe and sustainable communities. Regina and I felt right at home in this framework because it explained the complexities of our abortion decisions—we knew we wanted abortions, but we also felt the stigma or “misogynoir” towards us and other Black women who became young, single, or low-income parents. We couldn’t escape the messages that shamed us no matter what decision we made about our pregnancies. We wanted to ground the book in our abortion experiences, but also show that no matter what, people should be able to have the rights, resources, and respect to make their own decisions about their pregnancies—and reproductive justice is the way forward.

What do you think needs to be changed in the public discourse in how we talk about abortion and reproductive justice?

Renee: I think we must have a deeper conversation about the role criminalization and policing is playing in abortion access and how it is harming our ability to achieve reproductive justice. As we outline in the book, the only way to liberate abortion is through abolition. The criminalization of abortion is detrimental to our ability to have abortions, but we must see the connections between the way our government continues to fund an unending number of police and the family policing system that makes it difficult for people to care for their families. If people are afraid to provide or seek abortion care, people can and will die, as was the case for Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller in Georgia. People are being prosecuted for the outcomes of their pregnancies, and if we do not move towards abolition, that will only continue. That is at the core of reproductive justice—and it is what we must do to build a world where everyone is free to decide if, when, and how to grow their families and raise them in safe and sustainable communities.

You coin the term abortionsplaining in Liberating Abortion and devote an entire chapter to breaking down “abortionsplaining” myths. What is abortionsplaining and what were some of your favorite myths to dispel?

Renee: We wanted to really dig into the myths and outright lies about abortion, from the ridiculous to the commonplace, and help people understand where they come from, why they are spread, and what the truth was. Abortionsplaining is all around us. While some abortionsplaining is downright ridiculous like “abortion causes tornadoes and hurricanes” and “abortion powers electrical grids,” some, like “abortion is Black genocide” and “abortion is the Holocaust,” are widespread and cause anxiety in communities because they are rooted in a history of oppression. We wanted to explain why the anti-abortion movement spreads these myths and what the facts are. For all of them, it’s about making us feel uncomfortable with abortion and posing it as the worst thing to ever happen in history, while also rewriting history to remove white nationalist’s and colonialism’s culpability in things like slavery and the Holocaust. It’s to keep you from looking into the reality of why people have abortions and so scared to defend it, while also not engaging in any intellectual curiosity.

What does liberated abortion look like to you?

Renee: To me, liberated abortion is a feeling in which all of us feel like we have the ability to freely decide what we would like to do with our pregnancies. The decision is not based on how much money we have, whether there’s a clinic or access to pills, whether we have the support we need, childcare, health insurance, or anything else. It’s purely based on whether or not we’d like to continue the pregnancy. Then people can focus on having the abortion experience that they want, surrounded by people they love—or no one if they want!—and the method of their choosing, all on their own terms. Those should be the only factors. By having this freedom, people feel like they can both choose abortion, but also choose to continue a pregnancy without fear or pressure. That’s the liberated abortion world we’re building towards.

How do you want readers to feel while they’re reading the book and after they’ve finished it?

Renee: Our hope is that readers will come away seeing themselves in history and know that abortion is rightfully theirs. It always has been. We hope that it encourages them to share their abortion stories and seek out the stories in their families and communities to understand how abortion made their families possible. We hope that it makes them curious about history and thinking about what other stories are untold in abortion history—and all history—which feels critical as books are being banned and history is being whitewashed.