Renee Bracey Sherman is the founder and executive director of the abortion-rights organization We Testify, co-host of the podcast “The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion” and author, with journalist Regina Mahone, of “Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve,” which gives a history of abortion with a focus on people of color. Before shutting in 2022, Bitch magazine called her the “Beyoncé of abortion storytelling.” The honor stuck.
In “Liberating Abortion,” Bracey Sherman and Mahone illustrate the long racist history that brought reproductive justice to the current moment, highlighting its little-known trailblazers and necessity to community health. “Liberating Abortion” came out Oct. 1, and Bracey Sherman speaks at the Harvard Book Store on Wednesday. We interviewed her Tuesday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been a reproductive justice activist and an abortion storyteller for many years; what inspired you to take it to the next level and write the book?
I’ll start with my personal motivation, which is the lack of people of color as part of the conversation. When I started sharing my abortion story, I was often the only person of color on a panel; I was the only one representing all people of color, which was wild. And when I learned that the majority of people who have abortions are people of color, it made me very angry. I felt like, why are we not centered in this conversation? Why are we not part of this work? Where are we? It was clear that people of color weren’t really being invited into the conversation, and also that people believe what they see. So if the narrative about abortion only reflects white people – white women sharing their abortion stories and a history of white women doing this work – people of color think they are alone, but that’s completely not true. I think even the movement is really guilty of perpetrating this narrative that abortion rights were won by mostly white women in the late 1960s and ’70s, and it’s been like that ever since. But no, abortion has been around for 6,500 years and people of color have been having abortions for a long time, it’s just that you’re only seeing the shorter legacy of the last 250 years of colonization, white supremacy, and abortion restrictions, which then centered white people in that narrative. So we really wanted to write a book that was a historical corrective, that opens people up to the longer history of abortion, so that we’re not believing this misinformed history.
Another thing that motivated me was seeing concerted efforts to ban books and ban access to information, along with the increased spread of disinformation as part of this fascist regime. It’s really important that people understand their history, that they understand what is the truth and that we spread actual information so that people can learn how their bodies work and be able to think about how to express themselves and grow as part of resistance. And the last part that motivated me was the loss of journalism and documentation over the last decade. I have been writing on abortion for the last 15 years, and it’s been wild to see publications close and outlets that I’ve written on abortion for get taken over by new leadership and purge their website from anything that was remotely political, replacing it with celebrity news and gossip and product placement. We’re losing a lot of journalism, and I’ve watched my own writing disappear from the Internet. We used to say the Internet is forever, but that is not true, particularly as news outlets disappear or come under ownership of people who are not supportive of racial justice, reproductive justice, or in general, social justice and liberation for all people. So it felt really important to take all of the ideas that I’ve had for the last 10 or 15 years, all the things I’ve written about, and put them into a book that is available to everyone and will be preserved for generations to come.
What does abortion liberation mean to you, and what does the reproductive future you hope for look like?
Liberating abortion is really a vibe, it’s a feeling. I don’t say that to cop out of an answer, but it’s one of those things that’s hard because it will take a while to achieve: We probably won’t get there in this generation or the next, though I hope we do, because it goes beyond a set of policies. Obviously, policies can be helpful, like making medication abortion available over the counter, decriminalizing abortion nationwide, increasing access to maternal health care and pregnancy health care, making sure that there’s access to abortion in every hospital and clinic, having Medicaid cover abortion, all those very tangible things. But really what liberating abortion is about is creating a world in which when someone is pregnant, the only question they have to ask themselves is, do I still want to be pregnant? They don’t have to check their bank account, they don’t have to wonder if their family is still going to love them. They don’t have to worry if they have people to support them, if they have somewhere to live, if they can afford it. We have made it so difficult to get an abortion, but we have also made it so emotionally, physically and financially difficult to be a parent as well, so we do not make pregnancy decisions easy for people. Right now it is not a simple question of whether you want to be pregnant, because there are all these external factors, but in an ideal world, you would get to make that decision yourself. You would get to make the decision without other people hindering you, while surrounded by love and support from whomever you choose. And you would have all the information you need to make that decision, so it can be informed and thoughtful, without pressure or being gaslighted. It’s going to take us a while to get there, but I hope that we can get to a point where people feel like they have all that they need, and they don’t have to worry about what someone else is going to think or how they are going to be treated. It’s simply their decision.
Given the erasure of so many stories from people of color, what was the research process like?
I visited the Schlesinger Library at Harvard in January 2023, and there was an exhibition there, which was amazing and beautiful, but I also felt quite disappointed by its lack of coverage of people of color in the reproductive justice movement. As I was doing research for the book, I knew that there was so much more out there, and I totally understand that it was limited to what the Schlesinger Library had, but it was this aha moment for me, where I realized that if we do not document this story on our own, it will not be shown. I’ve actually been holding on to documents and items from this time period, of what Black and Brown folks are doing in this moment, in the hopes of eventually donating them to a library. But anyway, that exhibition was a reminder of how important it is to have primary sources and do this documentation. There were a few things we found and included in the book that were especially interesting. I looked on eBay and found these old Black magazines from the 1950s that covered abortion, so we could write about how abortion was being written about during that time. I also went to the Smith College Special Collections, and I got to go through all of the papers they have there, like Sister Song’s original documents and lots of Planned Parenthood documents. We include photos and some of that documentation in the book, like Margaret Sanger’s notes on the Negro Project, which includes one of her most misrepresented quotations. We’ve reprinted that, so people get to see the original source themselves, we’ve reprinted the We Remember pamphlet, this document of reproductive justice history before reproductive justice was even a thing. Holding in my hands things that were, in some cases, over 100 years old, was beautiful and powerful.
But I read over 100 books for this research and I was left with a question: Why were the stories of Black and Brown people, whether they were nurse midwives, granny midwives, doulas or abortion providers, not documented in all the books that I read? I talked to this amazing historian named Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, who wrote a book called “From Back Alley to the Border,” about the criminalization of abortion in California, which everyone should read. She hypothesized that it could be a few things: Maybe it was that police and white doctors were so racist that they just assumed people of color didn’t have the skill set and didn’t pay attention to them, or maybe Black and Brown midwives and providers were so skilled that they very rarely lost patients, or maybe the community rose up around them and supported them. I went on newspapers.com (free for two weeks, if anyone’s interested!), and I went through old newspapers from the 1800s into the mid-1900s, and we were able to find several Black women abortion providers who were arrested. We tell some of those stories in the book, to be able to give them their flowers and write them back into history, and to say that it wasn’t just Margaret Sanger who was a birth control advocate, for instance. There were so many Black women who were doing abortions and they were easy to find. For me, finding them was both exhilarating and angering, because while it was so exciting to find them and piece together their stories, it also upset me that their stories hadn’t been covered before – because all it took was a free newspapers.com trial.
Did you have any particularly surprising or striking findings?
This is sort of silly, but one thing that always sticks out to me is that people used crocodile feces and all sorts of crazy things for abortions, which speaks to people really being willing to try anything and everything. In the book, we highlight some of those recipes to show how common it was. But what has really stuck with me has to do with getting abortion pills through the mail. We think of this as being a new practice, sort of the future of abortion, but what I found when I was going through those newspapers is that this has been happening for a long time. They used to have ads for abortion pills and powders all the time in the 1800s, you could order them and have them mailed to you. This idea that’s in the news right now of mailed abortion pills being new is just wrong; they were doing that in the 1800s. It’s just that we’ve restricted ourselves so much, we’re still trying to come out of the long winter of criminalization, that we’ve lost that history. I think it’s really important that we recognize what’s been done, and what we can learn from looking back.
What would you recommend for people who want to get involved with the fight to liberate abortion?
What we hope is that after people read the book, they will understand this long history of both ordinary and extraordinary people who have been trying to liberate abortion for thousands of years, and that they will see something in that timeline that speaks to them. We hope that they’ll see themselves centered in that, and be able to think about what their contribution might look like, and they’ll take action with something that feels meaningful and realistic to them. First of all, I think one major way you can liberate abortion is by raising children who are confident in their bodies and know that they deserve the right to decide what happens to their bodies, so if you’re raising little humans, that’s a great place to start. People can of course also get involved locally. I like to ask people, do you know what your local abortion fund is? Do you know where your nearest clinic is? Do you know the self-managed abortion protocol? I think it’s really about what your personal connections are and thinking about how to keep growing your understanding of abortion after reading the book. We want people to think about how they can be inspired and make a difference in whatever way would be meaningful to them.
Renee Bracey Sherman reads at 7 p.m. Wednesday from “Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve” in conversation with Jamil Smith at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free. Information is here.
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