Author: Kimberly Hamlin

Dr. Kimberly Hamlin is professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and the author of Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener. A distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Hamlin speaks about the history of women across the country and regularly contributes to the Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine and other media. Follow her on Twitter @ProfessorHamlin.

Generation Roe: Have We Always Known Roe Was an Aberrance Only Two Generations Would Experience?

I was born in 1974, nearly 18 months to the day after Roe. The women of my generation, along with the following generation, have been shaped by access to legal abortion and the subsequent guarantee of full personhood. The birth control pill, first approved by the FDA in 1960, promised reproductive autonomy, but abortion rights helped make it true.

As we approach the overturning of Roe, the women of Generation Roe must continue to speak out and join forces with other generations of activists to ensure we will not be the only ones to have experienced full personhood, unencumbered by laws seeking to define all women as mothers whose interests are subsumed by their children, born and unborn.

Fetal Rights or Women’s Rights?

Fetal Rights or Women’s Rights?

The fundamental question at stake in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health is not the future of abortion access—but whether or not women count as equal citizens under the law.

What happens when the rights of the unborn prevail over those of living, breathing, working, loving and dreaming women and girls? Historically, women and girls suffer dire health, emotional, economic, career and personal consequences.