Meet the Voices

• Renee Bracey Sherman, founder and executive director of the abortion storytelling organization We Testify, co-host of The A-Files: A Secret History of Abortion, and co-author of the book Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. Follow her on Instagram and Threads.
• Michele Goodwin, Ms. Studios Executive Producer, host of On The Issues with Michele Goodwin, author of “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood,” and Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy and Co-Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter and read her work in Ms.
• Angie Jean-Marie and Amy Merrill, co-directors of Plan C. Follow Plan C on Instagram and Twitter.
• Susan Frietsche, Executive Director of the Women’s Law Project in Pennsylvania. Follow WLP on Facebook and BlueSky.
• Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, also a member of the Reproductive Freedom Alliance. Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
• And your host, Carmen Rios, feminist superstar and Ms. consulting editor. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram, and everywhere else @carmenriosss and read her work in Ms.

Further Reading from the 50 Years of Ms. Collection

Get a copy of the book here.

• “We Have Had Abortions,” by BarbaraLee Diamonstein. Spring 1972 Preview Issue. 
• “Never Again,” by Roberta Gratz. April 1973.
• “The Ultimate Invasion of Privacy,” by Gloria Steinem. February 1981.
• “Kathy’s Day in Court,” by Angela Bonavoglia. April 1988.
• “Between a Woman and Her Doctor,” by Martha Mendoza. Summer 2004.
• “Not a Lone Wolf,” by Amanda Robb. Spring 2010.
• “The Crime Was Pregnancy,” Amber Khan. Summer 2019.
• “Abortion is Essential to Democracy,” by Kathy Spillar, Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, et al. Winter 2022

Further Reading from the Ms. Archives

• “Moving On to Plan C,” by Carmen Rios. Summer 2018.
• “Clinics Shuttered,” by Tara Todras-Whitehill. Fall 2018.
• “A Year of Dobbs,” by Christian Nunes. Summer 2023.
• “The Next Dobbs,” by Carrie N. Baker. Spring 2024.
• “The A(bortion) Team,” by Belle Taylor McGhee. Summer 2024.
• “This Election, It’s Women’s Choice,” by Jodi Enda. Fall 2024.
• “Misogynist Manifesto,” by Carrie N Baker. Fall 2024.

More Links & Resources

• Want to dig deeper? You can explore an interactive timeline of Ms. history.
• Learn more about your options at Plan C Pills.org and You Always Have Options.com. (And tell your friends to do the same!)
• Special thanks to the House Oversight Committee Democrats for rights to use Cori Bush’s Congressional testimony. Watch here in full.
• Thanks as well to the office of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for rights to her remarks on abortion. Watch more.

Episode Transcript

Carmen Rios: Welcome to the second episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, a Ms. Studios podcast that traces the intertwined history of Ms. magazine and the feminist movement it has given voice to for over 50 years — and explores where the fight for gender equality must go next. 

I’m your host, feminist superstar and Ms. consulting editor Carmen Rios.

Today, we’re going to take on the urgent fight to restore and expand reproductive freedom for all across the country — and why the right to abortion access is so closely tied to the strength of our democracy.

[MUSIC TO TRANSITION]

Carmen Rios: The first issue of Ms. included a historic petition: “We have had abortions,” screamed the headline. Beneath it were the names of 53 prominent women, including Norah Ephron, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Gloria Steinem, and Billie Jean King. 

Readers were invited to cut out a box in the spread and send it in, adding their own names to the list: “I have had an abortion,” the reply form read. “I publicly join millions of other women in demanding a repeal of all laws that restrict our reproductive freedom.”

Through much of its first century as a nation, abortion was largely unrestricted in the US. That changed when the male-dominated American Medical Association formed in 1847, with the intent to disempower women whose work as midwives and nurses threatened their authority. Their full-throated campaign to criminalize abortions — and the women who provided them — would reshape our reproductive lives.

By 1880, every state had abortion restrictions on the books. By 1910, those restrictions had evolved into bans. It wasn’t until 1973, when the Supreme Court’s historic ruling in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion access in the US, when the period known as the “century of criminalization” finally came to a close.

The first issue of Ms. hit newsstands just months before that decision. When it was published, abortion was only legal in 17 states, and only in extremely limited circumstances. 

“It seems absurd, in this allegedly enlightened age,” Barbaralee D. Diamonstein wrote in the body of the We Have Had Abortions petition, “that we should still be arguing for a simple principle: that a woman has the right to sovereignty over her own body.”

That argument continues today — and for the last five decades, Ms. writers and campaigns have sought to make sense of it. 

Cori Bush: Choosing to have an abortion was the hardest decision I had ever made, but at 18 years old, I knew it was the right decision for me. It was freeing knowing I had options. Even still, it took long for me to feel like me again — until most recently, when I decided to give this speech. So to all the black women and girls who have had abortions and will have abortions: We have nothing to be ashamed of. We live in a society that has failed to legislate love and justice for us. So we deserve better. We do. We demand better. We are worthy of better. So that’s why I’m here to tell my story. So today I sit before you — as that nurse, as that pastor, as that pastor, as that activist, that survivor, that single mom, that congresswoman — to testify that in the summer of 1994, I was raped, I became pregnant, and I chose to have an abortion. I yield.

Carmen Rios: That’s former U.S. Representative Cori Bush, testifying in 2021 before the House Oversight Committee. Her abortion story, which she shared so powerfully that day during a hearing about abortion restrictions, illustrated a critical point about the erosion of abortion rights in the US.

Roe v. Wade was upheld for nearly 50 years before it was overturned by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But throughout those five decades, anti-abortion forces continued to use any means necessary — from laws and court cases to harassment, intimidation, violence, and even murder — to chip away at abortion access across the country. 

Less than 10 years after Roe was decided, Adam and Eve appeared on the cover of Ms. In the magazine’s illustration of the biblical origin story, an oversized hand holding a rubber stamp encroaches on their time in the Garden of Eden. A large block of ink covering Eve’s crotch reads PROPERTY OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. 

Ms. co-founder Gloria Steinem’s corresponding cover story, “The Ultimate Invasion of Privacy,” was published in February 1981 in response to a so-called human life amendment attempting to grant personhood to embryos and fertilized eggs.

Eleven years after Roe, feminist attorney Janet Gallagher again expressed alarm over the growing fetal personhood movement, and how it could be twisted to infringe on pregnant women’s rights. “What lies in store for pregnant women in the future?” she asked in her piece. 

Fifteen years after Roe, journalist Angela Bonavoglia chronicled the human consequences of laws that forbid minors to make decisions about their own reproductive health. Her piece in the April 1988 issue of Ms. followed the legal case of “Kathy,” a pseudonymous pregnant 17-year-old girl in Alabama who was the first minor to pursue an abortion under the state’s then-new parental consent law.

“Kathy” testified before a judge for 45 minutes — about her abusive and alcoholic stepfather, about why she feared her mother would suffer harm if he found out about her pregnancy, about the life she’d built working on her own in order to leave his house — before the judge, after 15 minutes, ruled that, quote, “she was not mature enough” to receive the abortion care she needed, and that, quote, “it was not in her best interest.” 

In an interview with Bonavoglia, the judge explained that he wasn’t just considering, with his decision, what was in the best interest of “Kathy,” who won her case on an appeal — he was also thinking of, quote, “what is in the fetus’ best interest as well.” 

“Asked if it would be hard to approve an abortion under those conditions,” Bonavoglia wrote, “he replied, ‘might be.’” Behind his desk, she noted, the judge had pinned materials from a religiously-affiliated, virulently anti-choice organization to the wall.  

Thirty-one years after Roe, investigative journalist Martha Mendoza told her own abortion story in the Summer 2004 issue of Ms. One year after a so-called “partial birth abortion ban” was signed into law by then-President George W. Bush, Mendoza’s much-wanted pregnancy ended tragically when her fetus died at 19 weeks in utero — “but in reality,” she wrote, “the years of angry debate that led to the law’s passage, restrictive state laws, and the violence targeting physicians” had made it almost impossible for her to access the care she needed.

Less than seven percent of OB-GYNs nationwide were offering D and E procedures, or dilation and extraction abortions, when Mendoza learned she’d lost her pregnancy — even though they are a safer option than continuing the pregnancy and delivery for the tens of thousands of women each year who find themselves in her position. Mendoza was turned away by multiple doctors and hospitals while she bled for days. Only after she went into active labor was her demand for a D and E finally heard.

Renee Bracey Sherman: Part of how we got to this moment, yes, Project 2025 and all of those things, but the slippery slope that got us there was the lie of white supremacy and the American dream, and there’s a right way to have children, and if you just do it the right way, then you’ll be fine. And so, then they allow different bans and restrictions to get into place — because at the end of the day, they felt like, the right people will still be able to get access to their care. Well, guess what? Now we’ve got folks who have miscarriages who can’t get mifepristone or misoprostol, and are being criminalized for the outcomes of their pregnancy. We have folks who need abortions later in pregnancy for health indications and they also can’t get it because the exceptions don’t work. And because they sold you a lie that if they only criminalize these people who are unworthy everyone else will be fine, but no — that was actually the way to get to you too. We really need to stop believing in this idea of there’s a right way of anything or exceptionalism and actually just let people be. And let people make their families on their own terms, and ensure that everyone has what they need, and stop criminalizing people for how they raise their children or the outcomes of their pregnancies. 

Carmen Rios: That’s Renee Bracey Sherman, founder and executive director of the abortion storytelling organization We Testify, co-host of the podcast The A-Files: A Secret History of Abortion, and co-author of the book Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. 

Renee Bracey Sherman: Our nation criminalizes life. You don’t have a house and you sleep outside, go to jail. You don’t have enough money to buy food and you steal food, go to jail. You don’t have healthcare or education and you, you know, health insurance fraud, whatever that is, and you know enroll your kids in the wrong school and if it’s not of your neighborhood you can go to jail. These are things that people have been arrested for, criminalized for, and they make certain things a crime so that they can go after certain populations and make them behave in a certain way and abortion is a piece of that. In the history of abortion, every single time there is a wave of criminalization of abortion, it’s at the same time that the people in power, the forces that be, are concerned about losing power and White people losing power. It is a way to ensure that White people will continue to have babies and behave within this hetero-patriarchal system, but also that Black and Brown people their reproduction is subject to criminalization and only exist to further capitalism and white supremacy. And understanding how all of that works together and how criminalization works with that then you start to understand, oh, wow that’s why you’ll never find someone who is antiabortion, but like pro-birthright citizenship or pro-queer families, pro-IVF, all those things, right? At the end of the day, they actually believe there is a specific way to raise a family and a right White way. 

Carmen Rios, 06:43-08:31: In the Summer 2019 issue of Ms., public interest lawyer Amber Khan chronicled the plight of Regina McKnight, who turned to drugs to cope with the fallout from her mother’s sudden death — which left her homeless and bereft with grief. In 1999, McKnight delivered a stillbirth baby. Within months, she was serving a 20-year prison sentence for the charge of homicide by child abuse.

Khan’s piece, explored how racist drug policies and a widespread fetal personhood movement had resulted in the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, for Black women and women of color in particular — citing the stories of Purvi Patel, who was prosecuted for terminating her own pregnancy, and Anne Bynum, who was faced charges for a stillbirth, as further examples. 

These cases, Khan wrote, “taught us that rights cannot be granted to fetuses without also stripping them from pregnant women.”

When Khan wrote her piece, 38 states and the federal government recognized fetuses as individual victims of crime, and seven states allowed the prosecution of women who ended their pregnancies. These laws, she observed, deterred women from seeking the care they needed during pregnancy, threatening them with prison time if they sought, for example, drug treatment or financial assistance. Better policies to improve pregnancy outcomes and the lives of pregnant people, she asserted, would improve access to health care and substance abuse treatment, lift people out of poverty, and confront white supremacy across the spectrum of maternal health care and child welfare services.

“Protecting the lives of pregnant women, children, and families should be the government’s priority,” Khan wrote in her piece. “But sending McKnight and others like her to prison, banning abortion, and criminalizing pregnant women — that’s no way to do it.”

Renee Bracey Sherman: What if actually we all just had what we needed? We actually could do that. We just as a society choose not to because we are more interested in arguing about resources and bombing people and starting wars. We actually choose not to make sure that everyone has what they need and spend it on this idea of a boogeyman that’s out there that’s ruining our freedom. It’s so much work to have to keep people from having all of the necessities of life because you always have to have a war or a fight or something to, to gate keep and keep people out instead of actually just saying how do we give people what they need. We spend more on incarceration than we do education and food and healthcare. It would actually just like be cheaper, if that’s the language the economists want to use, to give people somewhere to live than to incarcerate them in jail or give them food than to process them for stealing food. We actively choose not to. 

Carmen Rios: By the time Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, 13 states had “trigger laws” on the books that immediately outlawed abortion. But other abortion restrictions that had taken effect after Roe was decided had undermined access to abortion before Dobbs even came down.

Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers, or TRAP laws, had forced clinics to shutter with unnecessary and burdensome requirements for providers and their facilities. Policies stripped critical funding from abortion providers, or made it impossible for lower-income women relying on Medicaid to receive abortion care. And still other laws made the limitations on abortion so draconian as to make access impossible, making abortion illegal as soon as six weeks — before most people even realize they are pregnant.

Every single one of those anti-abortion laws impacted women at the intersections the most. Women of color and poor women suffer disproportionately under abortion bans — and it’s not by accident. It’s how our laws around the female body have functioned for centuries.

Michele Goodwin: If we tell the story of these lands, which were first occupied by indigenous peoples who were marched off of their lands, and honest about that, right? Marched off, exploited, abused, violence put upon them, and coercion, there is a reproductive health rights justice story there, too. When we tell the story of American slavery, most of it is told through the lens of forced labor and not forced sexual labor. We ignore terminologies that are really important, right? So, we’ve gotten away with, in the United States, of tossing out the term slavery. People feel a little bit badly about it, and then we move on, without really understanding, well, what is that? What is contained within that? The same as with regard to Jim Crow. It is a part of a story that involves dehumanization of girls and women, the failure to pay attention to the fact that they had lives, that they had purpose, that they had agency, that there were things that they were thinking about, at which time they were kidnapped and forcibly removed from their homes, from their schools, from the things that they cared about, and were put in fortresses and then had to endure a horrific voyage over to these lands, which were already being occupied, taken away, bartered, you know, exploitation.

If the websites are still up at Monticello where we can see the records, Thomas Jefferson writes that, for him, his strategy with growing wealth and building wealth on his plantations is to stock it more forcefully with women and girls. And he writes, because they turn a profit every year or two. Now, Thomas Jefferson is not speaking about how these girls and women are simply more sturdy, sufficient at picking cotton and tobacco. He’s talking about a different kind of profit that he’s able to benefit off of with these women and girls every year or two, and that’s that reproductive exploitation, which then takes a while for us to unpack and to understand that Roe, and whatever were its limitations, were rooted in a soil where the seeds were planted centuries before.

Carmen Rios: That’s Michele Goodwin, a prolific thought leader on matters of constitutional law and health policy and the executive producer of Ms. Studios. She’s also the author of “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.”

Over the course of our conversation, Goodwin explored how legacies of racism and sexism in the law — and our nation’s founding on principles of white and male supremacy — continue to shape the landscape of our reproductive rights. She also highlighted the danger that is presented by the perpetuation of these ideas, and the restriction of reproductive freedom, in a moment that is testing the fabric of American democracy.

Michele Goodwin: Post-slavery, post-Reconstruction, we’re in a period of Jim Crow, and there comes yet another iteration that is within the same of reproduction, that challenges notions of citizenship, reproductive freedom, autonomy, reproductive human rights, and that is when the Supreme Court agrees to take up a case from Virginia, Buck v. Bell, and it’s a case that involves a poor white girl. Virginia has enacted what it calls a model eugenics law. This law allows for the coercive sterilization of people who are considered to be unfit. Now, what does unfit mean? It’s broad and amorphous, and in this case, the state has identified people like Carrie Buck, who’s poor and white and was raped at 16 as being unfit. And Virginia has this proposal before the legislature, a law that’s been, actually, signed into law, that allows the state to coercively, against their will, sterilize people like Carrie, such that they can have no reproductive future. That Virginia law is picked up by the Third Reich in Germany. They see it as being consistent with their ideological leanings and consistent with the vision that they have for society, as well. And there becomes this race that is taking shape in the 1920s and ‘30s about who can sterilize more people, prevent the future offspring of people who are deemed to be unwanted in society, and I think all of those narratives have to stitch together the past and the present to tell us something about how, in this nation, we have viewed reproductive freedom.

Carmen Rios: Three years before Dobbs would overturn Roe, Khan observed in her piece that anti-abortion laws had already eroded women’s constitutional rights to bodily autonomy and sovereignty. “What is at stake today,” she wrote, “is more than the right to abortion. It is the ability of half of our population to be free from state surveillance and punishment, to make our own medical decisions, to have access to health care, to have our government protect and not violate our human rights.” 

In the wake of Dobbs, the stakes have only become higher. 

Michele Goodwin: There are so many lessons that we have in front of us, both historic as well as present, that tell us that we should not discount the things that seem strange, wild, and ludicrous. For example, states of Louisiana and South Carolina, amongst some others, proposing the death penalty in association with abortion. The State of Louisiana prosecuting a mom for providing abortion pills to her daughter, a state wherein there have been several state hearings where doctors have come forward to testify about having patients that are 8 years old and 9 years old and pregnant and the very high risk of potential death or morbidity that they might experience. Not to even mention the social costs of what it means for an 8-year-old to be pregnant. So, from matters of the death penalty to the criminal punishment of moms and family members, to the fact that doctors have been placed in a horrible situation, where they fear losing their medical licenses to practice, the possibility of criminal punishment. In Texas, up to 99 years’ incarceration, and also fines and fees. Texas, up to 100 thousand dollars with a case that a doctor has found liable for having violated the state’s anti-abortion law. What we see is a path that is cruel and that leans towards unusual.

Carmen Rios: Efforts to punish people for having abortions — and doctors for providing them — don’t end with anti-abortion laws. In some corners of the anti-abortion movement, a doctrine of “justifiable homicide” has endangered abortion providers and their patients for decades.

After abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed while attending church in 2009 — following years of harassment, threats, and attempts on his life — investigative reporter Amanda Robb noticed in the Spring 2010 issue of Ms. that “a predictable story began to be told” — one in which anti-abortion extremists like Tiller’s murderer are seen as lone wolves. 

“It is the oldest, possibly most dangerous abortion story out there,” Robb wrote. She knows this not only because she spoke to Tiller’s murderer, as well as his supporters and friends who shared his violent anti-abortion beliefs, but because her uncle, Dr. Barnett Slepian, was murdered by an anti-abortion extremist in 1998. 

The man who murdered Robb’s uncle was affiliated with the organization Army of God, which openly encourages the use of violence against abortion providers. Tiller’s murderer also became connected to Army of God early on in his anti-abortion activities, as well as Operation Rescue, which stages large-scale clinic sieges that blockade and disrupt care. He met some of the most prominent champions of so-called “justifiable homicide” the first time he attended an anti-abortion protest. Through them, he was introduced to clinic bombers, arsonists, and an entire community of people that cheered on the murders of abortion providers.

Law enforcement has long failed to take seriously the threat that these interconnected circles represent. No charges of conspiracy have ever been levied against the organizations that encourage, sanction, and even train anti-abortion extremists to commit violence. 

Instead, President Trump has pardoned 23 imprisoned anti-abortion extremists and questioned whether women who receive abortion deserve to be “punished” — and the Department of Justice, under his instruction, is no longer enforcing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act law that protects providers and patients from harassment and intimidation.

[Transition Music]

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: We are in a very dangerous moment, not just for women, not just for LGBT communities, not just for all of us — but we are in a dangerous moment in the world. Because this is not just about the right to choice. This is about rule of law, and democracy, and who is a full person in the eyes of the law. 

Carmen Rios: That’s Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaking at the US Capitol the day after Dobbs was decided by the Supreme Court. In her remarks, she made an important connection: that attacks on reproductive rights are attacks on our democracy, and on our full personhood.

Patriarchy and white supremacy remain potent forces in the anti-abortion extremist arsenal — because control over women, over people of color, over the poor, is the aim of laws and policies that seek to deny us our full reproductive rights.

Michele Goodwin: It’s important that we understand reproductive health rights and justice don’t just stand on their own. They’re part of a broader matter, a broader question of democracy, of human rights, of citizenship in our country, and therefore, shouldn’t be reduced to, even though very important, reproductive rights or abortion. These are questions of democracy. These are questions of citizenship. These are questions of equality, human rights at a baseline.

Michele Goodwin: The day before Dobbs, in a case called Bruen, which dealt with gun control, a centuries-old gun control law of New York. What is interesting about that case is that Justice Thomas offers the decision, and in it, Justice Thomas spends five paragraphs talking about bodily autonomy and how it must be protected, that the Second Amendment is key to protecting Black men’s bodily autonomy, and he shows incredible concern about how, as a history in the United States, there’s not been sufficient deference to the autonomy of Black men and their bodies, and that this is something that should be remedied, and Bruen is an opportunity to further remedy it. Ironically, the next day, at the Dobbs decision, you have Justice Thomas not issuing one word about the protection of Black women’s bodily autonomy, women’s bodily autonomy. It’s not mentioned. There isn’t a principle within the Constitution that Justice Thomas refers to or acknowledges that actually does the work of recognizing the citizenship, the freedom, the substantive rights of women, of Black women, and so, those two decisions, held up side by side, say a lot about constitutionalism. 

Carmen Rios: In other words: “It is all too clear,” as Ms. executive editor Katherine Spillar and executive director of Ms. partnerships and strategy Jennifer Weiss-Wolf wrote in the Winter 2022 issue of Ms., “that myriad democratic dysfunctions have led us to this dire moment.” 

Ms. published a series of essays in that issue, and online, under the banner ABORTION IS ESSENTIAL TO DEMOCRACY. The collection was a reaction to the Supreme Court’s failure to strike down SB8, a Texas abortion ban that allows individuals to sue anyone who provides or helps facilitate an abortion. 

In the pieces, various writers and experts illustrated how, Spillar and Weiss-Wolf emphasized, “the fight for abortion rights, the first for equality, and the fight for representative democracy are all in service of the same goal: justice for all.”

In one contribution, social justice attorney Elizabeth Hira explained that the anti-abortion arguments made by one Texas organization’s brief to the Court “make crystal clear that outlawing abortion isn’t the only end game. Control over women is.” She added that “whether we are willing to let women and people capable of becoming pregnant control their own bodies… is an equity issue — a question of who deserves bodily autonomy and freedom to reach their full potential.”

Of course, that also means the inverse is true. “If the patriarchal state, church, and family lose their control over women’s bodies as the most basic form of production — the means of reproduction,” Steinem observed in that 1981 cover story on abortion rights, “those structures eventually become more democratic, and not patriarchal at all.”

And that’s a vision feminists across the country continue to build toward — even if, in this moment, it feels particularly challenging to envision it.

Angie Jean-Marie: We need to be clear about who is doing this, because there’s been the single-minded effort of anti-abortion activists, for decades. They set an agenda. They had a goal. They didn’t care about science. They didn’t care about safety, don’t care about healthcare. They don’t care about agency. They don’t care about autonomy. They have a strategy, and they’ve been able to manipulate local governments and courts. They’ve been able to implement restrictions and regulations that are completely not in keeping with science. They’ve developed and published a very clear strategy that pushes their points of view to the highest level of government and doing this all despite the fact that abortion access is overwhelmingly popular. It is supported. It’s needed. It’s a human right.

Carmen Rios: That’s Angie Jean-Marie, co-director of Plan C. Founded by Francine Couyteaux, who played a critical role in the nearly two-decade push to make emergency contraception available over the counter, Plan C is an educational resource normalizing and formalizing self-administered medication abortion using mifepristone.

Christian Nunes, then the president of the National Organization for Women, wrote in the Summer 2023 issue of Ms.: “Even though just 12 months have passed since the Dobbs decision, it seems as though we’ve been thrust back decades in time.”

More than two years after the decision, the impacts are even more stark. According to data from the Guttmacher Institute and the Center for Reproductive Rights, 12 states have banned abortion and seven others restrict the procedure, sometimes as early as six weeks into pregnancy.

An analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute in January of 2023 found that 60 percent of women live in states with abortion bans or sharp limitations, and research by the National Partnership for Women & Families found that nearly 57 percent of all Black women and 53 percent of women with disabilities live in states that have already banned or are likely to ban abortion. GEPI’s research also revealed that mothers in states with bans were three times as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or shortly after delivery; babies in banned states were 30 percent more likely to die within a month of their birth. 

Carrie N. Baker’s piece “Misogynist Manifesto,” which appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of Ms., detailed the dangerous policy agenda laid out in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation handbook for the Trump administration. The proposals within it attack not just abortion access, but the right to contraception, sex education, and gender-affirming healthcare.

We’ve seen some of these proposals take shape in just the first months of the Trump administration: One of Trump’s first executive orders re-affirmed the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits poor women from accessing abortion using Medicaid, and re-instated the Global Gag Rule, which denies any US assistance to overseas organizations that even mention abortion care to the people they serve, even though the Helms Amendment has, for decades, prohibited any US funding from being used for abortions. His administration slashed Title X funding for clinics offering the full spectrum of reproductive health care, and the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” he rammed through Congress cut off critical Medicaid funds for Planned Parenthood.

In addition to directing the Department of Justice not to enforce the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, the Trump administration as also rescinded national guidance related to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, that required hospitals receiving federal funds to provide medically necessary abortion care to patients experiencing medical crises, even when state laws banned abortion.

Let that sink in: This administration is permitting states with extreme abortion bans to deny emergency abortion care, even in cases where a woman’s life is endangered.

Medication abortion is under attack by the Trump administration as well. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Junior has ordered the FDA to re-review safety, efficacy, and ultimately, the approval of Mifepristone, which is used in 63 percent of all abortions. But Plan C isn’t backing down from this fight.

Angie Jean-Marie: We know that there’s an entire administrative apparatus ecosystem that’s being constructed with the intention to unjustly advance policies that would undermine abortion, and at the same time, our work remains the same. Plan C has existed for over a decade to share information about how people are accessing abortion pills, and we’re continuing to do that work. Our ability to share information is protected speech. We have the right to share information, and that hasn’t changed. We are continuing to do our work, despite what different politicians and antis say. We’re also standing firm in the fact that abortion is healthcare and abortion should be a human right. So, that is like really how we ground our work. We know that there is the political landscape at the federal level, but then, we also have a vast state infrastructure that also has some antagonism towards abortion, and there are a whole array of unjust abortion bans that impact tens of millions of people across the country, but still, again, the work remains the same, until something about it needs to change. We’re still here to share information, to provide up-to-date research and fact-finding on how people are accessing pills by mail. 

Carmen Rios: I talked to Jean-Marie and her co-director Amy Merrill about the future of abortion access — both the long-term vision that they share and the new landscape we’re in after Dobbs. After all, the Supreme Court can’t just take us back to 1972. It’s 2025, and abortion access looks very different now than it did 50 years ago. Most critically, self-managed abortion today can be incredibly safe with access to abortion pills. Groups like Plan C and Women on Web are on a mission to make sure we don’t go back to dangerous, back-alley abortions.

Angie Jean-Marie: We have, I think, this very old and antiquated vision of needing to be in a clinic, in a stark white room, in an uncomfortable situation, navigating through protestors. That’s just not how it has to happen, and many, many people are accessing abortion in a very different way today.

Amy Merrill: The future of abortion, as we see it, is one where everyone has the abortion that they want and need. They have the resources that they need. They have access to this safe and effective medication that might even be tucked away, in their cabinet, in case of future use, and that they are not at risk of being criminally prosecuted for self-managing their care. We have a vision of abortion pills being over the counter. De-medicalization, to us, looks like this becoming something that you can just get at a pharmacy, like is the case in so many countries around the world. 

Carmen Rios: One way Plan C advances that vision of the future is providing people with knowledge and resources. At Plan C Pills dot Org and You Always Have Options dot com, you can learn more about abortion pills and self-managed abortion, find abortion providers, and connect with critical helplines when you need care.

Amy Merrill: When we talk about the current political landscape, the chaos is the point, right? Bans are about control. It’s not just controlling the outcomes of people’s lives, but it’s about just control of people, in general, by creating this fear and confusion. One of the best ways to mitigate that fear and confusion is by becoming informed, whether or not you need an abortion, whether or not you will ever need one, you can go online. You can learn about how this method works, with pills by mail, and with self-managed at home. You can learn about the clinic landscape that’s out there. You can learn about the ins and outs of the legal, the peer networks that are helping folks. And you can also share out information, as and when you feel good about sharing, you know? To mitigate the chaos, you can sow evidence-based information on what is real, what is happening, what is available. 

Carmen Rios: By cutting through that chaos, by speaking up and speaking truth to power, Plan C also seeks to change the conversation. In a moment like this, sharing accurate information about abortion pills is one way to prepare for the inevitable attacks on medication abortion we’re already witnessing in the Trump administration.

Angie Jean-Marie: How do we make it so hard, be so loud, that when they come, they can’t take it away? What can we be doing in these months and weeks where things remain uncertain, how do we share this information, get people to understand how things have evolved in the abortion pill ecosystem, to see that this is part of the future of abortion access — and be so firm and clear in the fact that we deserve access to pills, that when they try to take it, we’re going to raise hell, essentially. 

Carmen Rios: Another way to raise hell is to challenge anti-abortion laws, and make the case, once and for all, that women are entitled to full rights under the US Constitution, including reproductive freedom. The Equal Rights Amendment would do this — yet, nearly 250 years into US history, constitutional equality still eludes us, something Supreme Court rulings on critical matters of women’s equality have cruelly reminded us of, over and over again. 

Susan Frietsche: Abortion rights and reproductive autonomy rights were never really secured in a comprehensive and coherent way under the Federal Constitution. Even at the high point of protection under Roe, you were able to have parental consent laws and bans on Medicaid coverage of abortion, and so, the very people who most need constitutional protection, the least powerful people in our society, were not able to enjoy the promise of protection that they should’ve been able to. We’re starting from a point in the ‘70s where our legal system offers some but really not enough legal protection and then followed decades of very concentrated relentless attacks that I believe were completely grounded in efforts to subordinate women and to really shore up a gender hierarchy that had men at the top, and white men in particular, at the top and women, and specifically women of color, and gender non-conforming folks at the bottom. That’s what underlies abortion restrictions, and when you see it from that point of view the passion with which our opponents pursued abortion restrictions kind of makes sense. We got here because we have the gender ruling class desperately holding onto their privilege using any means necessary.

Carmen Rios: That’s Susan Frietsche, the Executive Director of the Women’s Law Project, a nonprofit public interest legal organization on a mission to eliminate gender bias and discrimination in Pennsylvania. 

The Equal Right Amendment still hasn’t been published in the Constitution, even though it met the requirements for ratification in 2020 when Virginia voted to ratify the amendment. 

27 states across the country, however, have Equal Rights Amendments or other gender equity provisions in their state constitutions — and in Pennsylvania, those protections have been affirmed to include reproductive rights.

Susan Frietsche: Because activists and litigators relied so heavily for so long on the power of federal courts and federal institutions, state level sources of protection are extremely underdeveloped, but they’re there and they have really exciting potential. The Federal Constitution is not the only constitution. States have constitutions too, and in the case of my own state, in Pennsylvania, our state constitution is older. It is broader. It is stronger and it is better than the US Constitution and it’s better for a number of different reasons, not the least of which is the Declaration of Individual Rights wasn’t an afterthought tacked on at the end, it’s the very first thing you see in the Pennsylvania Constitution, and it has an Equal Rights Amendment.

Carmen Rios: Frietsche and her colleagues at WLP have spent the last 50 years ensuring that the state’s ERA was put to use — and last year, they had a major victory at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court tying abortion rights to women’s constitutional equality.

Susan Frietsche: The Women’s Law Project was founded in 1974 and we were founded in Pennsylvania because Pennsylvania had an Equal Rights Amendment. The idea was we would take this new constitutional provision in our state constitution and implement it. One important piece that we addressed in 1985 was the fact that we have a state statute that prohibits state money from being spent on abortion and that includes state Medicaid dollars. That is the number one barrier to abortion in Pennsylvania. We filed a case under the ERA saying this ban on Medicaid funding for abortion is a form of sex discrimination, men get all the Medicaid coverage they need. Women don’t get coverage for this very important and common need that they have and it has a devastating impact on their lives and their health and their futures, and that court back in 1985 laughed at us, really literally could not understand what we were saying, said that abortion has nothing to do with women’s equality. In 2019, we thought, you know, we should try again. It’s still a problem. It’s still harming people really badly. We know more now than we did back in 1985 about the impact on people’s lives and the law has evolved to have an equality prong to it. So, let’s try again.

It took years, but January of 2024 we got a ruling that established the basic principles of law now underlying the state Equal Rights Amendment, and we won and we won big. The court ruled that classifications that are based on physical characteristics that define the sexes, like the capacity for pregnancy, for example, thought to define in some ways the category of woman, that that is inherently a sex-based classification. And all sex-based classifications, including those that flow from physical differences between sexes, are subject to the ERA. So, in plain language, abortion restrictions are presumed to be unconstitutional in Pennsylvania. 

Carmen Rios: Rulings in one state don’t set precedent in others — but the WLP’s successful fight in Allegheny Reproductive Health Center v. Pennsylvania Department of Human Services demonstrates the power we have at the local and state level to protect our communities and enshrine access to abortion, especially in the dozens of states with Equal Rights Amendments in their constitution. That’s exactly what Frietsche hopes feminists are setting their sights on during this current administration.

Susan Frietsche: If there is a silver lining to the political moment that we are currently in, it is that it is generating all of this creative energy around state and local initiatives. This is really sort of the beginning of the flowering of state and local power to protect reproductive and sexual health and rights. We know the Department of Justice is no longer enforcing the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act except perhaps in case of murder of a doctor or a patient, but we can have that same similar protection at the state level. There’s funding statutes that direct state money to family planning providers. That will become increasingly important as federal dollars are withdrawn. The reality is people support reproductive healthcare. That’s a very, very popular policy. I think we are going to see just a flurry of state and local legislation and policy initiatives to fill the gap that is being created by a hostile federal government. 

Carmen Rios: In the Summer 2024 issue of Ms., Belle Taylor-McGhee wrote about a group of governors from across the country coming together to protect reproductive freedom. The nonpartisan coalition of 23 governors determined to protect abortion rights and reproductive health comprise the Reproductive Freedom Alliance.

Maura Healey: We have seen a 600 percent increase in people coming to Massachusetts from other States because they couldn’t get the abortion care in their own state. And they’ve been coming to Massachusetts, where they know they can get that care. Today one in three American women live in a state with an abortion ban. So you know, we have said, women here are going to have access to abortion. We’re going to protect that right. We’re going to protect our providers, our doctors and nurses and staff, who are providing that needed care, and that includes doctors and providers who are providing care to an estimated 40 or 50,000 women outside of Massachusetts, through telehealth services.

Carmen Rios: That’s Maura Healey, Governor of Massachusetts and a member of the Reproductive Freedom Alliance and its executive committee. In a moment when abortion is under attack at the federal level, Healey has architected critical policies that affirm reproductive freedom and ensure that people will continue to have access to the reproductive healthcare they need. Her work in Massachusetts, known as a beacon for reproductive rights, serves as a potent and much-needed model for states and localities assessing how they can proactively address the Trump administration’s assault on abortion rights. 

In other words: This is the blueprint.

Maura Healey: Massachusetts is ranked the number one state in the country to live — if you’re a woman, to have a baby, to raise a family. That’s important for this conversation. It’s also important to talk about what we’ve done in terms of laws and policies and actions that I’ve taken as governor to make this a place where people want to come, live, where women feel more protected, where women are having better economic outcomes, where we’ve been ranked the best place to actually have a baby. So here’s what we’ve done: We passed a law called the Roe Act, which protects the right to an abortion in Massachusetts. It puts that in law it enshrines that in law, and that was something that we did immediately after the Dobbs decision. We passed a really strong shield law. That’s a law that’s in place to protect patients as well as providers, and including providers who are providing services to people out of State. We purchased enough Mifepristone to last us through the administration in the event that Donald Trump looks to take that away. We also gave a million dollars to abortion providers so that they could also purchase and stockpile Mifepristone. And we made over-the-counter contraception free in Massachusetts.

Carmen Rios: For Healey, like so many other advocates in the struggle for full reproductive freedom, this work is where the personal meets the political. Women every day show up and hold the line for abortion because they recognize how intertwined our autonomy is with our human rights, with our economic freedom and our political power, and with our Constitutional rights.

Maura Healey: I’m a woman. I have a stepdaughter, I have nieces. I was raised by a strong mother, a single mother who’s also a nurse who raised the five of us kids. My grandmother, also a nurse, a really strong woman. I was born in 1971, about the time that the Title IX legislation was passed, and for me what that meant is that I had more opportunities in sports. I was able to go on and play basketball in college, I was able to go on and play basketball professionally, and that those experiences certainly formed who I am, and gave me more confidence, and taught me about leadership, and taught me about taking risks, and I probably wouldn’t have ever ended up running for Attorney general or governor, were it not for those those things. Everybody has their story about the importance of a law like that. I recognize that the opportunities that I have, they come about because people were willing to stand up and fight for those rights, fight for those laws, and it’s my obligation to, and my responsibility to carry on for this generation and the next generation.

Carmen Rios: The Washington Post, in 2022, said that the 1972 We Had Abortions petition that appeared in the first issue of Ms. had, quote, “changed the course of the abortion rights movement by making visible the women who had abortions.”

It was a bold declaration for Ms. and the signatories who participated to make at the time — and the simple solidarity it promised proved to be one of our most powerful weapons in the fight for reproductive justice.

In 2016, over 110 lawyers submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court when it was hearing arguments in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, detailing how abortion made their legal careers possible. 350 people did the same in 2019, when the Court heard arguments in June Medical Services vs Gee. In 2021, 500 all-star athletes and 6,000 everyday citizens filed yet another, as part of the Dobbs case — and in 2022, Ms. relaunched its historic 1972 petition in advance of that decision, gathering more than ten thousand signatures.

Renee Bracey Sherman: I had an abortion when I was 19. Even though I grew up in a family that was supportive of abortion and I knew what I wanted it was a straightforward decision, it was an easy decision, it still was really emotionally hard because I felt really alone. I felt like I didn’t have anyone that I could talk to about it and I felt like there wasn’t anyone who looked like me talking about it or having an abortion. A lot of my work has really been about ensuring that people who have abortions see versions of themselves, and ensure that they get to be that version for someone else, and that they get to share their whole story. 

The name We Testify came, we as in a collective, a number of us testify. We share our stories. We share our experience. We are the experts of our experiences. It’s really beautiful when we can share our stories together as a collective we. And that’s what I thought was so beautiful and inspiring about the Ms. Magazine piece, in that it invited people to join those who were already sharing their abortion stories. It is such a beautiful moment to be able to say that openly and clearly and to be seen by others.

Carmen Rios: In the April 1973 issue of Ms., under the banner NEVER AGAIN, readers encountered a shocking image: The police photo of Geraldine “Gerri” Santoro’s body, after she died in 1964 at 28, alone, in a motel room. Santoro was abandoned by, in the words of writer Roberta Gratz, an “unskilled abortionist” when “something went wrong” during her illegal abortion. 

Gratz called the photo “one answer to the magnified fetus photographs so often displayed by anti abortion forces,” adding that “this individual woman has come to represent the thousands of women who have been maimed or murdered by a society that denied them safe and legal abortions.”

“We must not forget,” she remarked. “Now that a part of the battle is over, it is important to honor its victims and heroines.”

Renee Bracey Sherman: There’s always been risks in sharing abortion stories, but what has shifted is this larger risk where your abortion stories could be a confession, particularly for folks who live in a state where abortion is criminalized, or for folks who self-managed their abortion stories. The way in which they are trying to criminalize free speech overall, but also as part of that abortion storytelling speech, that you sharing your truth, you sharing your abortion story could be used as evidence against you is terrifying. And it’s a way of silencing us and that shows how powerful it is for us to share our abortion stories and how much we must be able to speak out. And also that it’s not just about speaking out super publicly it’s also about speaking out with our loved ones. That conversation, letting someone know that you’ve had an abortion and then they know they can come to you when they need support. And I think that that is a really radical way of subverting this effort to silence us. That we can organize together, that we can share our stories on our own terms both publicly in defiance, but also locally to make sure that we take care of us.

Carmen Rios: What the stories in Ms. have reminded us are not just of the challenges we’ve faced in the struggle for reproductive freedom, but of the potential we have to use our voices to speak out and push back on the narratives that persist in our laws, our policies, and our communities that seek to deny us the right to our own bodily autonomy.

“There’s no way we can surrender the struggle to maintain reproductive rights,” feminist author, theorist, educator, and social critic bell hooks remarked in the Spring 2011 issue of Ms., “because it’s so tied to the future of what females of all ages can do.”

Now more than ever, we have to remind ourselves that our voices matter. That our abortion stories, our birth control stories, our pregnancy stories, our stories of motherhood, or the choice to be childfree, or the ways in which we don’t feel fully empowered to make these choices at all — they don’t just matter. They move mountains.

We cannot surrender. And we can’t stop speaking out.

Carmen Rios: Thank you so much for tuning in to the second episode of LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD: a podcast celebrating 50 years of Ms. and what’s yet to come as we carve out the second half of this feminist century.

If you liked what you heard today, you know the drill: Be sure to subscribe to this show wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can also find more from every episode, including my full interviews with our incredible guests and episode notes, at ms magazine dot com and ms magazine dot com slash podcast.

Be sure to stay in touch between episodes, too! You can follow Ms. on Facebook at msmagazine, at ms underscore magazine on Instagram and Threads and via msmagazine dot com on BlueSky, and you can find me at carmen fucking rios dot com and on social media everywhere at carmen rios, with three s’s — thats c a r m e n r i o s s s. 

Looking Back, Moving Forward is produced by Ms. Studios. Michele Goodwin and Kathy Spillar are our executive producers. Our Supervising Producer, Writer, and Host is yours truly, Carmen Rios, and Roxy Szal and Oliver Haug are our episode producers. Art and design for this show are by Brandi Phipps, and every episode is edited by Natalie Hadland.

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You can dive deeper into the history of Ms. by ordering your copy of the collection 50 Years of Ms: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution at bookstores and online at ms magazine dot com slash book. And now, for the first time, you can explore the entire digital collection of Ms. magazines, 1972-present, at your public or university library through ProQuest! Ask your librarian to add the new Ms. Magazine Archive to their collections if you can’t find it.

Special thanks to the House Oversight Committee Democrats for rights to use Cori Bush’s Congressional testimony and the office of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for rights to her remarks on abortion rights. Our theme song is stock media provided by ProClips via Pond5.

Until next time, readers.