Attacks on Abortion Access Are as Old as White Supremacist Patriarchy Itself. Here's How We Fight Back.

(very important, angry-making read)

Attacks on Abortion Access Are as Old as White Supremacist Patriarchy Itself. Here’s How We Fight Back.
PUBLISHED 7/18/2025 by Carmen Rios

In the second episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, advocates, lawmakers and experts explore the real roots of abortion criminalization throughout U.S. history — and lay out visions for where the fight for reproductive freedom must go next.



“Founding of the American Medical Association,” from The History of Medicine, by Robert Thom circa 1952, oil on canvas. (From the collection of Michigan Medicine, University of Michigan; a gift of Pfizer, Inc.)

In 1847, the American Medical Association formed — and kicked off a period known as “the century of criminalization” of abortion in the United States. It wasn’t coincidental that the all-male AMA, formed explicitly to grab power and authority from female practitioners across the United States, focused their initial efforts so heavily on restricting abortion. Like the laws restricting and banning abortion that have shaped our reproductive lives in the centuries since, the sexism was by design.

“If we tell the story of these lands, which were first occupied by Indigenous peoples who were marched off of their lands … exploited, abused, violence put upon them and coercion, there is a reproductive health rights justice story there, too,” legal scholar and Ms. Studios executive producer Michele Goodwin says. “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. … 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.”



A woman holds a sign decorated with the Juneteenth flag in Lafayette Square north of the White HouseA woman outside the White House on Juneteenth, June 19, 2020. The date commemorates June 19, 1865, when a Union general read orders in Galveston, Texas, stating all enslaved people in Texas were free according to federal law, effectively ending slavery in what remained of the Confederacy. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

It’s also important that we don’t ignore the racialized dimensions of those stories. Today, laws restricting reproductive freedom continue to impact women and girls of color the most, and disproportionately. That’s no coincidence, either. “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,” says Renee Bracey Sherman, founder and executive director of the abortion storytelling organization We Testify and co-author of the book Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. “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 exists to further capitalism and white supremacy.”



“Abortion rights and reproductive autonomy rights were never really secured in a comprehensive and coherent way under the federal Constitution,” Susan Frietsche, director of the Women’s Law Project, explains. “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.” Frietsche and the WLP, in 2024, won a decades-long fight in Pennsylvania to close that gap in promise, and to affirm that abortion rights are tied up in women’s constitutional equality in the state — and protected under the Equal Rights Amendment in its state constitution.



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Over the next 50 years, similar efforts would go as high as the Supreme Court, taking women’s voices into the halls of power to demand reproductive freedom. Today, abortion storytelling remains just as critical. We must smash stigma, claim our rights, and demand the full personhood we deserve. In other words: we must continue telling our abortion stories, and we must continue fighting for our full reproductive freedom.



A protest marking the second anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, outside the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24, 2024. (Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
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https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/18/abortion-ban-attack-feminist-women-history-white-supremacy/