thanks so much, everybody. ■ so this is an. so this is anajustice starting e 19th century to the present. it's also something that's in some ways very hard to lecture about now because it's i as as

professor lawson said in one of the main historians of this stuff, and i'm also living through it with all of you. so it's a strange time to be it's also very much real life. so i think and we think of them in the context of relatively recent phenomenon. so if you g this that was reflected by the supreme in the supre cour's decision in 2022 in dobbs versus jackson, women's health organization, the majority led by justice samuel alito suggested that in the united states to some degree, another abortion had always been crime. any point in pregnancy, he might have said or might have believed something similar about contraception. but the reality was that for much of united states history, either passing or implementing criminal laws regarding reproduction would have been very difficult, in part because it was all but impossible. identify when someone was pregnant before quickening, or the point at which fetaldistinga

contraceptive, ansimply helped people who were having irregular -- was all but impossible and. physicians relied on highly unusual and ineffective methods to test whether someone was pregnant or not touching. abdomen was considered off limits and inappropriate at a were often hidden behind screensions. so physicians to tell people were pregnant would do things like exawhich you might be surpo learn did not result in reli pr. so at this time there was a sort female that might influence pregnancy one way or another. and for the most part, state didn't apply until the quickening. the point which abortion was most often criminalized. there exceptions to this there weremple, poison laws that regulatedly and

pregnancy, particularlyhigh prom poisons conctions used to end pregnancies. there were some states that treated abortion as a misdemeanor for early in pregnancy. there regulation of contraception at all. until the late 19th century and that was to change because of two independent socialview as an movement, though by no means, a fetal rights movement that began in the mid-19th century and was led by in the american medical association, including horatio daughter, whose pictured here, the american association was new at the time and medical education in#ñ general did not n any meaningful way resemble what we would see today. there were no real licensure in a modern sense. completely and often not very credential ized at all. the difference between a so-called regular homeopath

medicines in the pages the nation's newspapers was hard to distinguish, and t■lhe doctors n the american medical association looking for a way to set themselves they also were worried about birth rate, what they would have viewed as white women, anglo ú]g fewer children. and as the 19th century continued, ts disparity would only grow. so much so that when it had been normal in e s, for the average y have eight children, that number would decline to three by the end of the century and disproportionate started worried that decline was coming and families viewed as the best amic families at the same time that families disproportionate catholic having more children. he argued too that life began not at quickening, but at conception, and that physician with the expertise to understand

science knew when life began, and that this what distinguished them both morally midwives and others who disproportionately been serving pregnant people for the centuries before. storer lobbied for laws that would punish not physicians for performing abortions, but patients for procuring them. use his word time was still synonymous with miscarriage so the crime he procuring an abortion or miscarriage a crime that he proposed should be punished the most harshly when a patient was married, because a married person having an abortion was married, person rejecting their duties to their partner or this case he would see their their ds to the natn. promoting these laws in state legislatures in the 19th centuryinced legislatut states to introduce laws. although they rejected some of the harshest proposals that were introduced. it was■[■q

state laws to authorize felony punishments for abortion seekers and virtually all with the sole exception of new hampsre,include pregnant person, something that not concerned about in his proposal storer was'tnting to regulate reproduction in this era, this handsome gentleman anthony comstock was part of the picture to comstock's proposals were different, though he was not concerned with what he saw as the taking of fetal life. he was concerned instead with what he asso business model firt developed in new york in the late 1860s came about because comstock, his own account, was a compulsive master who worried that exposure to pornography was damaging the nation's fabric for young men and women alike. he proposed to new york law tha would define a much broader class of material as obscene everythingxtbooks to involving s

as abortion and contraception which hein to indeed, not just abortion and contraception, but any remedy troubles, as he would put it, because there was, of course no way at the time for an consistently whether someone was pregnant or whether drug acted as a contraceptive in abortifacient. in an amended gog for regulating --, or is a placebo or a snake oil remedy. comstock's model that passed in new york in 1868, then quickly ■ advice a supreme court justice named william convinced them to pass the comstock act, which to. mail any of the items listed or in the comstoc them subject to o several years in prison and a hefty so comstock perspective was differe't invested in proten of fetal life. he was invested in stog sex. he argued that the problem with abortion and contraception was

people knew they would available were available, they would what he called incentives toentially they would be able, as she put it to conceal their sin because they would be able to have sex without consent winces. and so both of these models quickly spread there are state comstock laws. this was an era when for the first time state laws many parts of the nation criminalized birth control, many of them on comstock model. and significantly, there was a close connection between reproductive rights and freedom of speech. comstock model criminalized not only the mailing of items used for thingsortion, but informatin about one. so there was always a sense that telling people about how you could get these things or how you could do these things was as deeply problematic, in his view, as the doing of the things thselvcentury, though, was hardly a period in which people stopped having abortions or using contraception. indeed, the birth rate continued

ementing both bans and many comstock laws and as comstock enforced the comstock act in increasingly[j■> ludicrous ways, including, for example, confiscating the reports to donors of suppression societi fothhis own because they had reported on existence of things like abortion informing people that were arresting people for abortion andbecause then people would awe of abortion and contraception. having said that, of course, in the 19th century, it seemsincres too. and so there was sort of an uneasy compromise that emerged whereriand using contraception. but no one was really arguing that thereeither one or that eid be legal. at the same time,■$ advocates fr abortion bans were arguing that fetuses or unborn childrenrsonsg that abortion either.

this was kind of a constitution free zone for some time, and that began to change gradually in part because of another movement that would have a strong effect on reproductive rights and■& justice down the road. the eugenics movement, eugenics, as it concept was a term coined by francis galton, a cousin of charles darwin in the late 19th century. and the idea galton had was that if you could breed livestock to improve its genetic qualities, why not? as galton wrote, human beings to have better geneticties and exactly what eugenics would mean legally complicated for some time. so legal argued that there should be unquote right sort of people to getbaby contests where the purported genetic quality of infants would be rewarded with cash or apple pies and of course, there were much more

interesting what's called negative eugenics, right? ■w to prevent the, quote unquote, wrong people from having childrentially. some of these laws focused on access to marriage, on the theory that if people were, for example, suffering from sexually transmitted infections, they but then, of course, reformers quickly realized that people could have children and have sex without getting married and turned instead to compulsory, sterilized zation laws which are on the books were on the books in more than 30 states in the united states, including california, which was one of the nation's leaders, compulsory sterilization. these laws applied to people mel illnesses or disabilities, but to a much well. california, for example, often targeted persons who were■■u vid as sexually promiscuous on the theory that sexual promiscuity, particularly in women, was a sign of feeble or genetic unfitness. overwhelmingly, the people targeted by these laws were alrey institutions.

they were overwhelmingly low ■■)incomeeople. overwhelmingly white people, in part because of either disarray or de facto segregation, ensuring that people of color had no to state institutions or services. all this was to change after world war two, when people, color, particularly black people, made up intmasterilizatf sterilization moved south.d the status quo when it came to abortion and contraception a few wa.obviously in a sense, the eugenics movement was compatible with wághat had co b■, case with storer or comstock. the message of the eugenics movement had that. of course, it was the role of the state to control who and how, albeit a different way. the claim of authority from eugenic of eugenicists was not moral. comstock's was, or even christian. it was. it in scientific expertise, eugenics simply do better than everyone else. argument went about who should ther hand, the idea

eugenicists was that more was not always an unmitigated good and in fact that certain circumstances it may make sense for certain people not to have at all or not to have children, and that the cost of having children, not just to the individual but to the state, was something that the state take an interest in. it was at this time that first birth control movement organized and that movement had, to varying degrees, involvement in the eugenic movement itself. so you see your pictured margaret sanger, some of you, most of you know, as the figure who coined the term birth control, the founder of planned parenthood, whbe connecting birh control to sociali and the rights of workers and transition support of eugenicists who were at the time enjoyed popular backing across the ideological spectrum. everyone from conservative catholic activists to members of coress thet/elves as supporters of eugenics.

and sanger, who was deeply pragmatic, believed that her cause, which she saw as an individual right to birth control, would be mo popular if it were embraced by eugenicists, too, o, includinge denette, who's pictured to her, rejected this idea courting eugenicists and instead of dennett argd that it was unreasonable to assume, under the comstock act, that americans themselves when to have children, much less when to consume information about birth control, and that it was inconsistent with the idea of democracy to patronize americans in this way and to deny them this kindthe fight for birth col gained outside of white community. two prominent activists like w.e.b. dubois and mary church terrell, who's pictured here, endorsed use of birth control in their communities, rth control, like many of the era,

had ties to eugenics. ntrol movement, the most part, didn't eo abortion a, although precisely what it was when no knew how drugs worked. the time like a miss lydia of pinkham's remedy, for sold as cd abortifacients, and nyiewed them as placebos. that didn't work at all so precisely a right to birth control would entitle you to was ambiguous, even if no one was endorsing)n■j in fact, if anything, sanger argued thatous at the time one e leading sources of result part becausecc denied. there had also been an unspoken consensus about how criminal abortionted that had applied for this era overwhelmingly when abortion was justified, had been left to discretion of physicians

who could invoke exceptions for the life of the patient. but the difference between and health of the patient in 19th and early 20th centuries was nonexistent at a time when maternal mortality morbidity rates were high. even compared to the shameful current standards for maternal mo morbidity we still experience so upshot tended to be that physicians w rarely prosecuted for abortion unless a patient actually died and often were prosecuted using the dying declaration or dying words of the patient themselves as by. contrast were rarely prosecuted at, and even those who did face prosecution and often weren't facing long sentences and sometimes came to practicing abortions after their prison ended. after the 1940s, this changed pretty dramatically for a few different reasons. first, it was longer easy to deny that occurring in the 1930s rates of contrtiexpont

depression. abor wwas pregnancy and entire hospital wards were dedicated to people1] suffering the complications of illegal abortions. so the idea that abortion is st not something happens here was no longer possible to maintain. at the same time, prosecutors began to s aio problem in the af world war two, at a time when, americans were encou■

providers began deeming abortion providers excuse me, prosecutors began deeming abortion provirs racketeers term that was often used for organized. and on occasion this was accurate because abortion was illegal, there organized crime figures in certain instances were involved in access to abon term applied to any abortion provider, including grandmothers eople helping family members have abortions. and as this hation prosecutionsn occurring there were also questions about how this was intersecting t p and race. this was an era people who had children out of wedlock who were white were often sent to maternityy would give birth and have those children adopted by others to conceal that. they had had a lapse for what was a what was perceived as morality. by contrast, people of color who were having children out wedlock were not seen as viewing as

lapsinr same way or were punished in different ways. so this an era as the 1960s began when states like began considering proposalserilized pe than one child out of wedlock med, a law that was intending to target welfare recipients who are discussion of wedlock pregnancies became a animus, all of this was in the background when it fiu began to see reprint action as a constitutionalig versus connectt began with a minimost egregious, the era. connecticut had a ban contracep, and this was not a ban on use. the only one of its kind in thid millions of americans ud the pad tried to get tto take the case e

constitutional of this law before and hadurt had said no oo enforce the law anymore. so griswold and her colleagues get the law enforced essentially starting an illegal birth control clcallingt to tell them were violating the law and theninformation while bg that could be used in subsequently the court in griswold versus connecticut ultimately did strike down connecticut's law and so on the ground that there was a constitutional right to privacy not spelled in the text of the document, but a right that was capacious enough to protect married couples, right to use contraception. at the time, griswold was decided, it was unclear how much this was a decision about marriage, which the court described as anhe bill of right. and to what extent this was a decision auttance or the privacy, one had any time one engaged in sex or sex in particular, and at the time, because of the ambiguity.

griswold surprising groups of people supported it. so, for example, large ges of catholics and even some catholic activists supported griswold as a , all kind of middle ground decision. but how broad or narrow the right to privacy would be contested in the years to come? and in advocating for what might look like beyond that, you also :[h?had a ■ury different landsce in terms of whether would be reproductive rights and what that would look lrise of a wom'n movement, as it was called the national organization for women, which was one of the largest women's liberation, was founded in a washington d.c. hotel room in 1966 and selected betty friedan, who's pictured top one, who's then kind the closest ininist celebrity as its president. polly murray, who's ctured at bottom of pioneering lawyer and civil rights activist, co-founded the natiol organization for women with friedan. and within a year of the organization's founding began to argue that reproductive■?

women's rights and critically constituted panel rights. there about whether to endorse a right to abortion. but after theso, friedan would e abortion, as she put it, as a woman's civil and would argue that there could be no full personhood for women until they had the ability to control their reproduction. radical feminist groups often based on cyou davis, made even o both abortion and contraception, often and often, particularly when activists of color were involved frame5z■m those interrelated rather than as discrete rights that could be understood in it wasn't the women's liberation movement alone that was pushing to changpolicies on control ands also at the time what was called the population movement, the population control was incredibly complicated. some of it had come directly from the eugenics movement

right? some of the organizations founded as part of the population control movement were founded by eugenicists who longer openly be eugenicists in the united states after. eugenics had kind of become a term of derision, something that was marked by scientists as racist and out of touch with kind of evidence or data population, by contrast, argued that it would be good for nation and for the world if fewer people had children. full■" lot of support in a way that eugenics didn't. soomgenicists believed that if people had fewer children altogether. the quality of the pat improve. so this would be sort of a backdoor way of achieving euge attracted to population control movement for different reasons. at], the height of the cold war, many of congress believed that more, they would be poorer and more and more open. the kind of solicitations of the soviet union on ege campuses

population control was often synymous with an emerging environmentalist movement. the idea that more people willed to environmental depredations my feminists on college campus saw women. so you often had a big,each, bu, least some laws on birth control and abortion had to change. there was a pretty vibrant debate within the black community to some leaders of the black power movement like brown, pictured here argued that abortion and birth control both were strategies for what he called black genocide. and there were two flavors of this argument. one provided that abortion, birth control were trying to reduce the size of the black community at a time the black community needed numbers to fight for civil rights. another argument provis white

world abortion and contraception solu■0tis addressing the root cf poverty itself, like a lack of education or structural racism. women in the black power and civil rights movement often pushed back against this claim, suggesting that women in the black community needed wanted access to abortion and contraceion, and that abortion in. contraception would help people of color equality rather than undermining the struggle of genocide argument as a sexist one, if not a racist too. "bso it was at this time, by the 1960s that statesan considering changing the laws that horatio storer had so vigorously promoted in the 19th century. and california was thecenter of this effort to you have anthony violence and pictured at the bottom here, who was one of the proponents of one of the first major abortion reform bills beilinson and his colleagues often look to a model developed by the the late 1950s

which permitted legal abortion under a certain narrow set of like sex cases, sexual assault or incest, certain fetal abnormalities, threats to health and the like. the justification often that violence and and his colleagues happening any way and that they were they were performed unsupervised in back alleys, and that it was ifr anyway, that they occur safely and in therapeutic conditions. some activists like pat mcguinness, who was pictured at thanother in california's abortn reform movement, made avowedly feminist arguments. reform, too. but the reform movement gained sometingly, not in states like california, across n south, which were some of the first to consider abortion form like georgia became among the first to adopt this model. and abortion reform prompted the

formation of a new movement very different from the anti-abortion movement of the 19th century. so h santi-abortion, had been overwhelmingly■+ protestant eli, overwhelmingly professional le movement anti-abortion movement of the 1960s was overwhelmingly catholic at its inception, often started directly in catholic diocese by figures in the church, and it made very arguments. so when states began reforming their abortion laws, anti abortion figures, for example, would argue that was unnecessary to legalize because pregnancy was no longer dangerous as a result of the advent of caesarean sections and antibiotics or that pregnancy in some of the violence and pointed to like sexual assault was all but impossible and. unsurprisingly these were not successful. people were getting pregnant in these scenarios. and soanti-abortion movement beo argue that liberal abortion laws werebecause word person in the

process applied from the moment an egg was fertilized and that liberal laws then violated the otection and due process under law of these fetal that we've seen play out recently in court decisions in alabama and elsewhere. so the anti-abortion movement initially fighting forfighting t had been the books since the 19th century, including laws like new hampshire's, where life exception, which the anti-abortion movement fought to maintain in the face, an effort to include a new life exception. it was against this backdrop that the supreme court ultimately to hear roe v wade, a backdrop of extreme state by, state conflict, conflict that was unfolding in terms of ballot initiatives, state legislative struggles and litigation launched by both opponents, proponents of legal■h■■u aborti, which had led to sort of a

stalemate. neither side had a particularly keen edge. there were back forth moments, one of the most pronounced being in new york state, which became the first state to rep■l all of its will, actually second after hawaii to repeal all of its criminal abortion restrictions before viability. but it was at this point that at the the democratic party, which in new york was the more anti-abortion party, had a majority that voted to reinstate state abortion restrictions in the state and had that vetoed by a republican governor, nelson rockefeller. so the partizan politics of abortion were very but what was similar was that there had that had emerged that reached beyond the contours just of se, involved a woman named norma mccorvey, pictured children. she had given up for adoption d when she was pregnant on a third occasion, decided that she wanted to terminate that pregnancy she co■rnsulted an attorney with whom she had worked on her past adoptions,wh, sarah weddington and, linda

coffey, who had been looking to takeóhp a challenge to texas abortion law, which like most at the time patient's life was at risk. o have an abortion not become plaintiff in a test case, but that is ultimately what happened in what her lawyers was in seeing happen. the court in roe ultimately held that thea5 recognized in griswold and so expanded and significant ■e encompass a patient's decision to terminate h p suggested the n to have an abortion was■ decisio get married, to have a child, to use contraception. that these key life decisions protected significant state erence at some point justice harry blackman, the author of the opionelf a pointeo what he saw as the cons of an ud

pregnancy for a pregnant per rif pregnancy or the stigma of unwes of physicians, suggesting that the abortion decision belonged jointly. the patient and the physician at various points after roe, people in fact thought that it was a right for a physician tohoon, nr women the courtjected the claiml personhood that the word person in the relevanted only natal and initially roe less of a big deal than you would have expected. it was not the top story in new york times that day, although to be fair there had lyndon johnson had just died. so it wasn't that it wasn't that ink people understood that it was going to be as bbecause as blackman himsd at the time, in s papehe doing t the constitution required, but also what the polls said. right. the poll said most people think

abortion is a decision between a right to abortion didn't mean abortion was accessible. so there there were birth control clinics all a■cross e united states. there was nothing comparable when it came to of in the united states in the 1970s were performed in hospitals. and somewhere between 15 and 24% of all hospitals offered abortions meant that the vast majority of americans who needed access or wanted access to abortions, lived nowhere near a hospital so this was the birth of the abortion clinic. organizations like planned parenthood and the national abortion rights action league raised moneycs, which would be both in terms of radicallyabortion and also laying the groundwork for the idea that abortion was different from birth control. quintessentially from health care, and physically from either one. right. so this was the beginning of what would become a massiv anti abortion protest outside of clinics, which not viewed the

same in it was in this era to that abortion groups did not at all back from the idea of fetal p■kernhming fe anti-abortion movement in the years after roe was they called ■■a man life amendment a constitution amendment that would change the meaning of word person in the 14th amendment to apply to a fertilized egg or any other an embryo, a fetus, the human amendment was so important to the anti-abortion movement that when members of congress suggested it would be easier to get an amendment through that said states had the right to do whatever they wanted about abortion. anti-abortion activists overwhelmingly rejected the idea, saying it would essentially roe, which in their view, stood not for the proposition that there was a right to abortion particularly, but that there no right to life for a fetus this struggle fo the human life amendment brought the anti-abortion movement into electoral politics as t movement desperately struggled to find allies in congress,

state gislaturessupport human l. and it ultimately brought the tirtalliance. the republican party, which the era of ronalag to the movement and the human amendment as a potential ph power, a way to peel off conservative and evangelical protestants who had voted democratic, often for reasons economics, but who be convinced to change the republican party as a result of, atstumbled upon a more ultimatey excusee, consequential strategy the what we would think a incremental ism where death of a thousand cuts and this began with the hyde amendment. the hyde amendment was the brainchild of henry hyde a long term legislator from illinois who proposed that medicaid patients should be unable to get reimbursed for most or all. and at the time, theydamendmentn appropriations bill passed with

the votes of both democrs anrepn abortion rights was already becoming a democrat a cause. why that was in part was because people in the democratic party believed, the supreme court would take care of it and strike down hyde amendment. already less emphasis put on access for low income people an would or really ought to be the case. the hyde amendment passed in 1976, and it had impacts, a lare in the 1970s in the united states were medicaid estimates, upwards of 200 or 250,000 patients each year who otherwise have had abortions were prevented from doing so as a result of hyde amendment. the hyde amendment alsoured that people who were low income would have to rely on an intricate network of abortion ■5s and private charities for money to seek out abortion. and■ what became of the grass roots of the reproductivediate aftermath of ,

they all went into service and of i think explains the lack somewhat of a visible grass roots in the post roe era. there was of an early reproductive justice movement to become the so-called pro-choice movement which to protect the right recognized in was not enough and? this movement, in part, took its inspiration from an epidemic of sterilization abuse. women of color. in this era, other people of color were being involuntarily, sometimes under existing eugenic sterilization laws, sometimes no legal authority at all.physician cross parts of the south, of appendectomy, in which patients who went in for childbirth or other services were involuntarily sterilized without their knowledge or consent again, particularly in states like mississippi, the was part acute in puerto rico, where a large percentage

of women at some point in their reproductive lives were sterilized, often with questionable no consent. and so activists like hele's pid here, argued that any movement for reproductive rights had to movement for freedom from the government but right.tect using the a movement that would say the government should guarantee informedmeans for people want te children, to have them. and rodriguez and her colleagues founded organizatns le the■qabui issue groups, a group called claressa or two and two,wq bothf which were reproductive justice groups founded inheebut none ofs succeeded, in slowing down the attack on abortion rights and other forms of reproductive health care, where that attack

cally involved two improbable things. sandra day o'connor in akron, ether so. akron, ohio was the site of an een marketed as the anti by anti-abortion movement, as a model for the rest of the and its constitution ultimately came before the supreme court in 1980, after o'connor had become ronald reagan's first supreme court nominee. the anti-abortion movement hated sandra day o'connor. feminist and generally just grossnd she saw, to their surprise, dissentefr court strig down this akron ordinance, not to say the ordinance wconstitutt roe itself was fatally flawed and itself was fatally flawed, it was at least deserving of some reconsideration. so the anti-abortion movement, which been utterly unable to get a constitutional off the ground, needed a plan b, it was unable to get that constitutional amendment off the ground. when ronald reagan was in power, when republicans contrd both

houses of congress, and when it as if republicans had fared better than in state legislative elections, there was still no prospect of a personhood and no prospect even of agreement on a second best solution for the so if there was going to be no personhood amendment, what could there be? court and with control of the supreme court, there could be the upholding of more laws, the hyde amendment, which would mean less to abortion and a right to that would mean very little or less. n practice, a right that people would feel less compelled or energized to ultimn fetus as a person in a way that an american public that seemed to reject the principle never might. and so with this, the■e anti-abortion movement proceeded to focus on incremental item looking for laws that could be argued to be consistent with roe and then defending themhe movemo begin, look for arguments that would cement its relationship

with an emerging conservative legal movement. it's hard to imagine as a non historian how liberal the legal orthodoxy prior to the 1980s was or overwhelmingly the justices that someone like richard nixon selected were themselvesotbd conservative because the legal, the bench and the bar were fairly on the same page in terms this was to change the founding of the federalist by three law students in the e fe's founders believed that this liberal liberal stifled debate on law school campus. and very quick■gly, the federalt society, a center of power. ronald reagan overwhelmingly, enn the early years of the group, looked to federalist society advisors and speerstaffd movement, this was not an unqualified goodyone in the fedt

society liked the anti-abortion movement or and other members of the federalist society just thought that anti-abortion movement was too extreme to affiliated with law brngd with christianity to be worthy of partnethat wanted to create a legal elite. this connced the anti-abortion groups that they needed to find common ground. example to look for strategies that would ly more on the role of history or even original intent. and this changed arguments against abortion in ways that are still consequential today. it also led should a crime more so than it already had been. that pregnant drug could be charged with child■ abuse, that people who killed pregnant people be charged with homicide rather than viewing the personhood of the fetus as something that would require more support for pregnant people. instead, the argument was the fetus was a victim of crime,

just as were others in ronald rea'otect the rights of a fetal person was to exact retributionka against who wrongd the fetal person. it was this backdrop that the supreme court decided case planned parenthood versus casey in 92. at this time, everyone expected the supreme court to roe. but the court in casey defied expectations and preserved what it called the essential holding of roe that there was a right to choose abortion survival casey also held that laws were permissible, though if they didn't abortion, unduly burden aesand this seemed to bey standard. and indeed the court in casey upheld e before it but one casey also focused the n movement in a new direction on the argument that if women and other pregnant victims because opponents

court longer concluded that there was a tensiobe rights of the fetus and the rights of pregnant people they would no so anti-abortion groups set out to create their own research institutes and journals to publish claims that abortion increased the risk of things. post-traumatic stress disorder and breast cancer. it was in this era, too, a more vigorous and long lasting reprustice movement formed, led by, like sister song members, of■ wche justice movement pushed back against this idea that abortion particularly by saying one this was an argument thatsuppose that people of color were being easily led by a predominately white group ofo, by saying thats argument make sense because it presupposed pregnancies and safe experiences raising ■, when, if anything, the opposite was true, when there were problems of maternal mortality and, morbidity, lack of access to contraception and

sex education and health care writ large in communities of color that had to contending that it was not enough to simply rights that a more capacious right or agenda for reproductive 7justice had to be considered. the anti-abortion movement had allies in this period, too, particularly, that consider themselves openly christian and argued that the founding of the united states had been a christian event with a chris■@ae interpreted in line with christian principles. groups le alliance defending freedom, founded in 1993, became with massive budgets and reach that began to reshape th proceeded moving it away from a single issue, struggle about one thing abortion and a broader kind of agenda that presented abortion is connected. religious liberty, the separation of church and state, lgbtq rights and more. the supreme court intervened another time before dobbs, partial birth abortion in.

2007 and the anti-abortion movement itself heavily in cases not related to abortion, including issues campaign finance, belie that if more money flowed into american politics, more republicans would be movement would gain more influence over the republican party, making it right kind of judges nominated and ensure that roe would be happened in dogs in 2022, when the court, faced with a 15 week abortion ban and dispute in the lower courts about the such a law, nevertheless, to take the case, roe v wade and declare a right to abortion was never was not and never had been rooted in the nation's history tradition. dogs, of course, has received lots of attention from historians for lots of reasons one of which is its ignoring of amongtradition actually say. but of course, stubbs other potl

challenges to reproductive can about se'u've seen lots of different kinds of litigation that point to where some of this historyay be going. there's what i think is an insipid emergent campaign to revedobbs centered on abortion exceptions. women like kate cox, pictured at the bottom in amanda's roski here are arguing that state abortion bans with exceptions, either have to be interpreted broadly or that those exceptions fact violate state continuing in states like texas, kentucky, see, elsewhere. again, this is state constitutional litigation. it's not a direct challenge to dobbs, but it's designed to deal dogs a death of a thousand cuts. right. to sayf this is the world dobbs is ushered, it's unworkable. s in two us supreme court cases on abortion in one term. after dobbs told uthat the federal courts were out of this mifepristone on a drug used in

more than ha us abortions. the case also involves a claim that the fda never had authority to make abortion pills available via. telehealth because anthony comstock' law never repealed and is argued make it a federal crime to maketoday, there's anoe involving the>,eder e act, which the biden has argued requires access for abortion to patients inal emergencies. this claim this case also involves the claimas and idaho t federal actually treats an unborn childe california may be prohibited from providing e of the federal law rather than required to do so. and finally, of course, as we saw just in the past few weeks, there's the ongoing struggle for fetal personhood. if you were wondering what is the ne roe wade for the anti-abortion movement, it was and always been fetal■# now that roe is out of the way, the campaign for fetal

personhood has intensified considerably. it's reflected in state laws, ing the personhood of fetuses for personal purposes like tax/. deductions and child support laws, and recently a decision of the alabama supreme of state's wrongful death of a minor law, a frozen embryo is a child person, and that therefore suits, fothe destruction of embryos can be brought as a wrongful death suit. thescl designed eventually to return, ironically, not to congress, not not to voters, but to the us supreme court, because we've seen after surmised, ironically that when voters are faced with questions involving reproductive rights and justice, they tend overwhelmingly to support reproductive and justice. and so instead groups have long complained about antidumping courts interjecting themselves into questions. reproduction are iteadkit courta matter of the constitution'soris

to abortion, potential/ a ivf po contraception is itself unconstitutional. sohen ask me sort of my favorite question is people usually not from the united states, me, when is this going to be over? and answer is probably never but i think one of the other things that's clear in thectives and justice is there's always very much been a story about the who gets to vote whether you get to vote at all how mey i vote? and so i think in terms of how this turns out a good barote hee democracy in the first place? so i'll stop there. so i think people are supposed to ask questions. then c-span is going to follow you covertly with them. so if people have questions, just raise your hand.

yeah, we're not. oh, go ahead. yeah just a sec. over here. so again, again. but. so just way of transparency. mary grogan, provostnd executive vice chancellor at uc davis and a reproductive perinatal■ epidemiol. just who is thrilled. thank you. uc. so one is thorough we comprehensive this was and it's talk and delivered exceptionally well the the one thing i didn't in field is dolores huerta.

mm hmm. who worked very hard against sterilization. mm hmmos. particular in relationship to movement. and i wondered if you had anything to saon that, because those was another one of these time in the 1960s and seventies, that was pretty dramatic. and again particularly in california. yeah. i mean, california was was the site of a lot of forced sterilization, said a lot of points in time and in the sixties and seventies in califoia jt in other states overwhelmingly forcible sterilizations from in problem primarily for low income white who had been more exposed to the state to being a problem overwhelmingly affecting people of color, and e united states and in california particular. and this was part of i think this, the move toward a reproductive justice movement rely across the country, because in new york, it was people who are puerto rican. in mississippi.

it was peowhddo were black in california. it was people were latina. and so it wasn't people of color o justice movement, but they were often the ones saying a reproductive right doesn'ananyt. it presupposes that you don't ever need the protectionf the government. sometimes you may need the government to support not just to leave you alone. and that because people like those in california were experiencing that firsthand, right? they weren't they didn't have the privilege of just saying, okay, the government has gone away. no'm. all set. that wasn't their experience. thank you. yeah, of course. oh, time's up. okay. well, thanks so.

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and joining us now on c span is anthea hartig. shehe organizing session of american historians, which is what? well, since 1907, the age has been in service as a nonprofit and association of historians, mostly in the early days and teaching at universities. but now our membership spans museum curators, high school history ter