had he had better kong and he won. so i congrhave you about losing the plans next year change in practice so my driving more i'll and again next year maybe i'll win.

thanks so much, everybody. so this isin an. so this is a snapshot of the history of reproductive rights and justice starting from the 19th century to the 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 discussing this as it's also very much real life. so i think and we think of them in the context of criminalization and criminal laws, but that's a relatively recent phenomenon. so ifou go back far enough and there's a dispute about this that was reflected b supreme in the supreme court'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 a crime. any point in pregnancy, he might have said or might have believed something similar about contraception. but the reality was that for either passing or implementing criminal laws regarding reproduction would have been very difficult, in part because it impossible. identify when someone was

pregnant before quickening, or the point distinguishing a drug was a contraceptive, an abortion efficient, or a drug that simply 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 t abdomen was considered off limits and inappropriate at a women and other people who could get pregnant were often hidden behind screensations. so physicians to tell people were pregnant would do things likewhich you might be surprised to learn did not result pregnancy. so at this time there was a sort of sense that there were female that might influence pregn 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 were laws, for example, poison laws that regulatedarly and pregnancy, particularlyhigh profile deaths from

poisonous concoctions used to end pregnancies. there were some s treated abortion as a misdemeanor for early in pregnancy. tle regulation of contraception at all. until the late 19th century and that was to change because of two independent social movements. the first was in what we would view as an anti-abortion 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 general did not in any meaningful way resemble what we so there were no real licensure in a modern sense. medical education was completely and often not very credential ized at all. the difference between a so-called regular physician and a midwife or a homeopath medicines in the pages the nation's newspapers was hard to the doctors in the american medical association looking for a way to set

themselvesy. they also were worried about what they saw as a grievously birth rate what they would have viewed as white women, anglo ing fewer children. and as the 19th century continue would only grow. so much so that when it had been normal in the united states for decades, for the average family have eight child would decline to three by the end of the century and disp started worried that decline was coming and families viewed a families at the same time that families catholic having more children. life began not at quickening, but at conception, and that only physicians like him physician with the expertise to unde science knew when life began and that this what distinguished them both morally and professionally, from the midwives and others who disppregnant 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 prop was the crime of procuring an abortion or miscarriage a crime that hproposed 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 duties to the promoting these laws in state legislatures in the 19th century and gradually convinced legislatures in most states. although they rejected some of the harshest proposals that were introduced. w relatively unusual for state laws to authorize felony punintr seekers and virtually all with the sole ofincluded for the life of the pregnanthi not concerned about in his proposal storer wasn't alone in wanting to regulate reproduction in this era, this gentleman anthony comstock was part of the picture to comstock's were different, though he was not concerned with what he saw as life. he was concerned instead with what he saw as obscenity.

so business model first 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 yorkt would define a much broader class of material as obscene everythingtextbooks to involving as as abortion and contraception wh to indeed, not just abortion and contraception, but any remedy for female troubles, as he would put it, because there was, of course no way at time r anyone to discern consistently r pregnant or whether drug acted as a contraceptive in abortifn 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 strong comstock went to congress and convinced them to pass the comstock act, whic to. mail any of the items listed or in the com them subject to up to

sehefty so comstock n't invested in protection of fetal life. he sex. he argued that the problem with abortion people knew they would available were available, they would what he called incentives to crime essentially they would be able, as she put it to conceal their sin because eywould be able to have sex without consent winces. and so both of these models quickly spread there are state comstock laws. 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 things like contraception and abortion but information about one. so there was always a sense that telling people abo get these things or how you could do these things was as deeply problematic, in his view, as the doing of the things h century, though, was hardly a period in which people stopped having abortions or

using contraception. indeed, the birth rate continued to plummet as states began implementing both bans and many comstock laws and as comstock enforced the comstock act in increasi ludicrous ways, including, for example the reports to donors of suppression societies for the suppression of vice like his own because they had reported on existence of things like abortion informing people that were arresting people for abortion contraception was obscene because then people would aware of abortion and contraception. having said that, of course, in the 19th century, it seems as abortions were actually increasing, use was too. and so there was sort of an uneasy compromise that emerged where and using contraception. but no one was really arguing that there was right to do either one or that either should be legal. at the same time abortion bans were arguing that fetuses or unborn children were persons, but no one was arguing that abortion laws were liberal were unconstitutional either. this was kind of aonstitution 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 righ 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. ane idea galton had was that if you could breed livestock to improve its genetic qualities ed? as galton wrote, human beings to have better genetic qualities and exactly what eugenics would mean legally complicated for some time. so some scholars and legal argued that there should be unquote right sort of people to get married. there were, for example, better baby 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? law to prevent the, quote unquote, wrong people from having childrennitially. some of these laws focused on access to marriage, on the theory that if example, suffering from sexually transmitted infections, they shouldn't get married.

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 than 30 states in the united states, including california, which was one of the nation's leaders, compulsory sterilization. these laws applied to people we now recognize as having mental illnesses or disabilities, but to a much larger of persons as well. california, for example, often target were viewed 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 theslaws were already in state institutions. they were overwhelmingly linoverwhelmingly white people, in part because of 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 sterilization victims of sterilization movedged

the status quo when it came to abortion and conobviously in a sense, the eugenics movement was compatible with what had come before because just has been the case with storer or comstock. ssage 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 cl authority from eugenic of eugenicists was not moral. comstock's was, or do better than everyone else. argument went about who should other hand, the idea eugenicists was that more reproduce 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 , her career in the 19 teens connecting birth control and the rights of workers and transition in part to in trying to enlist the support of eugenicists who were at the time enjoyed popular backing across the ideological spectrum. everyone from conservative catholic activists to members of congress themselves as supporters of eugenics. and sanger, who was deeply pragmatic, believed that her cause, which she saw as an individual right to birth ront popular if it were embraced by eugenist too, some of her colleagues including mary, were denette, who's pictured to idea courting eugenicists and instead of dennett argued that it was unreasonable to assume, under the comstock act, that americans were incompetent to decide for themselves when to have children, much lessnsume 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 kind of information. the fight for birth control 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 communibirth control, like many of the era had ties to eugcontrol movement, the most part, didn't e to abortion at all although precisely what it was when no knew how drugs worked. so common that were marketed at the time like a miss lydia of pinkham's remedy, for example were sold as contraceptives and abortiny viewed them as placebos. that didn't work at all so precisely a d entitle you to was ambiguous, even if no one was endorsinge. in fact, if anything, sanger argued thaterous at the time one of the leading sources of result part because access to contraception

was denied. there haan unspoken consensus about how criminal ulented that had applied for this era overwhelm 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 h even compared to the shameful current st morbidity we still experience so upshot tended to be that physicia rarely prosecuted for abortion unless a patient actually died and often were prosecuted using the 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 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 thatns occurring in the 1930s rates of contraceptive and abortion use increased exponentially during the great depression. abortiwas pregnancy and entire hospital wards were dedicated to peop suffering the complications of illegal abortions. so the idea thatst not something happens here was no longer possible to maintain. at the same time prosecutors problem in the aftermath of world war two, at a time when, amer families as part of the war effort and the of the co war being baby and having big family was seen as kind of antidote tcommunism at a time when the soviet union had legalized or the soviet union's embrace of smaller families and disturbing utterly un-american and un-christian. and conversely abortion providers were seen as distinctly un-american and un-christian as well. it was in this era that abortion providers began deeming abortion providers excuse me, prosecutors

began deeminders 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 abortion. but most often it was a term applied to any abortion provider, including grandmothers and other people helping family members have abortions. and as thipps haortion prosecutions began occurring there were also questions about how this was intersecting the and race. this was an era people who had children out of wedlock who were white were often sent to maternityhey 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 o were not seen aswirae same way or were punished in different ways. so this an era as the 1960s began when states like began considering proposals to sterilized people who, had more than one child out of wedlock

elmed, a law that was intending to target welfare recipients who are discussion out of wedlock pregnancies became a different way of expressing racial animus, all of thisas in the background when it you began to see reprint action as a constitutionalld versus connecticut began with a minie most egregious of its kind, the era. connecticut had a ban contraception and this was not a ban on sale or manufacture. it was a ban on use. the only one of its kind in this a time after the fda had approved birth control pill and millions of. the parties in griswold had tried to get the supreme court to take the case on the constitutional of this law before and hadcourt had said no one to enforce the law anymore. so griswold and her colleagues o get the law enforced essentially starting an illegal birth control ict calling up law enforcement to tell them were violating the law and then freely volunteering lots of information while being 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 t 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 an institution older than the bill of rights. and to what extent this was a ciortance or the privacy, one had any time one engaged in sex or sex in particular, and at the time, because of thety. griswold surprising groups of people supported it. so, for example, large tages of catholics and even some catholic activists supported griswold as a le, all kind of middle ground decision. but how broad or nar right to privacy would be contested in the years to come? and in advocating fo what might look like beyond that, whether would be reproductive rights and what that would look like. in part, that had to do with the rise of a women's liberation 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 b friedan, who's pictured top one who's theneminist celebrity as its president. polly murrwh; at bottom of pioneering lawyer and civil rights activist, co-fioorganization for women with friedan. and within a year of theorganization's founding began to argue that reproductive rights, women's rights and critically constituted panel rights. there was a bit of a fight within about whether to endorse a right to abortion. but after the organization did so, friedan would often describe abortion, as she put it, as a civil and would argue that there could be no full personhood for women until they had the ability to control their reproduction. radi feminist groupsyou davis, made even more bold feminist arguments for access to both abortion and contraception often and often, particularly when activists of color were involved frame those interrelated rather than as

discrete rights that could be understood in it wasn't the women's liberation movement alone that was pushing control and abortion there was also at the time what was called the population movement, the population control was incredibly complicated. some of it had come directly the eugenics movement fr right? some of the organizations foundepopulation control movement were founded by longer openly be eugenicists in the united stateseugenics 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 stop. this argument had a lot of support in a way that eugenics didn'eugenicists believed that if people had fewer children altogether. th improve. so this would be sort of a backdoor way of achieving attracted to population control movement for differentmany of congress believed

that in poorer nations, if people had more, they would be poorer and more and more open. the kind of solicitations of the llege campuses population control was often an emerging environmentalist movement. the idea that more peoplerces and lead to environmental depredations many feminists on college campus saw women. so you often had a big diverse movement, sometimes talking past each, but agreeing that laws, 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 theblack 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 bunity at a time the black community needed numbers t rights.

another argument white world abortion and contraception solutions to poverty rather than addressing the root causes of 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 me black community needed wanted access to abortion andn, and that abortion in. contraception would help people of color equalundermining the struggle of equality and f sexist one, if not a racso it was at this time, by the 1960egan considering changing the laws that horatio storer had so vigorously promoted in the 19th century. and californiapicenter 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 american law institute in 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 argued was that these abortions were happening any way and that they were unsafe. they were performed unsupervised in back alleys, and that it was cur anyway, that they occur safely and initions. some activists like pat mcguinness, who was pictured at the top your screen here, another in california's abortion reform movement, made avowedly feminist arguments. reform too. but the reform movement gained someestingly not in states like californiaes across the american south, which were some of the first to consider abortion georgia became among the first to adopt this reform prompted the formation of a new movement very different from the anti-abortion movement of the 19th century.io stores or anti-abortion, had been overwhelmingly protestant elite,

overwhelmingly professional led movement. and the 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, uld 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 so instead people in the anti-abortion movement began to argue that liberal abortion laws were quite unconstitutional because word person in the constitution, particular the equal protection clause in due process applied from the moment an egg was fertilized and that liberal laws then violated the protection and due process under law of these fetal persons. an argument that we've seen play

out recently in court elsewhere. so the anti-abortion movement initially fighting for the status quo, right. fighting for criminal laws that had been the books since the 19th century including laws like new hampsno life exception, which the anti-abortion movement fought to maintain in the face, an effort to include a new life exception. it was2n 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 abortion, 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 repeal 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 already been a profound conflict that had emerged that reached beyond the contours just of urse, involved a woman named norma mccorvey, pictured here, who had already had several children. she had given up for adoption and when she was pregnant on a third occasion decided that she wanted to terminate that ulted an attorney with whom she had worked on her pastwho directed her to two lawyers, sarah weddington and, linda coffey, who had been lookingo abortion law, which like most at the time patient's life was at risk. mcwherter, of course, wanted to 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 the recognized in griswold and so expanded and significant encompass a patient's decision to terminate suggested the decision

to have an abortion was salient in similar ways to decisions to get married, to have a child, to use contraception. that these key life decisions about and intimacy were protected significant state rference at some point justice harry blackman, the author of the opinion nixon nominee and himself a pointed to what he of an unwanted pregnancy for a pregnant risks of pregnancy or the stigma of unwed but often roe focused the rights 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 to choose abortion, not for a right for women the court explicitly rejected the claim of fetal personhood that the word person in the relevantlied only postnatal and initially roe less of a big deal than you would have expec ted. it was not the top story in new

york times that day, although to be fain lyndon johnson had just died. so it wasn't that it wasn't that think people understood that it was going to be as big of a deal as it was because as blackman himself said at the time, doing what he thought the constitution required, but d most people think abortion is a decisn between a woman and doctor recognized a right to abortion didn't mean abortion was accessible. so there there were birth control clinicsited 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 tabortion rights action league raised moneynics which would be both in terms of radicallyo abortion and also laying the groundwork for the idea that abortionly different

from birth control. quintessentially from health care, and physically isolate from either one. right. so this was the beginning of whata massive anti abortion protest outside of clinics, which not viewed the sa light hospitals in it was in this era to that abortion groups did not at all back from the idea of fetal personhood. the overwhelming focus the anti-abortion movement in the years after roeconstitution 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 the human life amendment brought

the anti-abortion movement into electoralnt desperately struggled to find allies in congress,lesupport human life amendment. and it ultimately alliance. the republican party which the to the movement and the human amendment as a p power, a way to peel off conservativand evangelical protestants who had voted democratic, often for reasons economics, but who be convinced to change the republican party a abortion it was in er too stumbled upon a more ultimately consequential strategy the what we would think 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 sreimbursed for most or all. and heat tamendment is part of an appropriations bill passed with the votes of both democrats and republicans at a time when abortion rights was already becoming a democrat a cause. why that was in part was because

e democratic party believed, the supreme court would take care of it and strike down hyde am because was already less emphasis put on would or really ought to be the case. the hyde amendment passed in 1976, and it had impacts, a large 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 also ensured that people who were low income would have to rely on an intricate network of abortion nds and private charities for money to seek out abortion. ands what became of the grass roots of the reproductive rights movement in the immediate aftermath of roe they all went into service and access work, which is part of i think explains the of a visible grass roots in the post roe era. there was of an early reproductive justice movement to that argued that what had 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 sometim itphysicians were notorious in cross parts of the south offering what they called mississippi 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 particularly acute in puerto rico, where a large percentage women at some point in their reproductive lives were sterilized, often with questionable no consent. and so activho's pictured here, argued that any movement for reproductive movement for freedom from the government but a right, a to protect using the power of the government. right. a movement that would say the

government should guarantee informed consent. government should guarantee the means for people want to have children, to have and rodriguez and her colleagues founded committee to end sterilization abuse, 1974 and broader multi issue groups, a group called claressa or two and two, which were reproductive justice groups founded in the late 1970s. but none of these groups succeeded, in slowing down t attack on abortion rights and other care, where thatnically involved two improbable things. sandra day o'connor in akron, ogether so. akron, ohio was the site of an ordinance that had been marketed as the anti by anti-abortion movement, as a model for the rest of the and its constitution ultimately came before the preme court in 1980, after o'connor had become ronald reagan's first supreme court nominee. the anti-abortion movement hated sandra day o'connor. they thought s supporter of abortion rights and a feminist and generally just gross and she saw, to their

su court striking down this akron ordinance, not to say the ordinance was constitutional, but to say that roe itself was fatally flawed and that if roe itself was fatally flawed, it was at least deserving of some reconsideration. so the anti-abortion movement, which be a constitutional off the ground needed a plan b, it was unable to getha constitutional amendment off the ground. when ronald reagan was in power both houses of congress, and when it as if republic than in state legislative elections, there was still no prospect of d no prospect even of agreement on a second best solution for the anti-abortion movement. so if there was going to be no personhood amendment, what could well there could be control of the supreme 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. and less in practice, a right that people would feel less compelled or energized to defend. and with that, ultimately to in the long term could a supreme court that would recognize the

fetus as a person in a way that an american public that seemed to reject the principle never might. and ti-abortion movement proceeded to focus on incremental item looking for laws that could be argued to be consistent with roe and then defending them before courts and the movement to 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 orthodoxy prior to the 1980s was or overwhelmingly the justices that someone like richard nixon selected were themselves not conservative because the legal the bench and the barere fairly on the same page in terms of conventional this was to change the founding of the federalist by three law students in the early 1980s. the federalist society's founders believed that this be orthodoxy stifled debate on law school usthe federalist society, a center of power. ronald r early years of the group, looked to federalist

society advisors and speakers to staff his administration and nominate)$lp movement this was not an unqualified good development to begin with. not everyone in the federalist society liked the anti-abortion movement or agreed that abortion should be criminal and other members of the federalist society just thought anti-abortion movement was too extreme to affiliated with law ted with christianity to be worthy of p that wanted to create a legal anti-abortion groups that they needed to find common ground. and so they began, for example to look for strategies that would rely more on the role of history or even original intent. and this changed argumennst abortion in ways that are still consequential t anti-abortion groups to argue that pregnancy 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 fetus was a victim of crime just as were others inme, and that the way to protect the rights of a fetal against who wronged 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 abort before viability or the point at which survival outside of the womb was casey also held that laws were permissible, abortion, unduly burdenand this seemed to be a pretty standard. and indeed the court in casey upheld every abortion restriction before it but one casey also focused the anti-abortion movement in a new direction on the a people were abortions second victims court longer concluded that there was a tension between the rights of the fetus and the rights of pregnant people they would no

longer justify rights. 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 it was in this era too, a more vigorous and long justice movement formed, led by, like sister song members, ofive justice movement pushed back against this idea that women to be protected from abortion particularly by saying one this was anrgument that presuppose that people of color were being easily led by a predominately white group of physicians. and two, by saying that this argument make sense because it presupposed that people were having healthy pregnancies and safe experiences raising families. but for the experience of abortion 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 contending that it was not enough to mply pursue abortion rights that a more capacious right or agenda for reproductivejustice had to be considered.

the anti-abortion movement had allies in this period, too particularly, that consider christian and argued that the founding of the united states had been a christian event with a christian constitu ation that should be interpreted in line with christian principles. groups like the alliance defending freedom, founded in 1993 became with massive budgets and reach that began to shape the fight against abortion proceeded moving it away from a single issustruggle about one thing abortion and a broader kind of agenda that presented abortion is connected. religious liberty, the church and state, lgbtq rights and more. the supreme court intervened another time before dobbs upholding a ban on so-called partial birth abortionn.movement itself heavily int related to abortion, including issues campaign finance, more money flowed into american politics, more republicans would be elected and the anti-abortion movement would gain more influence over the republican party, making it right kind of judges nominated and ensure that roe would be overturned. and in fact, that's what

happened in dogs in 2022, when the court, faced with a 15 week abortion ban and dispute in the lower courts aboconstitutional of such a law nevertheless, to take the case, roe v wade and declare aht never was not and never had been rooted in the nation's history and tradition. dogs, of course, has received lots of attention from historia reasons one of which is its ignoring of amongd tradition actually say. but of course, stubbs also the door to other potential challenges to reproductive rights down the road, some of which we can about we've seen lots of different kinds of litigation that point to where so may be going. there's what i think is an insipid emergent campaign to reverse. dobbs 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 constitutions.

so this litigation is continuing in states like texas, essee, elsewhere. again, this is state constitutional litigation. it's not a direct dobbs, but it's designed to deal dogs a death of a thousand cuts. right. to ushered, it's unworkable. nts in two us supreme court cases on abortion in one term. ld us that the federal courts were out of this game, one of which involves fda's authority to approve mife us abortions. the case also involves a claim that the fda never had the authority to make abortion pills available via. telehealth because anthony comstock's law never repealed and is argued make it a federal crime to make abortion related items. today, there's another case involving the federal emergency medical treatment and labor act which theued requires access for abortion to patients iical emergencies. this claim this case also involves the claim by states like texas and idaho that federal actually treats an unborn child as patient, and that some states like california may be prohibited from providing access to emergency abortions because of the federal law rather than required to do so.

and finally, of course as we saw just in the pas's the ongoing struggle for fetal personhood. if you were wade for the anti-abortion movement, it was andt now that roe is out of the way, the campaign for fetal personhood has intensified considerably. it's reflected in state laws, recognizing the personhood of fetuses for personal purposes like tax deductions and child support laws, and recently a decision of the alabama supreme court holding that for the purposes of state's wrongful death of a minorfrozen embryo is a child person, and that thereforestruction of embryos can be brought as a wrongful death designed eventually to return ironically not to voters, but to the us supreme court, because we've seen after surmised ironically that when ed with questions involving reproductive rights and justice, they tend over reproductive and justice. and so instead groups have antidumping courts interjecting themselves into questions. out courts and arguing that as a

maoriginal public meaning access to abort ivf potentially access to contraception is itself unconstitutional when 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 right. but i think one of the other things that's clear inductive rights and justice is there's always very much been a story aboutt. who gets to vote whether you get to vote at vote? and so i think in terms of how this healthy is the democracy in the first place? top there. so i think people are supposed questions. then c-span is going to follow you covertly with them. sojust raise your hand. yeah, we're not. oh go ahead.

yeah just a sec. over here. againin. but. so just way of transparency. maryrogan, provost and executive vice chancellor at uc davis and a r epidemiol. just who is thrilled. thank uc. so one is thorough we comprehensive this was talk and delivered exceptionally well the the one thing i didn't hear was one person who i've worked with in field is dolores huerta. hmm. who worked very hard against sterilization. mminos. particular in relationship to movement. and i wondered if you had those was another one of these intersections. 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, saidints in time and in the sixties and seventies in in other states overwhelmingly forcibleri problem primarily for low income white who had been state to being a problem overwhelmingly affecting people of color, and particularly latino women in the united states and in california particular. and so this was part of i think this, the move toward a reprreally across the country, because in new york, it was people who are puerto rican. in mississippilack in california. it was people were latina. and so it wasn' justice movement, but they were often the ones saying a anything. it presupposes that you don't ever need the protection of 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? weren't they didn't have the privilege of just saying, okay, the government has gone away. now i'm. all set. that wasn't their experience. thank you. yeah, of

okay. ll so.

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and joining us now on c anthea hartig. she is the president of the of american historians, which is what? well, since 1907, the age has been in se a nonprofit and association of historians, mostly in the early days and teaching at universities. but now our membersh spans museum curators, high school history teachers, and, of co