thanks so much, everybody.

so this is obviously more material than i can cover in an. so this is a snapshot of the history of reproductive rits ste 19th century to the present. w because it's i as asat's in professor lawson said main hiss stuff, and i'm also living through it with all of so it's a strange time to be discussing this as history when it's also very ch life. so i think now often when we we think of them in the context of criminalization and criminal laws, but that's recent phenomenon. so if you go back far enough and

there's a dispute about reflecte supreme in the supreme court's decision in 2022 in dobbs versus jackson, women's health organization, theto suggested degree, another abortion had always been a pregt 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. iden w pregnant before quickening, or the point at which fetal movement could detected ■distinguishing a drug was a contraceptive, an abortion efcit, 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

time. women and other people who could geprnant were often hidden behind screens during, examinations. so physicians to tell people were pregnant would do things like examine noses and mouths, which you might be surprised to learn did not result in reliable diagnoses of so at this time there was a sort of sense that there were female that might influence pregnancy one way or another. and for the most part, state didn't the point which abortion was moriminalized. there exceptions to this there were laws, for example, poison laws that regulated drugs could kill pregnant people early and pregnancy, particularly starting in the 1840s after a series of high profile deaths from poisonous concoctions used to end there were some states that treated abortion as a y in pregnancy. there was very little regulation of contraception at all. until the late 19th century and thatdm of

two independent social movements. the first was int on 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 gful way resemble what we would see today. the licensure in a modern sense. 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 newspapersd to distinguish, and the doctors in the american medicallooking fort themselves apart professionally. they also were worried about what they saw as a grievously birth rate, what they would have viewed as white women, anglo

saxon women were havg children. and as the 19th century continued, this disparity would only grow. so much so that when it had been normal in the united states for decades, for the average family have eight children, that number would decline to three by the end of the century and disproportionately started worried that decline was coming and families viewed as the best americans at the same time that families disproportionately having more children. he argued too that but at conception, and that only ph physician with the expertise to understand this what distinguished them both morally a professionally, from the midwives and others who disproportionately been serving pregnant people for the centuries before. storer lobbied for law not physr performingng them. use his word aboiomiscarriage se

proposed wasmiscarriage a crimee prosed should be punished the most harshly when a patient was married, because a person having an abortion was married, person rejecting their dues to their partner or this case he would see their husband as much as it was their duties to the nation. storer beganhese laws in state legislatures in the 19th century and gra legislt states to introduce laws. although they rejected some of the harshest proposals that were introduced. it was relatively unusual for state laws to authorize felony punishments for abortion seekers and virtually all with the sole exception of new hampshire, included for the life of the pregnant person, something that stoddard also wasin his proposar wasn't alone in wanting to regulate reproduction in this era, this handsome gentleman

anthony comstock was part of the picture to comstock's proposals ■ép2we, though he was not concerned with what he saw as the taking of fetal l insteah what he saw as obscenity. 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 york law that would define a much broader mate everything from medical textbooks to involving nudes as as abortion and contraception which he defined as obscenertiod contraception, but any remedy for female would put it, because there was, of course no way at the time for anyone 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 went national with the advice a supreme court justice named william strong comstock went to co convinced them to pass the comstock act, which made it a federal crimeems listr in the comstock act as well as receive them subject to up to several years in prison and a comstock perspective was different. he wasn't invested in protection of fetal life. he was invested in stopping argh abortion and contraception was available were available, they would what he called incentives to crime put it to conceal their sin because they would be able to have sex without consent winces. and so both of these■á models quickly spread there are state comstock laws. first time state laws many parts of the nation criminalized h

comstock model. and significantly, there was a?< close connection between reproductive rights and freedom of speech. comsck mailing of items used for things like cont but informn about sense that telling people about how you could get tow you could do these things was as deeply problematic, in his views themselves. in the 19th centy, 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 increasingly ludicrous ways, includin for example, confiscating suppression societs for the suppression of vice like on existence of things like abortion in contraception,

that were arresting people for abortion and contracepti w would aware of abortion and contraception. havi said that, of course, in the 19th century, it seems as abortions were actua increasing, use was increasing too. and so there was sort of an uneasy compromise that emerged where americans having abortions and using contraception. but no one was really arguing that there was right to do legal. at the same time,dv that fetuses or unborn childrenere wg that abortion laws were liberal, were unconstitutional either. this was kind of a constitution free zone for some time, and that began to change gradually in pmovement that would have a strong effect on reproductive rights and justice down the road. 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 imovtihzc qualities,ivesto to why not b human beings to have better geneticmean legallyr some time. so some scho■frs legal argued that there should be legal incentives fhe right sorto get married. there were, for example, better baby contests where the purported genetic quality of infants wod be rewarded with cash or apple pies and of coursethere much more interesting what's called negative eugenics, right? using law to prevent the, quot m access to marriage, on the theory that if people werefor example, suffering from sexually transmitted infections, they shouldn't get married. reformers quickly realized that people could have children anhave sex without getting married and

turned instead to compulsory, steriliz zatn laws which are on the books were on the books in more than 30 state t includig 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 muchgecalifornia, for examn targeted persons who were vwed as sexually promiscuous on the theory that sexual pa9miscuity particularly in women, was a sign of feeble or genetic overwhelmingly, the people targeted by these laws were already in state institutions. they were overwhelmingly low income people. initially, they were 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 into majority of sterilization victims of

sterilization moved south. the eugenics movement changed the status quo when it came to abortion and contraception a few ways. se, the eugenics movement was compatible with what had come before because just has been the comst. the message of the eugenics movement the role of the state to control who and how, albeit a different way. the claim ofutm eugenic of eugenicists was not moral. it was.k's was, or even it in scientific expertise, genics else. argument went about who should reproduce. theth idea eugenicists was that more good and in fact that certain it may make sense for certain people not to have at all or not to have childr, and cost of havt the state, was something that the state take an interest in. it was at thisim 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, who began her career in 19 en connecting birth control to socialism transition in part to in trying to enlist were at the time enjoyed popular backing across the ideological spectrum. everyone from conservative catholic activists to members of congress themselves as supporters ofugenics. and sanger, who was deeply pragmatic, believed that her cause, which she saw as an individual right to birth control, would be more popular if it were embraced by eugenicists, too, some of her colleagues, including mary, were denette, who's pictured to her, rejected this idea courting eugenicists and instead framed birth control as an issue dennett argued that it was

unreasonable tonder the comstock act, that americans were incompetent to decide for 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 kind of information. the fight for birth control gained outside of white community. two prominentw.e.b. dubois and h terrell, who's pictured here, ñlin their communities, even as birth control, like ties to eugenics. the birth control movement, the most part, didn't embrace idea of a right to abortion at all, although precisely what it was embracing complicated at a time when no knew how drugs worked. so common that were market at■g@ the time like a miss lydia of pinkham's remedy, forxamp contrd

abortifacients, and many viewed them as placebos. that didn't work at all so precisely a right to birth control would entitle youñc to s ambiguous, even if no one was endorsing abortion on its face. in ft, anything, sanger argued that abortions which were dangerou the■ç time one of the leading sources of maternal and morbidity would result part because access to contraception was denied. there had also been an unspoken consensus about how criminal abortion laws would be implemented era overwhelmingly n left to discretion of physicians 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 mortality and■y so upshot tendeo

be that physicians were r prosecuted for abortion unless a patient actually died were prosecuted using the dying the patient themselves as competent practitionersrosecuted at, and even those who did face prosecution and often weren't facing long sentences and sometimesr prison ended. after the 19s, pretty dramatically for a few different reasons. fi was longer easy to deny that abortions the 1930s rates of contraceptive and abortion use increased depression. abortion were still unsafe, as was pregnancy and entire hospital wards were dedicated to people suffe tabortions. so the idea that abortion is just not possible to at the same time, prosecutors

began to see abortion is more of atermath of world war two, at a time when, americans were encouraged to have bigger families as part of the war effort and the of the country after the pro baby and having big family was seen as kind of antidote to union had legalized abortion andhe soviet union's embrace of smaller families and working women was seen as sturbing utterly un-american and un-christian. and conversely,bo as distinctly un-american and -e era that abortion providers began■ deeming abortin providers excuse me, prosecutors began deeming abortion providers racketeers term that was often used for organized. and on occasion this wcurate bes illegal, there organized crime figures in certainre involved io abortion. but most often it was ad to anyn provider, including grandmothers

and other people helping family members have abortions. and as this happened, began occurring there were also questions about how this was intersecting the politics of illegitimacy era people whoo wee white were often sent to maternitychildren adopted by oto 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 lapsing for morality in the same way or were punished in different ways. so this an era as the 1960s began en like began considering proposals to sterilized ppl who, had more than one child out of wedlock overme target welfare recipients who are people color. and wh discussion out of wedlock pregnancies became a

different way of expressing racial animus, all of this was in the background when it finally i think you began to see reprint action as a constitutional right, this case, griswold versus connecticut began with a mini comstock law, the mo kind, the era. connecticut had a ban on married people's use contraception, and this was not a ban on sale or manufacture. it b the only one of its kind in this a time after the fda had ■cgl and millions of americans used it. kthe parties in griswold had tried to get the supreme court to take the case on theconstituw before and had failed because the courtadlaw anymore. so griswold and her colleagues engineed essentially starting an nd them were violating the law and then freely volunteering lots of information while being that could be used in

bsequently t court in griswold versus connecticut wn connecticut's law and so on the ground that there a not spelled in the text of the document, but a right th protect married couples, right to use contraception. at the time, griswold was decided, it was unclear how much this was a decision about court described as an institution older than the bl rights. and to what extent this was a decision about the importance or thehñm■ privacy, one had any tie one engaged in sex or sex in particular, and at the time, because of the ambig.people sup. so, for example, large catholic activists supported griswold as a 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 had a very different landscape e

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 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 thing to a feminist president. bottom of pioneering lawyer and civil rights activist, co-founded the national or women with friedan. and within a year of the to argue that reproductive rights, women's rights and critically constituted panel rights. there was a bit of a fight to abortion. but after the organization did so, friedan would often describe abortion, as she put it, as a woman'sivil and would argue that there could be no full personhood for women untilthe ar reproduction. radical often

based on college campuses like e even more bold feminist arguments for access to both abortion and contraception often and often, particularly when activists of color were involved frame those inteelat discrete rights that could be understood in isolation. it wasn' liberation movement alone that was pushing to change policies on birth l 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 from the eugenics movement right? some of the organizations founded as part of the tion control movement were founded by eugenicists who recognized that they could no penly be eugenicists in the united states after. the second world war, when 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 fewer people had children. full stop. this argumt lot of support in a way that eugenics didn't. so some eugenicists believed th if people had fewer children altogether. the quality of the population would improve. so this would be sort of a backdoor way of achieving eugenic goals. but others were attracted to population control movement for different reasons. at the height of the cold war, 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 soviet union on college campuses population control was often synonymous with an emerging envinmen movement. the idea that more people will consume more resto environmentar more climate change, and many feminists on college campus saw population as a way to talk abrights for women. so you often had a big, diverse movement, sometimes but agreein,

and abortion had to change. there was a pretty vibrantdebatk 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■y■hargument prot people offered in thetion and cn 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 pushedsuggesting that women in e black community needed wanted access to abortion and contraception, and that abortion

in. contraception would help people of color equality rather than undermining the struggle of equality and framing the black genocide argument asp sexist one, if not a racist too. s at this time, by the 1960s that statesthat horatio so ntury. and california was the epicenter anthony violence and pictured at e of thf 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 st often that violence and and his colleagues argued was tha happening any wat they were unsafe.

unsupervised in back alleys, and that it was far if abortions were going to anyway, that they occur safely and in therapeutic activt mcguinness, who was pictured at the top your scree, another in california's abortion feminist arguments. reform, too. but movement gained some steam interestingly, not in states like california, but in e first to consider abortion reform like georgia became among the first to adopt this model. anab reform prompted the formation of a new mov anti-abon movement of the 19th century. 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,startc

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 .

initially fighting for the status quo, righfighting for crt 19th century, including laws like new hampshire's, where there was no which the anti-abortion movement fought to maintain in the new le 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 uol ballot initiatives, state legislative struggles andunched by both opp, proponents of legal abortion, which had led to sort of a stalemate. neither side had a particularly back forth moments, one of the most pronounced whice the first state to repeal all of its 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 aefeller. so the partizan politics of abortion were was that there had already been a profound cbeyondf tion. roe, of course, involved a woman named norma mccorvey, pictured here, who had already had■:l ch. she had given up for adoption and when she was pregnant on a th■cird occasion, decided that e wanted to terminate that pregnancy she consulted an attorney with whom she had worked on her past adoptions, weddington and, linda coffey, who had been looking to take up cabortion law, which lit the time life was at risk. mcwherter, of course, wanted to have an abortion not become plaintiff in a test case, but that is ulmate what happened in what her lawyers was in seeing■o roe ultimately held

that the right privacy and so expanded and significant decisions was brd enough tenco'n to terminate her pregnancy. the court suggested the decision to have an abortion was salient ss to decisions to get married, to have a child, to contraception. that these key life decisions about d intimacyprotected signie injustice harry blackman, the author of the opinion nixon a pointed to what he saw as the consequences r of an unwanted pregnancy for a pregnant person such as the health risks of pregnancy or the stigma of unwed but oftero focused the rights of physicians, suggesting thatld jointly. the patient and the physician at act thought that it was a right for a physician to choose women the court exppersonhood tn

in the relevant parts of constitution applied only postnatal and initially roe less of a big deal than you would have expected. it was not the in new york times that day, although to be fair there had just been ly johnson had just died. so it wasn't that it wasn't that weird but i don't inpeopundersto be as big of a deal himself said at the time, in his papers, he was si doing what he thought the constitution required, but also what the pollsa ght. the poll said most people think abortion is a decision between a woman and doctor recognized a right to abortion didn't mean abortion was accessible. so there there were birth control clinics all across the e when it came to abortions. the overwhelminge united statess were performed in hospitals. and somewhere between 15 and 24%

of all hospitals offered who needed access or wanted access to here near a hospital so this was the birth of the organizations like planned parenthood and the national ■kabortion rights action league raised money to create cnics bef radically groundwork for the idea that abortion was quintessentially different from birth control. quintessentially from health care, and physically isolate from either one. right. so this was the beginning of what would become a massive anti abortion protest outside of clinics, which not viewed the same hospitals in it was in this era to back from the idea of fetal personh focuse anti-abortion movement in the years after roe was they called a huma/klifeconstitution amendmt would change the meaning of rd in the 14th amendment to other an embryo, a fetus, the

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, proposition that there was a right to abortion particularly, but that fetus this anti-abortio electoral politics as the desperately struggled to find allies in congress, state legislatures who would ndment. and it ultimately brought the anti-abortion monte republican e era of ronald reagan came to the movement and the human amendment as a potential path to power, a way to peel off conservative and evgecal who had voted democratic, often for reasons economics, but who be

convinced to change the republican party as a result of the abortion it was in era, too, that the anti-abortion menpon ay excuse me, consequential strategy the what we would think of as kind of incremental ism where death of a thousand cuts and this began with the hyde hyde amendment was the brainchild of henry hyde a long term who proposed that medicaid patients should be unable to get reimbursed for most or all. and at the time, the hyde amendment is part of an appropriations bill passed with the votes of both democrats and republicans at a time when abortion rights was already becoming democrat a cause. why that was in part was because peoplen th■4debelieved, the supt would take care of it and strike down hyde amendment. because was already less emphasis put on access for low income people would or really ought to be the case. the hyde amendment passed in

1976, and it had immediately significant impacts, a large percentage of peopg abortion in the 1970s in the united states were medicaid ts, and by most estimates, upwards of 200ents eo otherwise have had abortions a result of hyde amendment. the hyde amendment alsowould han intricate network of abortion money to seek out abortion. and that in some ways is what became of the grass roots of the reproductivevement in the immediate aftermath of roe, they all went into service and access work,:■i w of i think explains the lack somewhat of a visib g in the post roe era. there was reproductive justice movement to that argued that what had become the so-called pro-choice movement which to protect the right recognized and?

this movement, in part, took its an epidemic of sterilization abuse. women of color. in thispeople of color were being involuntarily, sometimes under sterilization laws, sometimes no legal authority at all. physicians 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 of women at some preproductive e sterilized, often with estionable no consent. and so activists like helen rodrig■iz re, argued that any mt for reproductive rights had to be not just aom the government t a right, aov protect using thee+

the government. right. a movement that would say the government should guarantee informeduld guarantee the means for people want to have children, to have them. and rodriguez and her colleagues founded organizations like thabi issueclaressa or two and two, fe but none of these groups succeeded, in slowing down the atta on abortion rights and other forms of reproductive heare, where that attack turned ironically involved two improbable things. sandra day o'connor in akron, ohio, don't usually go together so. akron, ohio was the site of an by anti-abortion movement, as a model for the rest of constitution ultimately came before the suprem o'connor had become ronald reagan's first supreme court

e. the anti-abortion movement hated sandra day o'connor. they thought she was a supporter of abortion rights and a feminist and generally just gross and she saw, to their surprise, dissented from an court striking down this akron ordinance, not to say the ordinance was constitutional, but to say that roe itself was fatally flawed and at ie itself was fatally flawed, it was at least deserving of some reconsideration. so the anti-abortion movement, which been utterly unable to get constitutional off the ground, needed a plan b, it was unable to get thatonstitutional amendment off the ground. when ronald reagan was in power, when republicans controlled■d bh houses of congress, and when it as if republicans had fared betterelections, there was stilo prospect of a personhood and no prospect even of agreement on a second best solution for the ti-abortion movement. so if there was going to be no personhood amendment, what could there be? l of the supreme court and with control of thed be the upholdinf

more laws, the hyde amendment, which would mean to that would mean very little or less. and less in practice, a right that people would feel less compelled or energized to defe. and with that, ultimately to in the long term could a sme woulde fetus as a person in a way that an american publ t principle ner might. and so with this, the an-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 itsthñg an emergine legal movement. it's hardhistorian howib to thes or overwhelmingly the justices that someone like richard nixon selected were themselves legal, the bench and the bar on the sas

of conventional legal. this was to change the founding of the federalist socty by three law students in the ear 's founders believed that this liberal liberal orthodoxy stifled debate on law school campus. d society, a center of power. ronald reagan overwhelmingly, early years of the group, looked to federalist society advisors and speers tosd nominate juds. bur the anti-abortion movement, this was not an unqualified goodgin with. not everyone in the federalist society liked the anti-abortion movement or agrthal and other members of the federalist society just thoughtextreme to w brean•ñqor affiliated with christianity to be worthy of partnering with. for a group that wanted to create a legal elite. this convincedhe anti-abortion

groups that they needed to find common ground. d example to look for strategies that woulrely morhistory or even ori. and this changed arguments agnstpz abortion in ways that are still consequential today. it also led 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 rather than viewing the personhood of the fetus as something that people. instead, the argument crime, just as were others in ronald way to protect the rights of a fetal person was to exact retribution against who wronged the fetal person. it was this backdrop that the supreme court decided case pland in 92. at this time, everyone expected the prem 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 before viability or the point at which survival outside of the womb was possible. casey also held that laws were permissible, though if they 'bortion, unduly burden access abortion. this seemed to be a pretty standard. and indeed the court in casey upheld e casey also focused the anti-abortion movement in a new direction on the argument that if women and other pregnant people were abortions second victims because opponents believed it if the supreme 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 institutes and journals to publish claims that abortion increased the risk ofst-traumatr and breast cancer. it was in this era, too, a more

vigorous and long lasting reproductive justice movement formed, led by, like sister song members, of which are pictured here the reproductive justice movement pushed back against protected from abortion particularly by saying one this was an argument 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■6 that people were having healthy pregnancies and safe experiences raising rience of abortion, when, if anything, the opposite was true, whenality ank of access to contraception and sex education and health care writ large in communities of color that had to be too, while contending that it was not enough to simply pursue abortion rights that a more capacious right or agenda for reproductive 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 christian interpreted in line with christian principles. groups like the■÷ alliance defending freedom, founded in 1993,budgets and reach that bego reshape thfight agait ■ abortion, proceeded moving it away from a single issue, abortion and a broader kind of connected. religious liberty, the separation of church and state, lgbtq rights and more. the supreme court intervened another time before dobbs, upholding a ban on so-called partial birth abortion in. 2007 and the anti-abortion movement itself heavily in issun finance, believing that if more money flowed into american politics, more republicans would be electedinfluence over the ren party, making itand ensure thate

and in fact, that's what happened in dogs in 2022, when the■d court, faced with a 15 wek abortion ban and dispute in the lower courts about theconstitut, 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 gs, of course,d lots of attention from historians for lots of reasons one of which is its ignoring of amongt what history and tradition actually say. but of course, stubbs other potl challenges to reproductive litigation that point to where some of this history 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 t the bottom in amanda's roski

here are arguingans with except, either have to be interpreted broadly or that those exceptions fact violate state constitutions. so this litigation is continuing in states like texas, kentucky, tennessee, 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 say if this i dobbs is ushered, it's unworkable. two counts in two us supreme court cases on abortion in one term. after dobbs ufederal courts wes game, one of which involves fda's authority to approve mifepristone on a drug used in more than half of 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■t items. today, there's another case involving the federal eenr act, which the biden has argued

requires access for abortion to patients in certain medical emergencies. this claim this case also involves the claim by states like texas and idaho that federal actually treats an unborn child california may be prohibited from providing y abortions because of the federal law rather than required to do as we saw just in the past few wks, there's the ongoing struggle for fetal personhood. if you were wondering what is the next roe v wade for the anti-abortion movement, it was and always been fetal onhe way, the campaign for fetal personhood has intensified considerably. it's reflected in state laws, recognizing the personhood of fetuses for personal purposes like taxd support laws, and recently a decision of the alabama supreme purposes of state's wrongful death of a minor law, a frozen embryo is a child person, and that therefore suitsfobrought ah

suit. these claims aire all designed eventually to return, ironically, not to congress, not tators, 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 supporreprodu. and so instead groups have long complained a antidumping courts interjecting themselves into questions. reproduction are instead seeking out courts and arguing that as a matter of the constitutio'origis to abortion, potenti a ivf poteo contraception is itself unconstitutional. so when ask me sort of my favorite question is people usy states, me, when is this gog to be over? and answer is probably never but i think one of the other things that's clear in the history of reproductive rights and justice is there's always very much been a story about the

health odemocracy. right. who gets to vote whether you get to vote at all how money is w you vote? and so i think in terms of how this turns out a good baromer will be, how healthy is the democracy in the first place? so i'lltop 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. ah, we're not. oh,yeah just a sec. over here. so again, again.

but. so just way of transparency. mary chancellor at uc davis and a reproductive penatal epidemiol. just who is thrilled. thank you. uc. so one is thorough we comprehensive this was and it's am talk and delivered exceptionally well the the one thing i didn'tve worked with in field is dolores huerta. against sterilization. mmmm. of latinos. particular in relationship to movement. and i wondered if you had anythingsase those was another one of these s. time in the 1960s and seventies, that again particularly in

as was the site of a lot of forced sterilization, said a lot ofinte sixties and seventies in california just as was happening in other states overwhelmingly forcible sterilizations from bein problem primarily for low income white who had been more exposed to thee state to being a problem overwhelmingly particularly latino women in the united states and in california particular. this, the move toward a reproductive justi movementbecas people who are puerto rican. in mississippi. people were latina. and so it wasn't people of color who were leading a reproductive justice movement, but they were often the ones saying a reproductive right does't mean anything. it presupposes that you don't ever need the protongovernment. sometimes you may need the government to support not just to leave you alone. that because people like those in california were experiencing that firsthand, right?

they the privilege of just saying, okay, the government has gone away. now i'm. all set. that wasn't their experience. thank you. oh, time's up.e. okay. well, thanks so.

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