USA – How Black Leaders Formed the Reproductive Justice Movement

Black leaders were critical to the formation of the modern reproductive rights movement. Black History Month provides an opportunity to pause and remember some oft-forgotten leaders who shaped the movement in the years before Roe v. Wade.

Feb 6, 2024
by FELICIA KORNBLUH

Florynce “Flo” Kennedy remains one of the most unfairly forgotten contributors to reproductive politics since the 1960s. Kennedy was an early member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the women’s civil rights organization founded in part to pursue the agenda Black and white feminist lawyers Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood outlined in their essay, “Jane Crow and the Law” (1965).

Kennedy graduated from Columbia Law School in 1951, disillusioned with a legal mainstream that in her view demanded “an almost mathematical mind, the kind of person who can walk past a pool of blood and think, ‘What a beautiful shade of red.’”

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/02/06/black-history-women-reproductive-justice-flo-kennedy-dollie-lowther-robinson-percy-sutton/

USA – How the first abortion speak-out revolutionized activism

Fifty years ago, under the banner of a group known as Redstockings, women gathered in a West Village basement to share their abortion stories, a radical act that ripples through movements today.

BY JOY PRESS
OCTOBER 19, 2022

“I can tell you the psychological and sociological effect the law has had on me: It’s made me angry!” a woman yelled across the crowded auditorium of the New York City Health Department.

It was February 13, 1969, and a phalanx of female protesters had dramatically interrupted the staid proceedings of New York State’s Joint Legislative Committee on the Problems of Public Health. The issue under discussion was whether or not to liberalize the state’s 86-year-old criminal abortion statute and allow for legal abortion in cases where a woman’s physical or mental health was at risk, or when she was a victim of rape or incest.

Continued: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/10/abortion-stories-speakout

19.10.2022

Commentary

Featured

Abortion: Tell It Like It Is

Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz

Barbara Kaminsky

Center for Constitutional Rights

Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion

history of abortion activism

National Organization for Women

New York Radical Women

New Yorkers for Abortion Law Repeal

Redstockings

Redstockings abortion stories

The personal is political

Thomas Laverne

women's abortion stories

America Almost Took a Different Path Toward Abortion Rights

Roe v. Wade was never expected to be the case that made history.

By Emily Bazelon
May 20, 2022

For three days in January 1970, they filled the 13th floor of the federal courthouse in Manhattan, women of all ages crowded into a conference room, sitting on the floor, spilling into the hallway. Some brought friends or husbands. One nursed a baby. Another was a painter who also taught elementary school. A third had gone to Catholic school. They’d come to give testimony in the case of Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, the first in the country to challenge a state’s strict abortion law on behalf of women.

The witnesses in the courthouse were among 314 people, primarily women, brought together by a small team of lawyers, led by Florynce Kennedy and Nancy Stearns, to set up a legal argument no one had made before: that a woman’s right to an abortion was rooted in the Constitution’s promises of liberty and equal protection. New York permitted abortion only to save a woman’s life. Kennedy and Stearns wanted the court to understand how risking an illegal procedure or carrying a forced pregnancy could constrict women’s lives in ways that men did not experience.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/magazine/roe-v-wade-abortion-rights.html

20.05.2022

Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz

Coat Hanger Farewell

Diane Schulder Abrams

Equal Protection Clause

Griswold v. Connecticut

Justice Harry Blackmun

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey

United States v. Virginia

women's abortion stories

USA – Unhelpful Arguments That Downplay the Importance of Abortion on Demand

Book excerpt: Unhelpful Arguments That Downplay the Importance of Abortion on Demand

Jenny Brown
Sept 30, 2019

The first shot in the feminist abortion wars was fired in 1969 in a New York City Health Department auditorium, where a panel of male psychologists, doctors, clergy, and lawyers (and one woman, a Sister Mary Patricia) debated exceptions to New York’s law forbidding abortion. They were discussing whether a woman should be allowed to have an abortion if her health was in danger, or if she had been raped, or if she had already given birth to four children.

A shout came up from a woman in the audience: “Now let’s hear from the real experts on abortion!” Then, “Repeal the abortion law, instead of wasting more time talking about these stupid reforms!” Then, “We’ve waited and waited while you have held one hearing after another. Meanwhile, the baby I didn’t want is two years old!” More women stood to object and testify. “Why are fourteen men and only one woman on your list of speakers—and she a nun?” The committee members “stared over their microphones in amazement,” wrote Edith Evans Asbury in the New York Times. The chair tried to shush the women, arguing that everyone was really on the same side: “You’re only hurting your own case.”

Continued: https://jezebel.com/5-unhelpful-arguments-that-downplay-the-importance-of-a-1838619064