7/18/2025
by Carmen Rios, Ms. Magazine
Podcast:  63 minutes

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

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

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

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/18/abortion-ban-attack-feminist-women-history-white-supremacy/