• Show Notes

Who gets to decide the future of reproductive rights?

In this encore presentation of a Now & Then episode originally broadcast in September 2021, Heather and Joanne discuss the history of abortion from the colonial period to the present: the surprising availability of abortion until the mid-19th century, the physician-led campaign to ban abortion, and the GOP’s decision in the early 1970s to embrace the “pro-life” movement. 

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Executive Producer: Tamara Sepper; Editorial Producer: David Kurlander; Audio Producer: Matthew Billy; Theme Music: Nat Weiner; CAFE Team: Adam Waller, David Tatasciore, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, and Jake Kaplan. Now & Then is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

REFERENCES & SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS:

  • Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman, “Processing Roe’s Reversal in Real Time,” CAFE, 6/26/2022

TEXAS

  • “Texas Senate Bill 8,” Legiscan, 2021
  • Shannon Najmabadi, “Gov. Greg Abbott signs into law one of nation’s strictest abortion measures, banning procedure as early as six weeks into a pregnancy,” Texas Tribune, 5/19/2021
  • Allyson Waller, “Texas has banned abortions at about six weeks. But the time frame for pregnant patients to get one is less than two,” Texas Tribune, 9/8/2021
  • Amy Howe, “Supreme Court Leaves Texas Abortion Ban in Place,” SCOTUSblog, 9/2/2021
  • Jon Michaels and David Noll, “We Are Becoming a Nation of Vigilantes,” New York Times, 9/4/2021
  • Ian Milhiser, “Texas’s radical anti-abortion law, explained,” Vox, 9/2/2021
  • Heather Cox Richardson, “Letter from American” about SB 8, Substack, 9/2/2021

QUICKENING

  • Olga Khazan, “Bringing Down the Flowers: The Controversial History of Abortion,” The Atlantic, 3/2/2016
  • Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village,” JSTOR, 1991
  • Lauren MacIvor Thompson, “Women Have Always Had Abortions,” New York Times, 12/13/2019
  • Jessica Ravitz, “The surprising history of abortion in the United States,” CNN, 6/27/2016

SLAVERY

  • Angela Davis, “Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights,” UCSD, 1981
  • Loucynda Jensen, “Searching the Silence: Finding Black Women’s Resistance to Slavery in Antebellum U.S. History,” McNair Online Journal, 2006

CRIMINALIZING ABORTION

  • Michele Goodwin, “The Racist History of Abortion and Midwifery Bans,” ACLU, 7/1/2020
  • Erin Blakemore, “The Criminalization of Abortion Began as a Business Tactic,” History.com, 5/15/2019
  • Geoffrey Stone, “‘Sex and the Constitution’: Anthony Comstock and the reign of the moralists,” The Washington Post, 3/23/2017
  • Ron Charles, “America’s old and new abortion debate,” The Washington Post, 8/1/2014
  • Kate Manning, “Abortion Wars, the First Time Around,” New York Times, 6/5/2009
  • Katha Politt, “The Notorious Life of a Nineteenth-Century Abortionist,” The Nation, 10/9/2013
  • Stacie Taranto, “How abortion became the single most important litmus test in American politics,” The Washington Post, 1/22/2018
  • Jacob Muñoz, “The Powerful, Complicated Legacy of Betty Friedan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique,’” Smithsonian Magazine, 2/4/2021

1970s BACKLASH