Black women have been pivotal to the reproductive rights movement
Abortion is not a white girl issue.
Renee Bracey Sherman has spent years debunking that message. The reproductive justice activist and Evanston native is the founder and co-executive director of We Testify, an abortion storytelling group with a lens around race, class and gender identity.
Common fallacies include: Abortion is worse than slavery. White feminists are corrupting Black women. Abortion is eugenics.
"When I first started sharing my abortion story, I was often on panels with all white women. It was ignoring the context of the unique misogynoir, the intersection of stigma and racism that people experienced and made it difficult for them to share their abortion stories," Bracey Sherman told me.
She’s co-author of “Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve.” We were in conversation this week at Call & Response Bookstore in Hyde Park on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the U.S. in 1973.
The book isn’t about how Roe came to be or how the U.S. Supreme Court overturned abortion as a Constitutional right in 2022, leaving states like Illinois to enshrine protections as other states prohibited the procedure. "Liberating Abortion" continues the We Testify mission, of centering people of color who have received abortions and those who have provided them.
"It's important that we claim our space in this conversation," Bracey Sherman said.
And highlight the full picture of who was in the abortion movement.
Civil rights activist Dr. T.R.M. Howard is known for searching for evidence in the 1955 Mississippi murder of Emmett Till and helping the family. But did you know he performed abortions right here on the South Side of Chicago and considered his clinic to be a part of civil rights activism?
"Liberating Abortion" also chronicles racist policies that politicized the procedure. That wasn’t always the case.
Even Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin understood abortion as a private matter.
Battle we’re still fighting
Before Roe legalized abortion, a network of women in Chicago created an underground collective known as The Janes. They counseled women and operated clandestine abortion clinics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Back then, women died from botched abortions using coat hangers.
Few Black women volunteers engaged in this radical work, risking arrests and home raids; Sakinah Shannon Ahad did, and "Liberating Abortion" tells her story. Shannon Ahad’s counseling presence soothed other women. Then she opened up her high-rise apartment three days a week for illegal abortions. Her 10-year-old daughter sometimes passed out vanilla sandwich cookies or Kool-Aid to the women. Abortion stigma didn’t exist in their family.
Post-Jane, Shannon Ahad opened three clinics on the South Side that offered abortion.
I asked her this week to reflect on her work in today’s context of abortion restrictions — and resistance.
"Now I'm too old to protest. I'm not gonna open another clinic, but I feel like the work still needs to be continued because it's still a battle that we're fighting," said Shannon Ahad, who uses social media to talk about abortion.
“I’ve been trying to keep people informed, keep them educated and kind of pass the torch to the younger people, the younger women — reiterating that it's okay to tell the stories. You don't have to walk around with the 'A' on your chest,” she said.
Bracey Sherman and Shannon Ahad are unapologetic about their abortions. And the fight for reproductive justice isn’t over for them. While Illinois boasts some of the strongest abortion rights protections in the country, it has been hard for advocates who wrestle with what a second President Donald Trump administration has in store. In emails, the Chicago Abortion Fund and Planned Parenthood continue their fight for abortion protections.
But Planned Parenthood of Illinois has announced staff reductions and clinic closures (not those that provide abortions) because of “the need to create a sustainable future after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.” Since 2022, the group said it’s seen a 47% increase in overall abortion care patients, and in out-of-state patients from 40 states. The increase in patient volume coupled with low reimbursement rates from insurers has strained operations.
Abortion is typically framed as reproductive rights. So what does liberation look like?
“We've got to keep doing it. I always feel energized to have conversations — even in moments where there's a lot of grief and despair. I want people to be able to gather and look around them to see that their neighbors care about this work,” Bracey Sherman said. “There are people who want to make a change and start really thinking about how we imagine and build towards a different world, which we're gonna have to do. White supremacy is the constant that we're always up against.”
Natalie Y. Moore is a senior lecturer at Northwestern University and author of “The Billboard,” a play about abortion.
Send letters to letters@suntimes.com
Get Opinions content delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.