The A Files - Episode 1

EPISODE 1 – UNAPOLOGETIC BLACKNESS, UNAPOLOGETIC ABORTIONS

In their first episode, Renee and Regina take on some of the most common myths about abortion—and trace the relationship between anti-Blackness and abortion bans in the U.S., and how white supremacy helped get us into this mess we’re in. Plus, they talk about their own personal paths to reproductive justice, and introduce There Are Other Books, a segment about a book about abortion that isn’t The Handmaid’s Tale – this time, it’s Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. 

Renee Bracey Sherman: Abortion access is in the absolute bad place right now, Regina. It’s not good.

Regina Mahone: It really isn’t, Renee. Someone should really make a podcast about that.

RBS: Should we do it? Let’s do it. Hello and welcome to The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion. A podcast from The Meteor. I’m Renee Bracey Sherman. I had an abortion and I write about it.

RM: And I’m Regina Mahone. I had an abortion and I write and edit about it. Renee and I are friends who talk about abortion.

RBS: A lot. Someone once told me that I say the word abortion more in an hour than they had heard in their entire lifetime.

RM: Well, this podcast is going to blow their mind.

RBS: In the greatest way.

RM: Definitely.

RBS: And you’re in really good hands listeners. Regina has been editing and writing about reproductive justice and abortion access for a decade.

RM: And Renee has been writing, researching, and organizing on behalf of people who have abortions for over a decade. She is the Beyoncé of abortion storytelling and has the Ivy Park from the queen herself to prove it.

RBS: Over the years we’ve learned so much about the history and politics of abortion that we really just want to share it with all of you. So Regina tell the folks, what’s this podcast about?

RM: Good question. So on The A Files we’re uncovering the history of abortion that you probably were never taught in school or even at a pro-choice rally. And there’s a reason for that. But we’ll get to that later. Each episode, a guest will join us to unpack another layer of the abortion conversation that has been completely overlooked or erased. Since the Dobbs decision, there has been so much interest in abortion with so many people talking about it, which is great, but also spreading misinformation and lies.

RBS: The bad history, the wrong history. It’s truly ridiculous.

RM: Really.

RBS: But seriously though, the misinformation impacts the stories that we’re all told about those of us who have abortions, and it’s repeated by politicians and reporters, and it’s just all wrong. It fuels the culture of stigma around us. But I promise we’ll get to that in another episode. The A Files is here to set the record straight.

RM: Great. And we want to provide an alternate vision for how abortion fits into people’s lives in this podcast, which is why it’s so important to both of us that we use a reproductive justice framework because it really does center the whole person.

RBS: Yeah. Absolutely. But real quick, Regina, before we keep going, let’s talk to the folks about what reproductive justice is, so we’re all on the same page.

RM: Definitely. So SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective defines the framework as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. So Renee, let’s talk about how we both came into the reproductive justice movement and how we found ways to apply it to the work that we do.

RBS: Yeah. I found reproductive justice, well, really, I’d like to say I fell in love with reproductive justice more than a decade ago. I was working with queer and trans youth to support them as they were lobbying at the state capital in California. And it was really beautiful to see them share their stories about what it was like to organize with other queer and trans youth in schools, but also how school policies weren’t protecting them. And I didn’t think it was right for me as a cis straight person to work with these young people to ask them to share their stories, but I wasn’t sharing my own story. So I felt, okay, I have a thing that’s living inside me that I’m afraid to talk about. I should be able to talk about it.

So I started to share my abortion story and I met so many other people who had abortions and it was really wonderful. But at the time, the organization I was sharing my abortion story with wanted me to play up all these justifications as to why I should have had an abortion and downplay the beliefs I had about how race played a really important part in my story.

RM: What didn’t they want you to talk about?

RBS: Oh, it was really weird. They wanted me to talk about how I was in a bad relationship and all those things and really play up the sadness of why I should have an abortion. And those things were true. But I felt like they traded on a lot of stereotypes that were anti-Black and also just they didn’t want me to talk about being biracial and having some white privilege and having the privileges of being able to have money to pay for an abortion when some people can’t. So they really didn’t want to talk about what they called the politics of abortion. And I thought about politics as in Democrats versus Republicans at the time, but it really meant that they didn’t want to talk about power and privilege and oppression and classism and all of those systems and how they impacted abortion access. And as a biracial Black woman, I felt like I just couldn’t do that.

And I found people who were reproductive justice activists, and when they talked to me about how we can talk about abortion access and how race and class and gender identity and location and income, all of it impacts our lives, that’s when I felt at home. I remember when I found the word intersectionality, like, oh my gosh, this is a word for my life. But I didn’t feel like that was the way I was being taught to think about or share about abortion. So it really became this moment of, oh my gosh, I can do this differently. And then I would often be on panels and I was the only person of color sharing an abortion story.

But the reality is that the majority of people who have abortions are people of color. So I felt like why are we not being encouraged to share our abortion stories, but also the larger reproductive justice principles of making sure that all of us have the ability to decide if, when and how to grow our families and to be able to do it free from state sanctioned violence, coercion, and just in this beautiful reproductive justice world that we could create. I just wanted to be in that beautiful world. What about you, Regina?

RM: I love that question. Well, it really started with my abortion. When I got pregnant, I immediately knew that I would have an abortion. I didn’t even really have to think about it. I just knew that’s what I was going to do. It was maybe four months after I’d started dating my boyfriend at the time, and it was just so new. I had no idea if it was going to work out. I was also 29 and just having a great time being young in New York City. But the main thing was that I knew that I didn’t want to become a Black single mother if my relationship didn’t work out. But after my abortion, I realized it was almost like a light switched on that I did actually want to become a mom. And that was really confusing for me. If I knew that I did want an abortion, why did I also suddenly want to be a mom and why did it seem like neither was a good choice for me?

And it just seemed like everything I had learned about reproductive rights up to that point was really inadequate for the moment I was experiencing. And it was only after I was exposed to the reproductive justice framework that all the pieces came together. And I want to give a shout-out to Luz Rodriguez, one of the mothers of the reproductive justice movement. She was my colleague at the time at the Foundation Center, a nonprofit organization that helps other nonprofits find grants from foundations. I was leaving that job to start a new job as an editor at Rewire. At that time it was called RH Reality Check, but it’s still kicking.

Rewire News Group they focus on reporting on abortion rights unapologetically as healthcare. But Luz at the time when I was leaving gave me a copy of the book Undivided Rights, and it’s a book that features different communities who are part of the people of color umbrella, so to speak, explaining how reproductive justice as a framework is necessary for each of these groups. And she also gave me a stack of papers and newsletters on reproductive justice with post-it notes, which still have that pile of papers next to my desk, and I’ve read through them. And I’m just so grateful for having someone really hold my hand and say, “You may have heard of reproductive rights, but there’s more in reproductive justice as you go on to do this work.” And it really did connect the dots for me around my experience with having an abortion, wanting to become a mom, but also feeling like it was probably easier to have an abortion than to become a mom in our society, and really unpacking a lot of that for me. But let me not get ahead of myself.

RBS: So we were both on these separate paths, but then one day they converged.

RM: So I mentioned Rewire. While I was an editor there, you were part of the Echoing Ida Writing Collective. It was a group of Black women and non-binary writers who supported one another in publishing articles about reproductive rights and justice issues. And I remember it wasn’t just that I was starting to edit you and get to know you through your writing, but I was at the time going to a lot of conferences and I always saw you at them. And every once in a while I’d be like, oh, Renee after an event or something, what are you doing after this? And I remember once in Atlanta just sitting on your couch in your hotel room and just hanging out.

So at one point I was in DC where you live, and I reached out to see if you wanted to meet for dinner. Because I thought to myself, well, Renee is definitely someone that I want to be friends with, so let’s go ahead and just start getting together every time that we’re in the same city. And I’m so grateful that we did have dinner that one night and then also just have continued to get to know each other, love on each other and you even… One of my favorite things which you may not know about Renee is that if you go visit her, she may run you a relaxing bath. She will put on spa music without you even asking for it, and just really set the vibes because she wants people to just feel like their best selves all the time.

RBS: I do have a big love of relaxation and abortion storytelling. Those are my things. Okay, but can we tell the story of the canoe?

RM: Yes, but you have to tell it because you do such a great job of telling it.

RBS: Okay. A couple of years ago we were at a retreat at The Wing, rest in peace The Wing. And we were sitting in this canoe on this beautiful lake and talking about what is it that we wanted to do next with our lives. And I asked you what you wanted and you said, “Well, I want to write a book.” And I said, “I want to write a book.” And we talked about what we wanted our books to be about. And I wanted to talk about Black motherhood and the way in which Black people are able to access healthcare overall, reproduction, all of those things, parenting and your journey. And I wanted to write about Black and Brown people’s experiences with abortion. And I remember looking at you and we were paddling, and you turned around and I said, “Hey, Regina, do you want to write a book with me?” And then you said…

RM: Yes.

RBS: So now we’re writing a book together, which we’re in the process of doing right now. But also we have a podcast.

RM: Yes. And the rest is history as they say. Well, not really because obviously we’re working on the book and the podcast. But we are here and we do have a lot to cover today. We’re going to be talking about unapologetic abortions and unapologetic Blackness, and then Renee has some thoughts out of a book she read recently.

RBS: I do. It’s called Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. But we’ll get to that later on. First off, let’s talk about what’s going on. People like us and all of you listening are doing all that we can to show up for our loved ones who need abortions, and actually all of you who need abortions in this trash heap of a mess. None of this is easy and it’s really exhausting and super demoralizing. But that’s actually by design. It’s designed to break us down and to keep us from achieving a future of reproductive justice.

RM: One of the ways people might have encountered the urgency of reproductive justice is through Black Lives Matter protests. The issue of Black people and children. Children being killed by police is a reproductive justice issue. If Black people can’t walk to the store without being shot at or sleep in their own homes without being shot at by police, we do not have reproductive justice. But the other hard truth about reproductive justice is that without it, the needs of people of color will continue to be left out of policies. Even those pushed by Democrats.

RBS: I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this, but even some of our favorite Democrats like President Obama weren’t the most helpful, right?

RM: Right. I still can’t get over how in 2011, he went against the FDA in their decision to make Plan B available over the counter for all ages and required an age restriction for people under 18. It took us two years, so many lawsuits to make it available for everyone. And then in his signature Affordable Care Act, it includes a ban on federal funds being used for abortions unless under extremely limited circumstances, which by the way, he did to make anti-abortion Democrats happy.

RBS: What a fucking mess. I think we should probably talk about how we got here, the full history of abortion and anti-Blackness and all the things. And how and why they’re intimately connected. We’re starting with anti-Blackness because that’s how abortion bans started in the US. Abortions have been around for 4,000 years, but the first criminal laws about abortion didn’t appear until the mid 1860s. We’ll get to that point. Let’s go way back. People have been having abortions for a very long time. There’s so much research from Hippocrates and ancient Egyptians. But we also know that people have been using methods like the herbs that might be in your garden, because they’ve been passed down in our communities for thousands of years. There’s some common ones, Queen Anne’s Lace, Pennyroyal, Chamomile, and actually even okra.

RM: Oh, I love okra.

RBS: I love the story of that one. It was brought over by enslaved Black folks on the ships because it was actually easy to dry and store. But then there’s also herbs that you may not have heard of like cotton root bark or lovage or dittany. And my new favorite, the peacock flower. An early record about the peacock flower is from a German artist, the scientific illustrator and naturalist Anna Maria Sibylla Merian. She traveled alone with her daughter to South America to draw all of these flora and fauna, and she ended up publishing in this book in 1705, and the book’s called Metamorphosis. And it’s like the Bible, I guess, of flora and fauna of the time.

Anyway, she was observing the enslaved people in Suriname and how they use peacock flower seeds to have abortions. And she wrote, “The Indians who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds to abort their children so they will not become slaves like themselves. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they’re treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves.” I highlight the story because I think one, it’s really clear that people have been having abortions for a long time, but also that people were using abortion as a way to be able to get free from the colonization and the white supremacist violence that was happening in their lives. It’s both sad that that’s what they felt like they had to choose, but also they felt like, look, being able to have access to reproductive freedom was key to their freedom overall.

RM: That’s exactly what we’re talking about.

RBS: Obviously people have been having abortions for a long time. And some of the first criminal abortions started appearing in the mid 1800s. What was happening at that time? Well, Black and Brown people were getting free from being enslaved. Indigenous Native American people were being forced onto reservations. There was actually quite mass genocide by white people, and they were afraid that now that Black people were free and their children could not be property for slave owners. They were afraid of the white population dwindling.

So they started putting limits on what white women could do with their bodies. In particular, they went after abortion. The American Medical Association started talking shit about midwives, like cashit going after them, calling them all quacks. Particularly because they were providing abortions. Who were midwives at the time, a lot of them were Eastern European immigrants. They were Native American women. They were formerly enslaved Black women. They were people of the community and they were trusted. Who were the doctors? Well, they were white men.

RM: Because the AMA actually excluded Black people and women.

RBS: Right. So they basically were like, only doctors are great. These people are only doctors. The rest of them who are not letting in any way, they couldn’t possibly be good, but specifically because they provide abortions. So what they started to do was put midwives out of existence, out of business and saying that they were quacks, but then also outlawing. At one point it was any contraception, any abortion care. They made it illegal to talk about, to write about, to offer care. They criminalize people and they used the full government to put pressure on doctors to turn others because they were afraid that white people would continue to have abortions and would not be able to outpace the growth of the immigrants coming into this country and Black and indigenous people growing their families.

RM: So let me get this straight. A bunch of white doctors who didn’t have any experience delivering babies or caring for the people who deliver babies pushed out the people with the most experience, in some cases, personal experience with having babies and delivering babies just because of white supremacy?

RBS: Yeah. That is absolutely correct.

RM: Good job.

RBS: And it continued.

RM: Cool. Continue.

RBS: So they were doing all this for a hundred-something-odd years. But of course, we had the civil rights movement, we had Black people getting free, demanding, separate but equal is bullshit. There was a Native American rights movement, like women’s movement, queer movement, everyone’s demanding rights. So of course, white Christian nationalists are feeling uncomfortable and they’re losing power. Does it sound familiar?

What they decided to do was go after abortion again. At the time at the Supreme Court, they had lost Christian prayer in school. They had lost segregation of the schools through the Brown versus Board of Education, and they lost it through forced busing. So this fight that they had where they were able to keep the country segregated, they lost all of that at the Supreme Court. So they needed another issue that they could use to organize and make as a dog whistle. But they didn’t have the Jim Crow laws anymore, but they needed the Jim Crow voting lines.

Speaker 3: Good evening. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court today legalized abortions. The majority in cases from Texas and Georgia said that the decision to end a pregnancy during the first three months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government.

RBS: So in 1973, the Roe v. Wade decision happens. The Supreme Court hands this down and we’ve got the religious right that’s like, great. Let’s take that. Let’s make that our new rallying cry. We fight for life. You can’t say shit to us. You can’t call us racist because we care about life and babies, and that is what they start organizing around to build their political power once again. What was challenging is that even the pro-choice side and the left, moderates who all supported abortion, didn’t want to be on the other side of “life.” So they seeded the ground of the political right, who then used abortion as an organizing tactic to get anti-abortion politicians into office. And then what they would push in addition to abortion restrictions was also gutting of Medicaid and Medicare and housing for Black and Brown people and undermining all of the gains of the civil rights movement. And that’s what they’ve been focused on for the last 50 years.

RM: And that legacy lives on and we’re experiencing it again now. I remember Renee when we wrote our abortion stories for our book proposal. We both had written about the stigma and shame and fear of becoming Black single mothers. And yet there isn’t anything at all wrong with being a Black single mother. I was raised by one. Black single mothers are truly extraordinary humans for everything they do to support their families, ensure their safety, keep food on the table, and watch their children grow up to be healthy and thriving human beings. But our society is told that Black unwed mothers are a drain. Where do we even begin with how wrong that actually is? Black women didn’t have a legal right to their children during chattel slavery. Newborns were ripped from their mothers’ arms, much like what people have become more familiar with in the coverage of Trump’s family separation policy. But that shit began centuries ago.

When we fast-forward to today, Black children represented 20% of the foster care population in 2020, but only 14% of the total child population in this country. Rather than expand Medicare or provide health coverage that doesn’t put people into medical debt, or provide affordable child care, or allow poor and working families to have food assistance that would actually cover their grocery bills, instead of all of that, the state takes people’s kids away or stops their public benefits if they have too many kids under family cap laws. These laws are rooted in this idea that people who can’t stop having kids should be denied public assistance to feed their children. And they build off of other laws that punish Black women for being unmarried with children or for living in a house with a man who isn’t their husband. And yet even some Black women have drank the Kool-Aid of white supremacy as we’ve been talking about, to spread lies about us. Can we please talk about the panel you were on earlier this year with Catherine Davis?

RBS: No. So I was at this Harvard event for the 50th anniversary of Roe, or what would’ve been the 50th anniversary in January 2023. And one of the people they invited to speak was Catherine Davis. She is the founding member of the National Black Pro-Life Coalition. And oh my God, please do not get me started on this lady, she’s-

RM: Founding member. Wow.

RBS: Yes.

RM: Okay. Let’s play the clip.

Catherine Davis: Most of us think that all the slaves that left Africa came to America. But that’s not true. Only 388,000 slaves landed in America. By the end of slavery, we were 4 million strong because we are very fertile people.

RM: Renee, what was going through your head at that moment?

RBS: I mean, so many things. It was honestly, I was sitting there and there was a lot, I was very surprised to hear come out of her mouth, and I was trying to just disassociate and ignore a lot of it because it was quite jarring and awful. Can you imagine just talking about slavery as if it’s just like only 300,000 slaves were stolen from their land and taken to the United States to be slaves? And then talk about it as if we were at the end, 4 million people strong. I cannot think of another way to describe slavery in such an ass-backward way. Like, what? It is truly really difficult and painful to hear another Black woman minimize slavery in that way, but also justify the enslavement and rape of Black women in this language, and in language that is still being used to denigrate Black women who do have children.

She sat there and said that we are a fertile people. Black people are no more fertile than any other race. And that is dangerous, dangerous language that white colonizers use to justify why we were enslaved, why it was okay to continue to rape Black people, to force them to have children. That is terrifying. It was exhausting. And then what was really painful was that we were at Harvard University for this panel, and she and I are up there both talking and we’re being presented as if the things that we are saying as equal. And if there’s no possible way to fact check, which one of us is telling the truth. I don’t know. One of us sounds like a Nazi. The others talking about, I don’t know, making sure Black and Brown people are able to decide if when and how they can grow their families. Like what? But these ideas about reproduction for all of us stem from anti-Blackness and this hatred of Black people and Black women being able to decide what to do with their bodies and their fertility and their futures.

RM: I can’t get over that. We are very fertile people is what she said. Also to what you were saying, it justifies sterilization. Because we’re so fertile, just go ahead and sterilize us so that we don’t have more children because those children are not going to be of a good quality compared to our white counterparts, which is just wild. This goes back to something you’ve said Renee, about how abortion bans are really a white people problem.

RBS: Yeah. For sure. I actually think that abortion bans are a white people problem. That is my, I believe, really popular opinion, but whatever. I think it’s really clear that consistent polling data have shown that Black and Brown communities are absolutely in favor of maintaining legal and accessible abortion, particularly Black communities. Because we know what it looks like when we don’t have access to abortion care. We know what it looks like to have our reproduction controlled by people in power who don’t look like us. And when you look at who actually votes for politicians who run on banning abortion or supports abortion bans, it’s overwhelmingly white people. white people vote abortion bans in. That’s how they got there.

This is because as we talked about earlier, it is used as a proxy for other racist issues, and it has become the loudest racist foghorn as a way to control and shame Black people’s ability to decide if, when, and how to grow their families. But that also means that unpacking anti-Blackness and centering Black people has to be critical to the conversation around reproductive freedom, parenting and abortion access. Okay, time to move on to our last segment today. Regina, do you want to introduce it?

RM: Yes. This is a little segment we like to call, there are other books. Look, when people talk about abortion stories, the same ones come up over and over again. The Handmaid’s Tale, Cider House Rules, Revolutionary Road, that scene from Dirty Dancing–

RBS: Grey’s Anatomy. But seriously shout out to the abortion on TV queen Shonda Rhimes.

RM: The Maude episode, Juno, The Handmaid’s Tale.

RBS: The Handmaid’s Tale times 12.

RM: And we want to thank Margaret Atwood for her service. We really do. But there are other books out there with nuanced, empathetic stories about people who’ve had abortions.

RBS: Yeah. I think those books and films and shows are all great and have a lot to offer. Again, seriously, thank you Shonda Rhimes for all that you’ve done in the Shondaland, Shondaverse. But the reality is that these books that we named and others, they’re not the only depictions and fictions out there. We deserve to have stories that include abortions that aren’t always so dire and focused on the world ending because that’s all people know. The comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s exhausting, people. There are other books. A few months back I tweeted a list of current novels that featured people of color as protagonists, and I had asked, oh, am I missing any? And it was so funny because somebody tweeted back a book with a white person as a protagonist. And it’s wild because even when we’re clearly saying we want protagonists of color, people can still only name novels with white protagonists who have abortions. And again, those stories deserve to be told. But also there are other books. So in this segment, we want to talk about different narratives that are out there.

RM: Well, Renee, what book do you want to talk about today?

RBS: I want to talk about a book that I read a few months back, Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. It’s a historical fiction book based on the real life story of a nurse who sounded the alarm on the systemic sterilization of Black girls and women in the South who were poor and/or disabled, all because they were afraid that Black folks were going to have children. This book takes place in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973 shortly after Civil, who’s the main character has illegal abortion. And then it also jumps into the future in 2016. We all remember that year revisiting all of the characters. Civil meets with some young girls, Erica and India, who she’s giving them these shots that are birth control. And she starts to realize that these girls haven’t even gone through puberty. Why are they getting these free birth control shots that are being sponsored by the government? She realizes that it is part of something like the Tuskegee experiment, but basically trying to sterilize Black people in the south and she’s really uncomfortable with it.

And then she finds out that behind her back, her boss has the girls sterilized. So she goes with them to court and they have these huge lawsuits. And the story is about what happened. And I picked this one because I thought it was really interesting the mix of what was happening in 1973, the sterilization, eugenics that is not in the very far history and also has happened recently in this country, and how it’s comparative to when we as a nation in 2016 we’re on the precipice of losing legal abortion. It’s a really beautiful story, and I think it’s really this amazing opportunity for people to understand that history in a narrative form without having to read a full research book. It’s really thoughtful. I love Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s writing. I think it’s really beautiful. In college, I read one of her earlier writings called Wench. I thought her writing was just so beautiful in that book, and I was really excited when this new book Take My Hand came out. And of course, the subject matter was right up our alleys.

RM: I think it’s really powerful how the book connects the dots between different forms of reproductive oppression for people of color, because we don’t see that a lot in books about abortion. It’s always generally about the abortion, and it really takes control of the narrative and the character development. And it sounds like this book is more complicated than that. So I’m actually really looking forward to reading this one. It is on my list. And for everyone’s benefit, we’ll put the link in our show notes to where you can buy the book from your local independent bookstore because there are other books.

RBS: There are other books.

RM: Well, thank you for joining us for our first-ever episode of The A Files. We have a great season coming up. We’ll be covering topics like abortion stigma, adoption, ableism, transphobia, and policing with some really smart, incredible guests.

RBS: There’s so much to get to and we’re super excited.

RM: And next week we’ll talk about Renee’s connection to this SNL sketch.

SNL sketch clip: And it’s hard to know what to say to make other truckers feel better. There’s one mother trucking thing we can do to fight for mother trucking freedom to make our own healthcare decisions. And that’s vote. And I hope to help everyone vote because remember, we all love someone who’s had an abortion. I mean drives a truck.

RBS: See you all next time. The A Files is produced for The Meteor by LWC Studios. Our hosts are me, Renee Bracey Sherman, and Regina Mahone.

RM: Our executive producers at The Meteor are me, Regina Mahone, Renee Bracey Sherman, Cindi Leive, and Tara Abrahams.

RBS: At LWC Studios, our executive producer is Juleyka Lantigua. Paulina Velasco is our managing producer. And our producer is Anne Lim. Kojin Tashiro is our sound designer and engineer.

RM: This podcast is produced with support from The Meteor Fund. The Meteor’s non-profit initiative. Additional thanks to Pop Culture Collaborative for their support. You can support us by subscribing to The A Files wherever you get your podcasts. And please take a second to rate us, five stars please, and leave us a review. It would mean a lot.

RBS: For links to any resources mentioned in this episode or more information, visit our website at themeteor.com/theafiles. You can follow us on social media. I am @RBraceySherman on Twitter and Renee Bracey Sherman on Instagram and for Regina at @byreginamahone on Twitter and Instagram. You can follow The Meteo @themeteor on all platforms. Thanks for listening. Thanks for saying the word abortion. And remember, everyone loves someone who’s had an abortion.

CITATION:

Bracey Sherman, Renee, and Mahone, Regina, host. “Unapologetic Blackness, Unapologetic Abortions.” The A Files, The Meteor and Lantigua Williams & Co., January 17, 2024. Themeteor.com/theafiles