Happy Monduesday, Meteor readers,

To mark the final day of Hispanic/Latine Heritage Month, we’re going to take a little stroll through the existential identity crisis of your favorite newsletter gal (🙋‍♀️). Plus, we’re taking a moment to salute the one and only Tarana Burke and applaud President Barack Obama’s words to Black male voters.

And speaking of voting! We are three short weeks away from Election Day. Do you know where your polling place is? Is your registration up to date? Does your state have early voting dates available? Find out, make a plan, and #GetReadyWithUs by clicking here.

Let’s get into it,

Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

Making history: On this day seven years ago, #MeToo went viral, shedding light on the millions of people who have experienced sexual assault and harassment. It was a breakthrough moment. But for Tarana Burke, the woman who first used the term “me too” as a rallying cry back in 2006, it was a moment filled with fear. As she wrote in her memoir Unbound, she worried that the viral discourse, sparked by a white woman’s tweet, would erase her story and her work, focused on Black survivors, from history.

Burke’s tenacity wouldn’t allow that to happen. She swiftly introduced the work she had been doing since 2006 to an audience of millions, and her organization, me too., is now a global network stationed in 34 different countries where sexual violence against women is on the rise. What began as a grassroots project to help women in her community is now one of the largest and most recognizable anti-violence movements in the world, giving survivors the tools they need to rebuild their lives. The words “thank you” don’t feel strong enough.

AND:

• Lilly Ledbetter, whose activism led to the passage of the Fair Pay Act of 2009, died on Saturday at the age of 86. Twenty years into her employment at a Goodyear tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., she received an anonymous note informing her she was being paid drastically less than her male counterparts. “Never…did I want to be a troublemaker,” she told NPR in 2009. But that note “took my breath away. I felt humiliated. I felt degraded.” And the rest, quite literally, is history.

• The Biden administration has given Israel 30 days to improve Gazans’ access to food or risk losing military aid—just two days after the U.S. had authorized sending 100 American troops into Israel to operate an advanced anti-missile system in the country’s ongoing battle with Iran. “The U.S. military is now inextricably involved in this war, directly, without any illusions of barriers,” says Middle East analyst Séamus Malekafzali.

• During a campaign stop in Pittsburgh, former President Barack Obama made a heartfelt plea to Black men voters, a group that reportedly has been “unenthused” by Harris’ candidacy. One factor in their lack of enthusiasm, according to Obama? Sexism. “You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.” Say it louder for the voters in the back 🗣️.

• Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is currently indicted on federal charges of sex trafficking and racketeering, is now facing six new civil lawsuits accusing him of sexual abuse. One woman claims that Combs “violently raped” her at a promotional event in 1995, while one of the men alleges that Combs assaulted him when he was only 16 years old during one of his “white parties.”

• A glimmer of good news out of Georgia: A state judge has ruled that county election officials can’t delay in certifying election results, or decline to do so. Democrats are still in the thick of challenging similar recent laws passed in Georgia but, tonight, voting rights advocates will breathe a little easier.

To Be or Not To Be “Latina”

That is the lifelong question

BY SHANNON MELERO

A CHILDREN'S CHOIR IN TEXAS PERFORMS AT A COMMUNITY CENTER IN HOUSTON TO COMMEMORATE HISPANIC HERITAGE MONTH. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Today is the final day of Hispanic/Latine Heritage Month and as is the case every year, I find myself revisiting the question of what it means to be Latina, or as some people might dare to call me (but never to my face) a “whitetina.”

I’m a Puerto Rican from the South Bronx, which felt to me for a long time like a race in and of itself. I knew who I was: I was the product of strict, loud, bold women, each varying shades of brown or beige. Everyone around me was Latine, Black, or a combination of the two. The smattering of white people in my life—teachers mostly—didn’t register in my mind as White People. They were just people who happened to be white. (Please know these two classifications are very different: whiteness is about one’s appearance, while Whiteness is appearance plus the lived myth of superiority.)

Growing up, I was frequently reminded that as a light-skinned Latina, I looked and spoke like a White Person. This was intended both as an insult and a sort of gift. My proximity to whiteness meant I could ascend. I could be something. But the thing about being a person who happens to be or look white is that it doesn’t come with the same advantages or security as actually being a White Person.

MY MOM AND ME OUTSIDE OUR FAMILY'S HOME IN PATILLAS, PUERTO RICO. I'M TOLD THAT HAIRCUT WAS VERY FASHIONABLE FOR THE TIME. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR) 

Picture it! A bathroom, 2009: I had just gotten out of the showers in my freshman dorm and was building up the mental fortitude to finish detangling my very long, very unruly hair, which was being decimated by the hard water of upstate New York. As I stared down at my array of creams, oils, and combs, a girl walked in, struck up some small talk, and then, without invitation, touched my beautiful locks and said, “Your hair is so exotic.”

At the time, I didn’t understand the gravity of that exchange. I was annoyed and offered up a fake laugh and an unconvincing nod. But now I realize it was the first moment I was confronted with the question of my own race and discovered that I didn’t actually have an answer.

It was the first of many hard lessons of my college years. The White People saw immediately that I wasn’t white. To them, I was exotic. Loud. I pronounced “bagel” and “water” wrong. My body was proportioned strangely, an academic way of saying I had a big ass, and some of my floormates teased me about how hard it must be to find clothes that fit. Try as I might, and I tried very hard, I couldn’t squeeze into the mold of whiteness. So I decided I would be more Latina. Whatever that meant.

A 1940 CENSUS DOCUMENT WHERE MY GREAT GRANDFATHER, JULIO, HIS WIFE, AND HIS FIVE CHILDREN WERE LISTED BY A SURVEYOR AS BEING OF THE RACE "DE COLOR" MEANING THEY WERE "COLORED" BUT NOT BLACK. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR) 

To my utter dismay, it meant reading a lot of history and coming to grips with a litany of uncomfortable truths. The biggest of these was that “Latine” isn’t a race; it’s a racialized status, meaning it’s an invented labeling concept intended to group together a variety of people in one box. And as Laura E. Gomez beautifully explained in her book Inventing Latinos, the term “Latino” was primarily created to establish a race that was lower on the totem pole than White but still somewhat above Black (making it more difficult for the two “lesser” groups to demand the same rights of the first). After all, how can you systematically strip millions of people of their rights and dignity or justify a yearslong occupation of their lands if you don’t first strip them of the one thing that guarantees their protection: Whiteness? You make them something else. You make them something lesser. And then you give them thirty days to celebrate their “unity.”

The failure of Hispanic/Latine Heritage Month is that it relies on the false premise of “Latinidad,” that we are all united because of the one thing we have in common: being colonized by Spain. But our actual heritage cannot be attributed to a single colonizer, nor can it be captured in a category rooted only in our post-colonial existence. The Taíno traditions and history of Puerto Rico are not the same as those of the Maya, the Aztec, the Inca, the Quechua, the Zapotec, the Macorix, the Arawaks, the Garifuna—I could go on.

MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER, JULIO, WAS NOT CONSIDERED BLACK IN 1940. HOWEVER, WHEN HE WAS REGISTERED FOR THE DRAFT IN 1942, HIS RACE WAS FILLED IN AS "NEGRO." (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR) 

But when we celebrate Latine “heritage,” we’re not celebrating those cultures. We’re celebrating a Eurocentric, watered-down, post-Columbus, post-Spanish occupation version of ourselves. We’re celebrating who we became, not who we are.

It’s a trap many of us are lured into at a young age. We’re trained to forget ourselves, only to learn that our skin color isn’t enough to grant us full White Privilege. And when we finally unlearn all of that, we find a beautiful, rich history waiting for us, along with enormous grief that we’ve wasted our lives assimilating and no longer feel a connection to who we are. We buy fully into the American dream only to find out that we can’t have it because we are not really white, not really American. And if I cannot be white or American, and I cannot be Latina because my Taíno ancestry is lost to time, then I have to ask: What am I allowed to be?

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Greetings, Meteor readers,

We’ve got a lot to get through today, but first, please indulge me for a moment. (Or just skip down to What’s Going On, I won’t take it personally.) Today is Samhita Mukhopdhyay’s last day as editorial director here. She’ll still be Meteor-adjacent, but I told her I couldn’t let her go without emailing her (and by extension, you) my farewell speech:

Samhita, my Taurus twin, my fellow DDC member, you have been an incredible leader, a mentor, an unwilling recipient of my voice notes, a source of strength, and above all else, a friend. This departure feels like a death. But, if there’s one thing I believe in more than you and everything you are, it’s that not even death is permanent. So, no goodbyes. I’ll see you on the other side. ♥️

Speaking of grief, we chat with Sarah Jaffe about her new book on how mourning affects politics. Plus, the exciting conclusion of Fat Bear Week and some weekend reads.

The last SM standing,

Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

• A new report from UNICEF has found that more than 370 million girls and women worldwide have experienced some form of sexual assault before age 18. That translates into one in every eight girls suffering from sexual violence. And the risk doubles in what UNICEF calls “fragile settings,” beset by war or disaster: “We are witnessing horrific sexual violence in conflict zones,” UNICEF’s executive director Catherine Russell said, “where rape and gender-based violence are often used as weapons of war.”

• New evidence has confirmed that Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna died last month while in captivity in Russia. Roshchyna disappeared in August 2023 while traveling to cover the war in an area that had been occupied by Russian forces. According to Reporters Without Borders, she is the thirteenth journalist to die in the line of duty since the war began in 2022. “Her life was taken because she dared tell the truth,” said the International Women’s Media Foundation. “The international community must pressure Russia to cease targeting journalists and silencing press freedom.”

• Are you trying to make sense of what’s happening in the WNBA, which has seen a sharp increase in racist and sexist abuse against players? So are we. It’s a good thing Brittany Packnett Cunningham spoke to Cari Champion on this week’s episode of UNDISTRACTED about the making (and gross mismanagement) of this season’s most lucrative rivalry.

• Thrilling animal news: Yesterday was the conclusion of Fat Bear Week, and it was a big year for the moms! Not only did voluptuous mama bear Grazer take home the win for the second year in a row, but, in an act of fat, furry revenge, she actually prevailed over Chunk, a male bear who had killed one of Grazer’s cubs earlier this year.

FAT BEAR QUEEN, GRAZER. (VIA NATIONAL PARK SERVICE)

Three Questions About...Grief

It's a tool of revolution, author Sarah Jaffe explains. 

As the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel approached, I prepared myself for anger and blame on social media. What I noticed instead was the palpable sense of grief that coursed through people—grief for what we’ve seen, what has happened since, and what we’ve lost.

That’s actually not unusual: Collective grief plays a profound role in our politics; it can unite us and inspire change. But we don’t often give grief the space to truly transform us into better political citizens.

I talked to the author and labor journalist Sarah Jaffe about how we might do that—a subject she takes up in her new book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: Why did you decide to write about grief?

Sarah Jaffe: The thing that got me started thinking about grief was the death of my father. [This book] takes our emotional lives seriously and argues two somewhat contradictory things: that grief is an integral part of being a full and complete human and also that the world creates so much unnecessary grief and pain and that we could, in fact, stop some of that. And then a third thing, which is that we ought to talk about it.

When my father was ill, I had some idea that I could be good at grief, that I could work hard at it the way I had at everything else in my life. I was so wrong about so many things, but particularly the [fact that grief] will come when it comes and fade when it fades, and there is nothing you can do but ride the waves of it. This, of course, is a very difficult thing to accept in a world that runs on the time clock and the biweekly paycheck and in a country that doesn’t even give us health insurance, let alone expansive paid time off.

Grief is mostly considered private, something you have to manage on your own. Can you talk about the importance of moving grief from the personal to the public?

Nearly all cultures have grief rituals in which the community comes together to mourn. In the capitalist West, those rituals have been shortened and forestalled, if not ended altogether. Yet there have been moments in the last few years where the world seemed to erupt in collective grief. The George Floyd uprising [was] probably the largest of those, when despite lockdown orders people spilled into the streets and mourned and demanded change.

Last week, I was in Minneapolis for a book talk, and I went down to George Floyd Square, where the names of people killed by police are still painted in the street and fresh flowers are still laid where George Floyd was killed and massive sculptural fists stand in the streets. The call “Black Lives Matter,” the demand to “say her name,” are calls for us to grieve. The demand “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”—taken from labor agitator Mother Jones—has been embraced by Jewish groups calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (and now in Lebanon and beyond). Such public mourning does more than bring us together—it calls on us to think about the world we live in, and the harm that it does every day, and how we might imagine it differently.

When my father died, I remember you reached out with a beautiful letter of advice on how to navigate what was to come. I loved seeing in the book that someone else had done that for you. Why do you think this act of reaching out with wisdom in moments of grief is so important?

Grief is universal, and yet it can feel so profoundly isolating when it happens to us. No one, it seems, understands. Except then the people who do understand start to find you, and they share little or big bits of wisdom, and they hold you when you need holding, and they tell you their stories.

This book is a way of paying forward the care I got from people when I didn’t remember my own name and couldn’t remember to eat. [It’s a way to show] that maybe the world is built [not] on transactional, one-to-one reciprocation, [but rather] on what philosopher Eva Kittay calls nested caring obligations. I live in New Orleans, and like a lot of people this past week, I have been haunted by the destruction done by Hurricane Helene in places that are nowhere near the coast and are hundreds or thousands of feet above sea level. So many people here have been reaching out with money and time and donations and fundraisers for people we’ve never met in another part of the country, because we know what it’s like to face climate disaster. We build solidarity with those acts of care, without asking for them to be directly repaid.

WEEKEND READING 📚

On the great outdoors: Meet Rhiane Fatinikun, the founder of Black Girls Hike. (The New York Times)

On the stuff of parents’ nightmares: After her children’s nursery temporarily lost their license, journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian set up a makeshift daycare in her living room—and nearly lost her sanity. (The Cut)

On the gender cleanliness gap: Anne Helen Petersen explains why women—even child-free ones—are trained to “serve our spaces.” (Culture Study)

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Greetings, Meteor readers,

This week last year, we sent you a newsletter grappling with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and it remains one of the hardest we’ve ever had to compose. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, we were grief-stricken, angry, and fearful of impending violence. “What is happening cannot fit in an easy tweet or cleverly worded Instagram post,” we wrote at the time. “Honestly, it can’t even fit in this newsletter.”

That truth still holds. Since then, we have witnessed children left to starve to death. Hostages treated as dispensable pawns. Women giving birth in the rubble of bombed hospitals.

We’ve also seen and been part of a larger awakening—about how connected we all are to what happens half the world away and about the difference our actions, our tax dollars, and our votes make. And while that awareness will not bring back the thousands who've lost their lives, it’s a better place from which to move forward than willful ignorance. Perhaps we can spend this next year looking for peace.

There is another way,

The Meteor

WHAT'S GOING ON

This week in abortion: It’s not great! Yesterday, Georgia’s Supreme Court reinstated that state’s six-week abortion ban. Judge Robert C. I. McBurney had overturned the ban last week on the grounds that it was not in line with the state’s constitution. But local Republicans immediately started filing appeals, and until they’re sorted out, the original ban will be the law of the land.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, ambling its way back to the bench for the start of a new session, has declined to weigh in on a case in Texas involving a federal emergency care law (EMTALA) that requires any hospital receiving Medicare funds to provide abortions in emergency situations. For now, the existing language in the state’s ban will remain unchallenged.

Why is it playing out this way? Because technically, Texas’ abortion ban already has a carve-out for emergency situations, making it EMTALA-compliant. However, as we’ve seen time and again (and as Amanda Zurawski can attest), those exceptions are so vague that, in practice, women often have had to be actively dying before a doctor grants an abortion—and sometimes, as in the case of Amber Thurman, life-saving care comes too late.

AND:

• A damning new report has found that the 2018 FBI investigation into sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was severely limited by the Trump administration. Despite Donald Trump saying on national television that he had authorized the FBI to run an independent investigation into the allegations, a report produced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) found the White House never actually did that and, instead, tightly controlled the agency’s investigation, even forwarding the FBI’s tipline messages directly to the White House. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford told The Meteor last spring that “the process was the most disappointing part” of coming forward. This report shows how right she was.

• Kamala Harris has been on a media blitz over the last few days, sitting for interviews with 60 Minutes, Howard Stern, and the ladies of The View, where she admitted “not a thing comes to mind” that she’d do differently than Joe Biden (except, she later clarified, welcoming a Republican into her cabinet). Whatever happened to “I am not Joe Biden”??

• In a first-ever report of its kind, a survey from the CDC has found that three percent of American high school students identify as transgender. While the good news is that more young people have the space and language to know themselves, the report also found that transgender and gender-questioning students face higher rates of bullying, sadness, and suicidal thoughts.

• Yesterday, Grammy award-winning singer Cissy Houston died at the age of 91. Houston, who was in hospice care and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, was an unmatched gospel and soul artist as well as the mother of the late, great Whitney Houston.

• Finally: Happy book birthday to Meteor founding member Paola Mendoza, whose new YA novel Solis is available right now and belongs in the backpack of every young person you know. Solis tells the story of undocumented immigrants forced into American labor camps in 2033 who become the subject of brutal experiments—and of the brave young women who start a revolution. (Wait, I thought it was supposed to be fiction…)

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Evening, Meteor readers,

Tonight is the big showdown between vice presidential candidates J.D. keep-women-in-the-kitchen Vance and Tim I-support-trans-youth Walz. (What long middle names these guys have!) It’s sure to be an exciting war of words—and we can’t wait.

Speaking of, we are 34 days away from the election. Today, in partnership with several incredible outlets and organizations like Teen Vogue, Feminist, Betches, and more, we have helped launch a new voting initiative: Get Ready With Us (#GRWU).  The goal behind GRWU is to make sure women and LGBTQ+ voters have everything they need to hit the polls on election day. Voting early? We can help. Not sure if you’re registered at the correct address? We got you. Don’t remember where your polling place is? Babe, no worries. We’ll hold your hand through it all. The only thing you need to think about is what you’ll be wearing and whether or not it will clash with your I Voted sticker or the outfit of the friend you are dragging with you to the polls (I’m going with a dramatic all-black motif to mark the death of the Trump Reich.) Click the image below to learn more!

Getting ready,

Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

• Since we’re on the topic of voting, the state of Alabama recently removed the voting rights of hundreds of citizens while trying to target a group of “non-citizen voters,” a false-term used to demonize undocumented people and cast doubt on upcoming election results. (To be VERY clear, even the GOP knows that over the last 20 years, fewer than 100 non-citizens even attempted to vote in an American election.)

• Yesterday, a judge in Georgia struck down that state’s abortion ban on the grounds that it violated the Georgia constitution. The presiding judge wrote, “Liberty in Georgia includes….the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.” Put it on a t-shirt and send me 100,000.

• Dockworkers across the East Coast went on strike today, and that spells big trouble for consumers. This strike means that all of the items that ship overseas and come in through ports between Maine and Texas will not be received and processed—costing the American economy $5 billion (WITH A B) every day. But keep in mind: The dockworkers are rightfully fighting for pay increases and protections against automation. Friendly reminder that during this time, it is harmful to others to resource horde and buy more than what you need.

• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the city of Austin over its abortion fund. This year, the city allocated $40,000 of its budget to a fund that would reimburse patients who had to travel out of state for an abortion. (Increasing numbers of patients have to do so, especially since the state supreme court ruled against women who nearly died trying to get lifesaving abortion care.) The suit is demanding a temporary restraining order be placed on the fund while the case plays out in court but a judge has yet to grant the request. You can support me in my lifelong mission to keep Ken Paxton irate 24/7 by donating to Texas abortion funds here.

• Today, Claudia Sheinbaum took office as Mexico’s first woman president. During her campaign, Sheinbaum promised to launch an anti-femicide prosecutor’s office to respond to Mexico’s high rates of violence against women. Sheinbaum is also a climate scientist, but farmers in the region who have begun a resistance movement against transnational mega-farms are worried she won’t have enough power to protect local water sources which these companies have contaminated.

Three Questions About...Abortion

Authors Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone on “liberating” the history of this very common procedure

Despite everything we know about abortion, myths persist. So when our brilliant podcast collaborators Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone, announced that they were writing a book about the past, present, and future of abortion, it only made sense to slap that pre-order button faster than you can say dilation and curettage.

And today, that book is finally in our clutches! So we asked the authors three questions about how they set the record straight on the suppressed history of abortion in America.

Both of you are bona fide abortion experts, and one would assume you know pretty much everything there is to know about the subject. Was there anything you learned while researching the book that surprised you? Or anything that felt new to you? 

Renee Bracey Sherman: Ha! Well, I don’t know if we know everything, but we have really learned a lot….What surprised me most was how openly abortion pills were marketed in newspapers in the 1800s. We scoured digitized newspapers throughout the 1800s and found tons of ads for tansy and pennyroyal pills, “female beans,” “preventative powders,” “Portuguese female pills,” and Madam Restell’s powders and pills…They were available over the counter and via mail to anyone who wanted them. Today, abortion organizations constantly have to fight censorship from billboard companies [and] social media sites just to be able to post about abortion pills. And the idea of abortion pills being available over the counter is treated like a pipedream. But when we look back in history, we actually already did it. What is considered visionary was commonplace 200 years ago.

Regina Mahone: ​​One of my favorite conversations was with Dr. Jamila Perritt, the president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health. We talked with Dr. Perritt about how OB-GYNs don’t talk to their patients about sex. And it’s so true. I can’t remember a single conversation with any of the many gynos I’ve had over the years where the conversation was about my sex life unrelated to a medical diagnosis. None of my doctors—and I’ve had two kids, a miscarriage, and an abortion—have asked, “How is your sex life going?” Of course, so much of that is rooted in this idea that we shouldn’t be having sex for pleasure, so we shouldn’t talk about sex or sexual health in a way that would encourage people engaging in those acts to learn more about their bodies to ensure they are developing healthy and satisfying experiences…That, to me, was super interesting and depressing but also kind of liberating. Because now, I will be asking my doctors about sex and their response will tell me whether I will continue being their patient.

One thing I feel I learned from this book is the degree to which Black women have historically led the charge in reproductive rights. But when I look at how the issue is positioned today, we mainly find white women and their stories at the center. How did we get from the reality to the perception of it sort of belonging to white women? 

RBS: This is the exact reason we wrote the book. We wanted to write ourselves back into history. We wanted to correct the record to show that we have been here, doing this, and we can do this for whatever is next. When I had my abortion, I saw abortion being debated on the news a lot, but it was always between white people, usually an older white woman and a white priest. I didn’t see myself as part of the conversation. But when I started learning about reproductive justice, a framework created by Black women to center the experiences of people of color and the intersections of our identities, I realized there was a whole world out there that I wasn’t being told. When we wrote the book, we found tons of brilliant Black and Brown people and their traditions who had been overlooked in favor of elevating the same few white heroines. This is an incorrect telling of history, but also it makes people feel like they don’t belong. In order to build a reproductive justice future and liberate abortion, we have to ensure everyone feels welcome and sees themselves reflected.

RM: Black women have been having and providing abortions since people have been getting pregnant, but our leadership on this issue was decimated in the late 19th century as a result of the American Medical Association’s racist crusade against abortion. AMA doctors labeled midwives, many of whom were Black and immigrant women during this period, barbaric and quacks and successfully pushed them out of the reproductive and maternal health fields in order for white male doctors at the AMA to “professionalize” the OB-GYN field—in other words, to make the field inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t a white man. Medical professionals were also experimenting on Black and Brown communities, which made folks rightfully skeptical of seeking any care. Even so, Black people have continued to provide abortions and advocate for deregulation, but their work is often erased from abortion histories or included as footnotes rather than being centered in the storytelling. There have been disparities in representation, funding, and systemic-level discrimination that have given people of color disadvantages when it comes to the optics of the movement.

The subtitle of the book includes the phrase  “reclaiming our history.” What do you mean by that?

RM: For far too long our stories have been overlooked or erased. Think about Jane, the network of volunteers working as part of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union before Roe to ensure women had access to safe abortion procedures. Abortion rights activists have been told the story of Jane over and over. But rarely do we hear about the Black women who organized and volunteered, or from their perspective, why they felt it was important to be part of the abortion rights movement. The problem with not telling that history is it suggests that Black people weren’t part of the movement for abortion liberation. Worse, it makes us—Black people—think that only white women have done this advocacy when Black women have been doing it. …We deserve to feel connected to the advocates who came before us.

RBS: This was one of the most important aspects of our book and our main motivation for writing it. When he wrote the Dobbs decision, Justice Alito wrote that abortion was not part of the tradition of this country, but that is a bald-faced lie. He rewrote history into the Supreme Court record to fit his own agenda. Abortion is deeply woven into this country’s history—the entire world’s. What’s the old adage? You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you come from. We wanted to put all of the history that we could find into one place together so we could see the connections between our peoples over thousands of years. It was so clear that abortion is ours. It has always been ours. It’s time we reclaim that—and now we have the stories and facts to prove it.

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