White Women Weren't The Only Ones Who Fought For Abortion Access

When most people in the U.S. think of the history of abortion, they think about white women like Margaret Sanger, a nurse who opened America’s first birth control clinic and founded an organization that later became Planned Parenthood.

Fewer people think about Mildred Campbell, a Black midwife from Washington, D.C., who provided abortions in the late 1800s. Or Marie Leaner and Sakinah Ahad Shannon, two Black members of the Jane Collective, a group that provided abortions to women in the late 1960s and early 1970s before federal abortion protections existed. Or Toni Bond, one of 12 “founding mothers” who created the framework of reproductive justice in the 1990s.

Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone are hoping to change that with their new book, “Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve.” Bracey Sherman and Mahone offer a more complete history of abortion in the book, which includes many of the women of color who were so critical to the movement but whose names were erased by whitewashed media tropes and racist arbiters of history.

“In so many ways, the media has this history of cosigning the racist, sexist, misogynistic tropes about Black women and other people of color,” Mahone told HuffPost. “This book is our platform to right those wrongs. We’re writing our experiences back into the history of abortion.”

Bracey Sherman, a biracial Black woman, and Mahone, a Black woman, have both had abortions and understand how isolating it can be to not see oneself reflected in the abortion stories that media and history choose to tell. Bracey Sherman has been working toward writing this book throughout her long career in reproductive justice, during which