As the United States commemorates the 250th anniversary of its founding, there are many threads about how Americans of previous eras fought for bodily autonomy.
Rewire News Group has been covering the ongoing fight for reproductive justice since our founding, offering a comprehensive historical perspective on these recent battles. This Fourth of July, we’re highlighting our coverage of the people, the places, and the movements that have historically—and contemporarily—moved the reproductive justice fight forward.
A retrospective on the abortion access fight
Before Roe v. Wade federally protected abortion rights in 1973, plenty of people were able to get abortions. According to a 1961 estimate by the Saturday Evening Post, between 750,000 and 2 million abortions were performed in the U.S. each year. At the time, pregnant people were approved for abortion care based on “medical or psychological necessity,” such as a miscarriage, an ectopic pregnancy, or the pregnancy threatening “their sanity.”
As journalist Cody McDevitt wrote in a May 2026 piece for RNG, the need to prove “medical necessity” to access abortion care has been resurging since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022. Before Roe, women had to jump through hoops to “justify their need for abortion care to doctors or legal professionals.”
Physicians had to “present formal cases, secure supporting opinions, and submit them to review” before a pregnant person could be granted permission to have an abortion, McDevitt wrote, which would often discourage them from seeking legal professional care.
For those unable to get permission to have an abortion, the Jane Collective, a Chicago-based underground group that helped people get abortion care before Roe, was a useful alternative. In the years before Roe became the law of the land, the Jane Collective helped 11,000 people get abortions. It was a dangerous act of care: In July 2022, just after the Court overturned Roe, Imani Gandy interviewed Jane Collective volunteer Judith Arcana about the consequences of defying anti-abortion laws.
Arcana and six other Janes were arrested and charged, facing 110 years in prison for “conspiracy to commit abortion” in 1972. But, as Gandy noted, Arcana still “didn’t waiver.” She was released from prison on May 4, 1972. The Jane Collective’s work continued.
“We all need to be smarter in order to protect one another,” Gandy wrote. “Ultimately this next fight is going to be about community. It’s going to be about who you trust and who trusts you.”
In 2015, Dr. Cynthia Greenlee documented an example of community in action: Percy Sutton, an investor, lawyer, power broker, and member of the New York assembly, introduced the state’s first bill that would have legalized abortion in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the pregnant person’s health. It was 1966, and at the time, New York prohibited abortion in all instances, except to preserve the life of the pregnant person. His proposal wasn’t successful, but it opened the door for the 1970 liberalization of New York’s abortion law.
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Pleasure and Black activism
The history of America is one made up of those who’ve been marginalized but still fought for their rights. Sex historian Hallie Lieberman documented the 250-year history of male sex work in America, from “gigolos” to Chippendales dancers, and how their work, which has been “reviled, criminalized, and scapegoated” has evolved alongside gender norms.
As one male sex worker told Lieberman, their work is “almost therapy for people.”
And, of course, no history of America is complete without considering what Black people have contributed to the fabric of this country. In 2018, disability justice activist Vilissa Thompson wrote about being unable to separate Black disability history from U.S. history. Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Mary Davidson were all disabled, and, as Thompson wrote, the erasure of their disabilities from the stories told about them “speaks volumes about how our society recounts stories of disabled people.”
The one-dimensional stories we tell about Black trailblazers such as Pauli Murray, Rosa Parks, and Shirley Chisholm also obscures their work, especially around laying the groundwork for Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that prohibits gender discrimination in schools. In 2018, Nnennaya Amuchie detailed how Murray predicted that the 1965 Civil Rights Act would not be beneficial for women unless they organized. That led to the creation of the National Organization for Women, and, eventually, the passage of Title IX.
“As race, gender, and class have combined to disenfranchise and disempower them, Black women have made advocacy for civil rights and women’s rights a natural convergence,” Amuchie wrote.
It has been essential for Black women to wage a fight for equality and for visibility because of historic mistreatment: In 2023, California introduced a two-year program to compensate incarcerated people, many of whom were Black, who were forced to undergo involuntary sterilization. Many of them were still fighting to be paid reparations for the state violating their bodies, as Garnet Henderson wrote in 2023, but the trauma of the process remained a “considerable burden.”
This article was adapted from a Bluesky thread.
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